Gretchen Emery’s musical journey has taken the longtime nurse and soulful rock singer down a deep rabbit hole filled with unusual relationships and experiences that the Newark resident has cultivated over the last 20-plus years.
For evidence, witness The Gretchen Emery Band’s new EP, “If Love Were Enough.” It’s a project she and her guitarist and husband Kenny Windle created that touches on themes of injustice, heartbreak and hope. The record was produced by Derek Chafin.The song “Addie” was inspired by the singer’s heartache after she lost an infant patient nearly 30 years ago, while working as a pediatric nurse for a medical daycare in Delaware.
“I have cared for many children who have passed away, unfortunately. And he just touched me in a different way. Or he was the straw that broke the camel’s back after losing a number of different kids,” Emery, 54, explained.
The song “Addie” is a fictitious name for the young patient’s grandmother. The music sounds a little like a marriage of rock and non-contemporary gospel, while Emery flexes her strong vocals on the tune. In the song, Emery asks Addie to tell her grandson — if she managed to find him in the afterlife — that she tried everything she could to save him.
“The music allows me a place to sort of … I don’t want to say deal with the emotions, but it gives me a place to manage the feelings, some of which don’t have words,” Emery observed.
The self-titled track, “If Love Were Enough,” offers a laidback, hypotonic melody under Emery’s sassy, lounge-style vocals. As the song progresses, she turns up the pressure and morphs from casual singing into intense crooning, once again demonstrating her mighty chops.
The song features the chorus, “Love ain’t enough to keep the devil from knockin,’” which repeats a few times and ends with, “But I’ll be damned. Ain’t gonna give up on love.”
The title of the tune is a phrase that’s lived in the back of Emery’s mind for ages, she said. The singer explained she was inspired by a young terminally ill patient she cared for who was surrounded by a loving family, yet that love didn’t keep the child alive.
“If love were enough, maybe he wouldn’t have to die. Maybe he would be OK. Maybe he could be healed,” she said.
The music video for the song includes a social justice theme and features a wide range of people from different walks of life. It includes a biker with a George Floyd tribute on his vest, a gay couple sharing an intimate moment, and a young woman in a wheelchair armed with boxing gloves, among other subjects.
Cerebral palsy patient blessed her
Emery’s best friend Lisa Carnley, of Middletown, is in love with the new EP. It moves her in a special way because her son, Cory, was Emery’s patient around the same time she was caring for the infant that inspired “Addie.”
Cory has special needs and was under Emery’s care when he was about age 2. He was diagnosed with cerebral palsy and has suffered seizures his whole life, according to his mom.
“His neurologist explained to me, he just doesn’t have a very good brain. It’s not one area of the brain that the seizures are coming from, it’s kind of all over,” Carnley said.
When Carnley met Emery, it was at a traumatic time in her life. Her son wasn’t expected to live long and she didn’t know how to navigate through the healthcare system.
But Emery, who was just a stranger to her at the time, had her back.
“She helped get doctors to listen to me,” Carnley recalled.
Emery said Carnley has since become her No. 1 fan. “She’s at 99.9% percent of the gigs.”
Eventually, Carnley learned from another nurse that Emery was a singer. She came out to one of the artist’s shows and was dazzled. “I saw her singing one time and was hooked. I just couldn’t believe that voice came out of that little tiny body.”
To this day, the singer still cares for Cory, who defied the odds and is now 27 years old. He’s wheelchair bound, but he’s got a strong will to live, his mama said.
“She’s done so much for me just this past year, because I’ve had some vacations planned and she has come and stayed at my house and been his nurse while I was away,” Carnley said. “She’s pretty incredible.”
Thanks to Emery’s musical life, GEB’s latest drummer, Tim Elliot, is now in a serious relationship with Carnley after the pair got acquainted at one of the band’s shows.
“They met and it’s all our fault,” the singer said.
An ugly Volkswagen and an enviable gig
From 1989 to 2008, Emery worked primarily as a nurse. She’s since transitioned to a management role. When she’s off the clock, she kicks into singer mode.
