Emma Louise overcame a crisis of confidence to fall in love with music again. Picture: Bob Barker.

The teenage singer with the ethereal voice which ripped your heart out as she revealed her soul had won the attention of older souls who knew talent when they heard it.

By the time she was thrust into a recording studio to make her debut album V Head V Heart a few years ago, her song Jungle was all over the alternative airwaves in Australia and a remix of it would later take her to the world.

Emma Louise Lobb from Cairns became the voice of Yves Saint Laurent and feted by the French when Jungle soundtracked the YSL worldwide campaign for Black Opium perfume.

Her rendition of the INXS classic Never Tear Us Apart and charismatic performance of it in the Adelaide tourism campaign called Breathe had many Australians intrigued by her beguiling presence.

She was celebrated, a rising star, an exciting new Australian talent.

All of that was true but the darker truth was others were trying to undo everything that made the 19-year-old singer songwriter the very artist they wanted to champion.

And when she finished taking her debut album around the world, she quit.

“With the last album, I was stripped of everything. I was told I couldn’t play. Being 19 and having someone tell you that … it sucks,” she says.

“You are a young musician and someone tells you these things and you believe it. I think it’s so f---ed for people to take advantage of that.

“I don’t like to look at it as being a gender thing but I think it was.

“I’ve always done my own thing, from when I was a busker, just me and my guitar. And all of a sudden I had these people involved with my music and it wasn’t just me and my guitar. The only things that made me me were all gone.

“I had to fight really, really, really hard to get it back.”

Heartbreak makes for great songs on Supercry. Picture: Supplied.Source:Supplied

Flight and fight she did. Her relationship faltered around the same time she completed her touring duties for the record and Emma Louise struck out for the world.

Slowly but surely, the music started coming back and songs helped her make sense of her inner turmoil.

A solitary soul who likes spending time alone to create, she avoided the tourist route for a wintry cabin in Japanese mountains and a tiny village in the south of France.

“The Japan trip was pretty soon after the first album cycle had finished and I was in a really weird headspace. Everything was ouchy and I was very impulsive,” she says.

“I saw this place on AirBnB. Nobody had stayed there in winter and the owner keep asking if I was sure I wanted to.”

There she wrote Everything Will be Fine as a personal pick-me-up, one of the first songs for what would eventually be her second album, Supercry.

Others were written closer to home. While now based in Melbourne, Brisbane stole her heart, as you can hear in the vulnerable album closer I Thought I Was a Ship.

“I watched you swim naked with the other fish”, she sings. You could hear a pin drop as the heartbreaking song about a cheating lover played at her recent album launches.

“Do you know the Old Museum in Brisbane? There were all these artists chilling around that building for a while. I was in this building and snuck down to this basement … my ex-boyfriend was in the same building,” she says.

“I found out this thing … the worst thing I have ever felt in my entire life. I sat down at the piano and I had these mics and stuff in my backpack so I hooked everything up and wrote that song.

“It’s all from me, crying at this piano and writing it, it just comes out of a place of such pain.

“The hardest thing in a break up is that you are used to that person being your world, your best friend. And all of a sudden, you can’t talk to anyone in the whole entire world who will understand how deep it is. It is the craziest thing.”

In France, she fell in love with music again. The man who helped rebuild her shattered confidence was Belgian producer Pascal Gabriel, whose credits include Kylie, Dido, Goldfrapp and Ladyhawke.

Emma Louise says it was the “perfect pairing”.

“For this album, the environment of making it was like nothing I had ever experienced. It had always been something that hurt me but working with Pascal, he built up my confidence,” she says.

“He wanted me to play everything and with this one, I thought ‘F--- it. I don’t need to be a shredder on guitar or prove I can play an instrument. F--- it.

“Everything I needed was in that tiny village; there was so much wine ... it was amazing.”

The cover of Supercry features a painting of woman overcome by emotion, crying on the ground.

Painting helps to fuel Emma Louise’s songwriting. Picture: supplied/Source:Supplied

Emma Louise painted it and others which have been used on recent single covers. Other works were exhibited in gallery spaces when she recently launched the album for family, friends and the music industry.

It is not only an art form she is determined to dedicate more of her creative energies to in the immediate future but acts to rekindle her songwriting fuel.

“When I need to refill the bucket of songwriting, I won’t touch an instrument for three weeks. But I still need to do something during that time, so I will paint or do pottery or work on a jacket,” she says.

“I’ve just started really getting into it. I always did these paintings but never showed anyone or thought much of them. The label wanted to use them for the launch and I was ‘No, no, no, no. I’m not ready’.

“But if my paintings are going to be out there, I need to get better at it, so I’ve been teaching myself and practising, practising, practising. I love it.

“It’s a new thing. I might even give that a crack after this album for a bit.”

Supercry is out now. She performs at Splendour In The Grass, Byron Bay, June 22-24 and then Corner Hotel, Melbourne, October 8, The Triffid, Brisbane, October 22, Metro Theatre, November 4. For all other dates, frontiertouring.com