‘I love Jesus and I love jazz’ — inside the rise of Emma Nissen

Four years ago, Emma Nissen was sitting in church, when she realized she couldn’t speak. She tried clearing her throat, but her voice was completely gone. The next day, doctors discovered a hemorrhage on her right vocal cord and a cyst on her left one. She was told she needed to stop talking, and what was even more heartbreaking for Nissen, she would have to stop singing to prevent permanent damage to her voice.

Everything in Nissen’s life revolved around singing. She was in her first semester of college at Northern Arizona University, majoring in vocal performance and nearly every class involved singing; she also sang in two choirs. But after the initial jolt of the news, she felt a wave of calm settle over her.

She’d been thinking about going on a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but she had just started college and the timing didn’t make sense. The untimely voice disruption — and the time needed for her voice to heal — presented an opportune window. It was like “a salve to all my anxiety and nervousness,” she told me. She left college, got a surgery and went on a mission to Sweden.

“I felt that if I have complete trust in God, that if music is supposed to be part of my life — because it’s something that I feel like I’m blessed with — it’s going to come back in a way that I don’t understand right now, and it’s going to be not about me and it’s going to be 10 times better for the world,” Nissen told me over Zoom.

What she couldn’t imagine was just how big that comeback would be.

On Aug. 28, Nissen released her debut album in partnership with Deseret Book titled “Love Like You,” which is also the name of one of the 12 tracks on the album. Delivered in Nissen’s velvety and husky vocals, the collection radiates a sense of faith as a joyful and expansive state of being. Nissen has described her music as “Christian jazz,” acknowledging the influence of musicians she grew up listening to, like Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.

With all the songs written by Nissen, the album is full of fun jazzy riffs, upbeat gospel melodies and mellow and soulful ballads accompanied by piano, rich instrumentals and R&B beats. The lyrics feature the big themes: God’s love, acceptance, faith, light and nature, but Nissen brings freshness and honesty to these familiar themes.

The album propelled the 24-year-old singer onto the big Christian music scene. Within 24 hours since its release, the album made No. 1 on the iTunes Christian music chart and was in the top 10 albums across all genres worldwide. This past week, the “Love Like You” CD was sold out on Amazon.

“It’s just like — truly — how did I get here?” Nissen told me. “It’s like, I just closed my eyes, held on and then the roller coaster just took off.”

A family of performers

Nissen inherited her talent from both sides of the family. Her grandfather, “a jolly Swedish man,” played the accordion, the organ and the piano. (Nissen’s mother is from Sweden). Her father, an acting major, belted out a line from “West Side Story” to get the attention of Nissen’s mother, whose name is Maria. With Nissen’s four older brothers all singing and playing piano, her childhood at times seemed like one big family performance.

When Nissen was 8, her older brother, who was studying choral education, began teaching her how to read chords and recover from mistakes during a performance. Building this confidence was key to learning how to improvise, a big part of Nissen’s music today, and jazz overall. As she performed in all-state jazz and choirs through high school, the idea of being a professional musician was beginning to take shape.

Although Nissen picked vocal performance as a major in college, it wasn’t clear what her career would actually look like. Maybe she’d get some gigs, she hoped. She was a good singer, she told me, but at that point, she’d never written her own music. And soon, the dream of being a singer no longer seemed certain after the damage to her vocal cords.

But it was on her mission, in the northernmost part of Sweden, when COVID-19 was just beginning to take hold and her companion was sent home, that she felt a tinge of despair — and with it, an urge to put what she was feeling to music.

‘Music melts away all the questions’

“You gotta have faith” was the phrase popped into her mind. She rushed to the piano and came up with a chord progression. Within 30 minutes, she had written a song with that title, now a track on the album.

“It just came out,” she told me. The pattern kept repeating over the following days: a flash of inspiration, rushing to the piano and capturing a melody.

On another occasion, a phrase from Russell M. Nelson’s talk “Hear Him” kept resounding in her head. It had a good ring to it, she thought. Later, “Hear Him” became her first single.

Nissen is aware how strangely miraculous this creative process might seem, especially since she’d never written music until four years ago. “I always say I didn’t write my music,” she told me. “There is no way that for 24 years I couldn’t write and then I could.”

Writing music for Nissen became like speaking a language that could encompass faith as a dynamic, ever-evolving process, filled with both questions and spiritual clarity. In Sweden especially, she wrestled with how she could respect other people’s spiritual paths while also sharing messages as a missionary.

