Tucked away in Limoges, a font of love songs

LIMOGES, France — Emma Goldberg shouldn’t be walking around. She knows it, too. She sprained her ankle badly running outside of Paris and her doctor said she shouldn’t be moving around at all. But she’s at the front door of her apartment building anyway to greet me warmly. She turns and mounts the stairs with an “ooof.” 

“Doucement,” I tell her. “Take it easy.” But she hobbles up the stairs with surprising quickness. “It’s okay,” she says, “my doctor will be very upset with me but…it’s okay.”  

It’s a cold day for Limoges and a space heater is planted smack in the middle of the living room in a perfect spot to cause another sprained ankle. Emma moves constantly between the adjacent kitchen, the low couch, her computer, and back. Her ankle hurts now, but it’s even worse when she goes to bed at night. “It will kill me later, but I have to be all the time moving, all the time.” 

Music permeates the apartment. Two guitars face each other in opposite corners of the living room. The mantle wall is loaded with stereo equipment, and CDs are crammed in stands and in any open crevice. Her personal recording studio is stuffed into a third corner where a keyboard sits mounted with a microphone and pages of music with lyrics crossed out and hastily rewritten. Trip and fall, an easy thing to do here, and chances are you’ll strike a note.  

Tiny three-room apartments in the middle of cow-country France aren’t normal pop singer domains, but it’s here on the low couch that Emma Goldberg, 35 with frizzled blond hair and a bum ankle, says her career, her life, is just taking off. 

Emma’s singing career began as many have, next to a piano in a smoky bar and a black dress. She sang regularly at the Blues Rock Café in downtown Limoges because when she was 21 her parents told her she needed to work and singing was the only thing that she wanted to do, really. 

Fourteen years later and Emma seems unable to cast a bad word toward anybody she met in that time. In fact, she spends more time talking about the people she has worked with than herself. They are often minor celebrities, people little known within the French music community much less the international one, but Emma speaks of them with utmost reverence.  

There’s Annette, her press agent, a watchful guardian and dear friend who helped get her first album “Au Bout de Toi” off the ground in 1996. Emma beams when she talks about her work with Philippe Laffont in 2004, a producer whose work on film and with musicians she painstakingly details. She recalls her collaboration with the accordionists Sebastien Farges and Cristophe Coinneau from 2004 to 2008 as “one of the best times in my life.” Faces, dates, what they accomplished on their own, what they accomplished with her, and the wonderful things they did for her — she keeps track of it all. 

A quick look at the back cover of her new album (“T…Forever”) reveals a pattern: Emma writes love songs. “Je t’aime encore,” “Tu me perds,” “Si loin de lui,” etc. The lyrics are cheesy, but the songs are beautiful, and sung with sincerity even if the words don’t keep listeners awake at night.  

So it’s somewhat surprising that when Emma finally does talk about herself, love doesn’t come up. She discusses Ernest Hemingway, Oscar Wilde and 1930s Russian literature. She also admires Moliere, Roberto Felini and Martin Scorsese. She’s into geopolitics, citing Nicholas II and Mao Zedong and “the beautifully interesting and hard century we live in today.” 

But there’s no mention of love, not her own.  

Probe, ask if there’s one song that holds some kind of special meaning, and she answers quickly. “Yes, there’s one.” 

In 2003, Emma recorded her second album, “Poussière d’étoile.” She and her crew were relaxing between takes when Emma suddenly sat up, walked into the studio, locked the door, plopped herself before the piano and began to write. 

She hammered out the lyrics, hammered out the notes, and in 20 minutes she wrote “Ça fait mal,” the letter she would have liked to write to her father who passed away three years before. She waited three years, and in 20 epiphanic minutes, she said goodbye.  

Emma doesn’t say any more about her father, except that his death in 2000 was something of a turning point. At the time she had been gaining in popularity. Her face was well known locally through television interviews and concerts appearances. Her star was budding. But with her father gone, things changed. “I didn’t know if I would go on in life. It was easier for me to be a little less…media.” 

Emma ditched what fame she had, pulling out of the interview circuit and performing live under her little-known real name (“Emma Goldberg” is actually a pseudonym). She stayed out of the recording studio until work began on “Poussière d’étoile.” The album was released in 2005, nearly a decade after her debut album.  

The album was a big success for Emma, even making its way onto American web radio stations. That success brought her out of hibernation and spurred a furious recommitment to her career. She was back in the studio with Farges, Coinneau and Laffont. She toured again, even internationally. 

And finally, she admits, there was a man, too.  

In the same clutter we sit now she says she spent her best years with the love of her life. Close quarters, cheap living, the French countryside, it was all the best aspects of a bad romantic novel. 

And while life might not have been perfect (he worked during the week and she was often gone during weekends doing shows, doing interviews, etc.), those moments together were among her happiest. 

Again she doesn’t  delve too deeply. Her tongue is loose but always wary. What can be gleaned of the story sounds like low-scale celebrity tragedy. She’s a popular singer on the road while he’s left alone in a small town. Journalists talk. Fans talk. One person gets suspicious of the other, and two people who know they love each other also know that it will never work. There was no scandal, there were no mistakes.  

And that’s her secret. As outgoing as she is, as much as she sings about attraction and talks about the great things that can come out of the right match, Emma is decidedly alone.  

Oh, she has friends. Seemingly millions. She makes efforts to learn about and understand every person she meets. But there’s no love, not now, not when everything is finally coming together. She is by herself by choice, where the only sound if she isn’t playing music is the intermittent click of the space heater. She could live amidst the cafés and bustle of Paris, but she is still happiest here in Limoges. She isn’t shunning society by any means, but… 

“But when you are alone in front of your piano or with a pen and paper to write songs, ….” she says before cutting herself off. She almost completes the thought but, in character, she leaves it be.