After more than fifteen years with The Crane Wives, Emilee Petersmark steps into her own identity as Lee Emi on a debut solo album shaped by adoption, illness, anger, therapy and the realization that sometimes survival requires dismantling the stories you were given.
There is destruction that leaves nothing behind, and then there is the kind that clears space.
On DESTROY EVERYTHING, Lee Emi—the solo project of longtime The Crane Wives songwriter, co-lead vocalist and guitarist Emilee Petersmark—spends eleven songs figuring out the difference.
The album, due October 2, may technically be Emi’s debut, but describing it as a beginning doesn’t quite capture what is happening here. Some of these songs have existed for more than a decade. Their earliest versions were written by a younger artist carrying anger, anxiety, depression and experiences she had not yet learned how to name. What eventually became DESTROY EVERYTHING is therefore less the arrival of a new songwriter than the reexamination of an old one.
“This record actually took over a decade to make,” Emi says. “A large portion of the songs on the album were written when I was much younger and in a very different position in life.”
Years of therapy changed the meaning of those songs. So did the pandemic. So did receiving a rare kidney disease diagnosis. So did beginning to reconsider her experience as a Korean adoptee raised in Michigan and the complicated relationship between identity, family, separation and belonging.
Rather than discard the songs that came from an “unhealed place,” Emi returned to them.
She changed the lens.
“Forest fires clear a path for new growth,” she says, “and I think a part of me had to burn away before I realized that all that anger was clearing space for me to grow back stronger and healthier.”
That makes the title unusually precise. DESTROY EVERYTHING isn’t nihilism. It’s renovation.
The things you cannot leave behind
The album’s newest single, “Clean Slate,” arrives at one of its central contradictions: the seductive fantasy that starting over somewhere else might allow us to become someone else.
For Emi, that idea became inseparable from adoption.
Her original Korean name was Lee Sang-Eun. After being adopted and raised in Michigan, she was given a new name and, as she describes it, all the support necessary to assimilate into her new life. Yet the assumption underlying her adoption story—that an infant was too young for separation to leave a meaningful psychological imprint—became increasingly difficult to reconcile with her lived experience.
“I was given a new name and all of the love and support I needed to assimilate, but even as a kid I struggled with my identity and feelings that I didn’t have the language to name,” she explains.
Working with an adoption-informed therapist eventually helped her recognize how deeply adoption had shaped her.
The revelation changed “Clean Slate.”
What began as a more youthful fantasy about changing one’s name, leaving and beginning again became an acknowledgement of something far less convenient: relocation does not erase memory. Reinvention does not automatically resolve trauma. And changing the exterior architecture of a life doesn’t guarantee that its foundations have moved with it.
“You can’t run from yourself,” Emi says. “Everywhere you go, there you are.”
The song therefore becomes less about escape than confrontation.
“The only way to free yourself from your demons is to face them.”
Becoming Lee Emi
Even the name Lee Emi contains that tension between past and present.
It combines part of Lee Sang-Eun—the name attached to Emi’s Korean origins—with the identity through which she grew up in America. For years, she says, Lee Sang-Eun felt disconnected from her actual life.
“For a long time, the name Lee Sang-Eun felt like a costume that I kept in the back of my closet with the child’s hanbok I’d worn as a toddler.”
Reclaiming “Lee” didn’t suddenly resolve that history. Instead, it gave her permission to look at it directly.
That distinction also separates DESTROY EVERYTHING from Emi’s work with The Crane Wives.
Since 2010, she has spent more than fifteen years developing music collaboratively with the band. Their arrangements and records are deliberately constructed so that each member participates in shaping the larger sonic identity. The Crane Wives operate collectively.
Lee Emi had to operate differently.
“With Lee Emi, I was challenged to create songs almost completely independently,” she says, “leaning into themes that are deeply personal and working to tell a more complete story from my perspective.”
That independence was liberating.
It was also frightening.
“This project has allowed me to focus more intently on what speaks to me, and it’s been both terrifying and exhilarating to share this personal journey with an audience.”