She told me that the song “Light” is a kind of ode to Sweden. The lyrics talk about the divine power and light that nature embodies, an important part of Swedish culture: “Our hearts and the mountains, they carry the light, for others a fountain of glory and might. Our hands and the valleys hold us at night, till dawn breaks and we take in heaven’s first light.”

The titles and lyrics of Nissen’s songs convey messages of acceptance and affirmation: One track is called “I Am Enough;” another is called “Whole.” A slower song, “Flesh and Bone,” featuring an R&B beat, begins with: “Imperfect, but complete, I’ve found completion at Your feet.”

Nissen wanted anyone, regardless of their spiritual journey, to find connection while listening to her songs.

“For me, music melts away all of the questions — and leaves you with a core feeling. And it’s something that I can trust,” she said. “I’ve always been able to trust my gut and my core feelings. And what music does is that it reveals that core feeling.”

The big break

After her mission, Nissen never went back to college. Instead, with the help of a producer who lived near her home in Arizona, she recorded her first single, “Hear Him.”

“Who is that?” Bart Olson thought when the Spotify algorithm served up “Hear Him” on the drive to his daughter’s soccer game in October 2022. Olson, the music product director for Shadow Mountain Records, the record label of Deseret Book Company, couldn’t believe Nissen’s vocals. He pulled over and Googled Nissen’s background.

“I think what struck me about Emma right away was a hint of those timeless voices (singers like Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin and Etta James) in her style,” Olson said in an email. He couldn’t believe a singer this talented didn’t have a record deal. Right then, in his car, he messaged Nissen on Instagram and introduced himself. The two got on a call and immediately hit it off.

Olson has worked with Latter-day Saint musicians for 10 years across all kinds of music styles. He’s worked with Michael McLean, a known songwriter and musician; the Bonner Family, whose music features soulful gospel elements; classically trained Nathan Pacheco; and the country-inspired Nashville Tribute Band, among others.

To Olson, what makes Latter-day Saint music is less a specific genre but a blend of “authentic expressions of the spirit as it moves through artists and expresses the lived experiences of trying to live the gospel,” Olson wrote in an email. And part of living that experience is being honest about life’s struggles and “turning those darker times into art that can help pull people out of their own dark times.” That honesty was palpable in Nissen’s music.

After that, the doors started opening up for Nissen. Adam Blackstone, a Grammy-winning producer and bassist, found her on Instagram and invited her to sing as part of his Christmas show in 2023 at the Blue Note Jazz Club in New York. During the show, Olson recalled, Blackstone asked Nissen to tell the audience what her music is about. “I love Jesus, and I love jazz,” Nissen said. The concert went so well that Nissen asked Blackstone if he would produce one of her songs, and the two collaborated on “Love Like You” together.

Since signing the record deal with Deseret Book last year, Nissen moved to Salt Lake City, Utah. For her, working with Deseret Book and Olson has been more than a job. “They’ve been my family almost first,” she said. “They really guided me through getting dumped into the industry and hitting the ground running.”

Finding purpose

On Instagram, Nissen is unapologetically herself: She’s dancing and singing in her living room, talking while laying down on her couch, disheveled. Sometimes she erupts in spontaneous tunes and shifts to funny voices. “I don’t feign humility, but I do think that I’m just kind of living in my own world,” she told me. And people respond to her.

Since her album came out, she hit 500,000 followers on Instagram. “It’s too many,” she said in one of the videos, rubbing her eyes as if she couldn’t believe the numbers herself. “I’m very transparent that I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m just like — guys, this is crazy.”

Olson believes Nissen’s success is a byproduct of who she is as much as her musical talent. “She lights up the room whether she’s talking to a few new friends or entertaining an audience of 15,000 at the Delta Center,” he said.

Nissen is OK with not having earned a college degree and she doesn’t get upset about missing out on two years of singing. “Because I think it’s given me a lifetime of music,” she told me.

Nissen sees her medical emergency as a pivotal point that reoriented the purpose behind her music. Prior to losing her voice and going on a mission, she was “just singing for my own benefit: to hear myself sing.” Now, she’s reaching people in more profound and unexpected ways. The other day, for example, she got a message from a fan who said that her music led them back to God and to writing music. Others have called her music “healing.”

“What I’ve noticed from meeting so many different people is that I don’t know what’s going on (in their lives) and I’m not equipped to know what people need,” Nissen said. “But my hope in life is that God would continue to use me and my music to leave people feeling better.”