Her husband Windle, 70, is semi-retired and works part-time restoring exotic vintage cars.
The couple has been married since 2012. But they first met around 1995 when they were both still married to other people.
The pair met when Windle came to Emery’s house to audition for her old cover band, the Condors. As Windle pulled up to her Newark home, the one they live in today, she was about to leave to run an errand.
Windle didn’t make a great first impression.
“There is the most hideously colored green car in front of me. And I thought, ‘I hope to God that car is not coming to my house.’ Sure enough, it did. And it was Kenny.”
Windle didn’t join the band. But it had nothing to do with his beloved Volkswagen Golf.
A year later, the two randomly ran into each other at the supermarket. They discussed the idea of playing original music together in the band Red House.
Their partnership in that band went well and lasted a few years. One of their highlights was playing Warm Daddys in Philly, a venue that wasn’t any easy gig to land for local bands.
“That was a big deal back then,” Windle recalled. “But they loved us because we sold it out every time we played.”
‘Rock ‘n Roll Honeymoon’
When Red House dissolved, Windle and Emery played in a few other projects together. They struck gold with their group Gretchen Emery & Dirty Boots, which lasted from about 2009 to 2014.
They earned a spot in the prestigious International Blues Challenge in Memphis in January 2013, competing against bands from all over the world.
Their run with Dirty Boots inspired their popular song “Rock ‘n Roll Honeymoon.” The tune was a nod to the fact that their competition in Memphis was basically the couple’s wedding trip, after they tied the knot Thanksgiving weekend in 2012 and Emery went back to work that Monday.
“There’s nothing we really enjoy more than playing music,” Emery said. “So we went down for the competition. That was kind of our honeymoon.”
In 2017, Emery and Windle began a new project and called it The Gretchen Emery Band. They ditched the “Dirty Boots” part because some people thought they were a country group. GEB has been going strong ever since.
From Christianity to ‘the occult’
Emery was raised by teachers in a Christian home with a white picket fence in Dover.
Windle grew up poor in an extremely violent neighborhood in North Philly where books on Aleister Crowley, an occultist, magician and mountaineer, were read in his home. “My dad was deep into the occult,” he recalled. The guitarist, who said he’s not a religious man, lost his mom at a young age. His dad was a writer who retired as a publicist from Temple University.
A lot of Haitian immigrants lived in his neighborhood and they brought with them their religious traditions. “We had a voodoo witch that would go around and bless the block once or twice a month,” Windle remembered.
The Philly native bounced in and out of the foster care system until he eventually landed back home with his dad.
Windle was a violent youth who was once sentenced to 23 months in a juvenile detention facility, he said, charged with being involved in the destruction of railroad property during burglaries.
“When he was doing his time, I was an infant,” his wife joked. “I was just busting out [of the womb] and he was getting locked up.”
When Emery first met Windle, he was a more refined version of himself. And he was sober.
The frontwoman learned over the years that he was a genuine guy with a good heart, despite having grown up in a hellish environment. Her best friend Carnley has known Windle for ages and said he lights up around her wheelchair-bound son.
“Kenny loves Cory to death,” she exclaimed.
Emery initially turned Windle down for a date once they were both divorced from their previous partners, because they had built a strong friendship that she didn’t want to risk losing.
But her reluctance didn’t last. “It turned out that we did not mess it up,” Emery said.
These days, she and her husband are focused on making more music and playing gigs. Emery looks forward to what the next chapter of her musical life will bring.
She’s been on a wild ride, both figuratively and literally.
That’s because fate led her to sit in the driver’s seat of her husband’s ugly green Volkswagen Golf, the car she swore she wouldn’t get caught dead in.
“My car was in the shop,” she explained. “So I ended up driving that very car — eating my words.”
The Gretchen Emery Band will play an acoustic set at Zollies (414 Delaware St., New Castle) from 7-10 p.m., Saturday. For more information, visit gretchenemery.com.
Andre Lamar is the features/lifestyle reporter. If you have an interesting story idea, email Andre Lamar at alamar@gannett.com.
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