Classical Composition and Queer Country Songwriting Collide in EmmyJean Jenkins’ Delightful Debut EP Gay All This Time

“EmmyJean Jenkins’ song “Gay All This Time " makes me wish I wasn’t a straight girl,  because it makes me sing along like I mean it! The whole EP is beautiful - great songs well-sung, a tight band, and most importantly, killer string orchestrations. I’m eagerly awaiting more from EmmyJean.” - Enion Pelta-Tiller

“Just glorious! EmmyJean Jenkins brings a magnificent voice to these original songs that feel old and new all at once, with arrangements that are rich, inventive, beautifully performed and recorded, and lyrics that are fun, thought provoking, and hopeful. A glorious listen.” - Dan Trueman

Adhyâropa Records is thrilled to announce the release of Gay All This Time(ÂR00161), the new EP of Annika Socolofsky’s new country persona EmmyJean Jenkins. Through collaboration with the Friction Quartet, Jenkins delivers a trilogy of queer Americana anthems inspired by 70s classic country. This project serves as the bold, fun introduction of a fresh artist entity, formed by a long-time established classical composer. She is also joined by producer Jeff Snyder on pedal steel, Chris Sies on drums, Morgan Harris on guitar, and the CU Boulder University Choir.

“She’s very much based off of my upbringing and parts of myself that maybe I haven’t had a chance to fully explore,” Socolofsky says. Finding success as a professor of music and classical composer at CU Boulder, Socolofsky found that everyone must take themselves seriously to thrive in musical academia. The unintended cost of said excellence is losing the ability to let go and have fun with music making, for which she directly challenged in this project. “Contemporary classical musicians take themselves so seriously all the time! With this project, I really just wanted a joyous place to not take myself seriously, even to be campy. Having an alter ego gave me license not to take myself too seriously while still discussing serious topics.” 

“Friction Quartet actually reached out to me for a contemporary classical piece,” Socolofsky says. “I said, what about some country songs, instead? I was thrilled when they agreed. The Friction Quartet primarily reside in contemporary classical spaces, new music spaces, but they’re very interested in branching out genre-wise. I wrote and layered four different quartet parts and they recorded all of them. Total troopers!”

Choosing 70s-era country as the genre was important not just for designing a lighthearted sound throughout the tracks, for emphasizing the themes of queer liberation. More specifically, the sound was heavily inspired by the iconic women artists of that time: Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette, Tanya Tucker, and others. “I love the really corny stuff from the 70s. I love when the vocals propel something forward, and those are things that I was trying to do in these songs, at least from a musical and lyrical standpoint,” Jenkins says. “There’s already a kind of a camp to it!” Country music has always had its roots in representing the average American, making the voices of the working class heard. Through recontexualizing this sound within queer anecdotes, EmmyJean Jenkins epitomizes queer joy, a liberation from conformity and heteronormative social pressure.

These lyrics serve as the core of this project’s mission, reinforced through soulful stacks of vocal harmonies and roots-inflected instrumentation. This is fully displayed in the opening track, ‘See It To Believe It,’ where Jenkins notes her experience joining the adoption pool with her wife. “I wrote this song for my wife as we were in the early stages of the adoption process,” Jenkins says. “I’ll be honest, I didn’t ever think that this would be a reality for me. Even if something doesn’t seem possible for us, [my wife] can just see it being possible for us.” 

This sentiment travels through a production Jenkins crafted with Dottie West’s “A Lesson in Leaving” in mind, evident by the strongcountry backbeat, clean electric guitar rhythms, and cascading fiddle riffs. “My wife also loves ‘A Lesson in Leaving.’ That’s one of her favorite songs. That song was for her, and is kind of a snapshot of what it was like to begin the process of growing our family.” 

What defines the substance of EmmyJean Jenkins and the work in this project is vulnerability. As a composer of classical music, Jenkins chose to express these personal stories through a new musical medium and persona. By taking calculated artistic risks, she embraced new approaches in her songwriting process. The clearest example of this is the second track, ‘Home to Me.’ The track delivers an ethereal ballad to her dear friend’s wife, a song of gratitude and love towards someone who’s brought so much joy to someone she loves. “I wrote this song as kind of an ode to them and their love and their journey, which is very similar to Jane and I’s journey,” Jenkins explains. “I wrote it really fast, in 30 minutes it was done. And that was kind of surreal, because that’s not how things work for me.” 

The result of this flow state is a surreal country track, with percolating pizzicato strings and flowing pedal steel guitar performed by the Friction Quartet and Jeff Snyder. Through her impeccable compositional and orchestrational chops, introspective lyricism, and tactile arrangement, Jenkins creates a soundscape which mirrors the nuance of loving from afar. “A lot of country songs that resonate with me are bittersweet, there’s a beauty and a pain to it at the same time. And I think that ‘Home To Me’ has that… It's a happy ending, but also talks about the hardships along the way to getting there. It’s not a rose-colored glasses kind of song.” 

A stand-out highlight is the album closer, the lighthearted, grandiose anthem, ‘Gay All This Time’. This track follows the poignant, minimalistic ballad ‘Home To Me’. When juxtaposed to it, it’s clear that she wanted to lift the spirit of the listener through maximalistic humor. “Early on in my journey of queer self-discovery, this was very much the perspective I had. Like, ‘Wow, okay, I wish I had just been gay all this time’, which is also silly,” she says with a chuckle. “So I wasn’t before, right?” 

To highlight the absurdity of that concept and manifest such drama through the music, she lavishly layered in vocals from the CU Boulder’s University Choir. “It’s just really silly and over the top. I brought in one of the choirs at University of Colorado to record backing vocals. It just kind of ballooned to the point where I called my choir director friend and was like, ‘Hey, can I have half an hour of your time?’ Because it just needed more people, more ridiculousness.”

Artist: EmmyJean Jenkins

Album Title: Gay All This Time

Label: Adhyâropa Records

Release Date: April 13, 2026 (single: ‘See It To Believe It’); April 24, 2026 (album: Gay All This Time)

Purchase: https://emmyjeanjenkins.bandcamp.com/album/gay-all-this-time

Performers: EmmyJean Jenkins (voice, backing vocals); Friction Quartet: Otis Harriel (violin); Kevin Rogers (violin); Mitso Floor (viola); Doug Machize (cello); Morgan Harris (guitar); Chris Sies (drums); Jeff Snyder (pedal steel, bass, producer); University of Colorado Boulder University Choir (vocals)