Emery Dobyns - Improvs (2025)

In the midst of a career writing, creating, and recording music with a wide array of influential popular artists and for television and film, Grammy award-winning Nashville-based producer and musician Emery Dobyns is releasing his debut album, "Improvs", on Hammock Music Label. A series of 16 improvised works, "Improvs" sees Dobyns step from the fast-paced environment of the studio and into a world of glowing ethereal ambiance, where time slows and rays of hope and poetry illuminate life’s quiet moments and days full of wonder and promise.

Dobyns was raised in New York City but lived for some time in South America, Boston, Syracuse, and Maine. At an early age, he played the clarinet and developed into an accomplished classical clarinetist. He grew up immersed in a listening rotation that included Nick Drake, Nick Cave, The Rolling Stones, and a wide array of jazz, but it was the gift of a four-track as a teenager that led to a lifelong relationship with recorded music.

As the son of a poet and with a family history in book publishing, Dobyns was poised to pursue a career in publishing after college. But an interview at Simon and Schuster on the morning of September 11, 2001, was postponed as he made his way to the publishing house’s Manhattan office. In the disorienting, numb weeks that followed, the timely words of his stepfather, who suggested a career creating and capturing music in a recording studio, opened a new path. The possibility of studio work as a viable career was a lightbulb moment, and though he kept family tradition by working part time in a bookstore during his first internship at Dubway Studios in Chelsea, he never looked back. His career has included producing, mixing, and recording for artists including Patti Smith, Sia, Anohni, Mary J Blige, and, following a move to Nashville, the ambient post-rock duo Hammock. He won a Grammy in 2008 for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical, for his work on Suzanne Vega’s "Beauty & Crime".

The "Improvs" album is comprised of 16 ambient and piano works, each recorded in January of 2022 as part of an exercise to write and record a song every day of the month. A commitment that required discipline but was creatively liberating, it was a combination of process and the spontaneous spark of improvisation. Dobyns made initial sketches with a stripped down approach, playing piano and experimenting with a variety of synths on a controller running through a laptop without headphones. As he recorded at the end of each day, new sounds emerged over the course of the month that were incorporated into a flowing, growing composition. The resulting songs explore dream state ambiance, where traces of inspirations like Cocteau Twins, Bibio, and Kevin Shields entwine in a warm embrace. “I planted 31 seeds, and I sat on them,” Dobyns said. “When I was making them, I’d get to the end of the day, and I couldn’t wait to go to that place.”

Sixteen of those seeds have grown to create the deeply affecting, rejuvenating and light-filled "Improvs". The first steps of a new journey for Dobyns, the album is set for release on September 12 via Hammock Music Label.