Making ugly things sound ugly
Musically, DESTROY EVERYTHING doesn’t sanitize the experiences behind it.
Emi describes the album’s territory as dark indie-pop-rock, but its real character comes from the way she allowed the rough edges of her earliest demos to survive into the finished recordings.
Before bringing songs to The Crane Wives, she often built GarageBand demos using layers of distorted vocal harmonies to compensate for instrumentation she couldn’t yet confidently execute herself.
Instead of growing out of that technique, she eventually recognized it as part of her musical language.
On DESTROY EVERYTHING, those stacked voices become intentional architecture, joined by distorted guitars, dissonance and deliberately abrasive textures.
“A lot of the music on this record comes from dark, ugly places,” she says, “and I really wanted those dissonant feelings to be sonically reflected in the overall tone.”
She also made herself play every guitar part.
Rather than calling musicians she considered technically stronger, Emi used the album as an opportunity to find out what her own limitations might produce.
That instinct extended into the record’s unconventional sound design.
On “Smoke In Empty Rooms,” a trombone was filled with water and slowly exhaled through to create the sound of ragged breathing. “Clean Slate” uses thigh slaps and a plastic tube filled with Pogs as woody percussion. On “Margaret,” chains were dropped onto a wooden box to evoke shackles being dragged.
These details aren’t novelties.
They exist because language eventually reaches its limit.
“I wanted the instrumentation and arrangements of these songs to create a world for the lyrics to live in,” Emi explains, “one that reflects the feelings that I have trouble naming with words.”
Collapse has a sequence
Look at the tracklist and the album’s emotional architecture begins revealing itself before a note is heard.
“Black Hole.”
“Empty Spaces.”
“Destroy Everything.”
“Smoke In Empty Rooms.”
“Before The Lights Went Out.”
Eventually, “Clean Slate.”
Emi is a fan of concept albums, and although these songs weren’t initially written as one, she deliberately sequenced them so that DESTROY EVERYTHING could behave like a narrative.
“This record is about all of the things you’d like to leave behind,” she says, “culminating with the knowledge that you cannot escape yourself.”
Destruction gets the listener only so far.
The ending requires recognition.
And because many of these songs were written years apart, assembling the record became an act of conversation between different versions of the same person. Older songs could be reconsidered through newer experiences; recent writing could answer feelings expressed before Emi had the language to fully understand them.
The resulting album documents more than a difficult period.
It documents interpretation changing over time.
In Conversation with Lee Emi
“Forest fires clear a path for new growth.”
MUNDANE: DESTROY EVERYTHING sounds destructive on the surface, but the record is ultimately about rebuilding and becoming. When did you realize that destruction could be a creative act rather than simply an ending?
LEE EMI: This record actually took over a decade to make. A large portion of the songs on the album were written when I was much younger and in a very different position in life. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve always struggled to cope with anger, depression, anxiety, and self-destruction, and a lot of the art I made at the time came from a very unhealed place.
Years of therapy have helped me look at these songs through a different lens, and a big part of putting this record together during the pandemic required reinterpreting the music from a different perspective. Forest fires clear a path for new growth, and I think a part of me had to burn away before I realized that all that anger was clearing space for me to grow back stronger and healthier.
DESTROY EVERYTHING is about a transformation over 10 years in the making, and I’m really grateful to have had the time and space to realize that.
MUNDANE: “Clean Slate” wrestles with the fantasy of starting completely over while acknowledging that there are parts of ourselves we inevitably carry with us. What were you trying to understand about the difference between genuinely changing your life and simply running away from it?
LEE EMI: “Clean Slate” started with the juvenile idea that a name change and new location could alter your foundation. Over the past few years I’ve been working on deconstructing my adoption story, which began with the promise that an infant separated from their first family would be too young to feel the effects of that separation.
I was given a new name and all of the love and support I needed to assimilate, but even as a kid I struggled with my identity and feelings that I didn’t have the language to name. It wasn’t until I was older, after seeking out an adoption-informed therapist, that I realized how much of my life had been touched by adoption, that there was trauma that had been integrated into my life from the moment I was given away.
Working with a therapist to actually face that trauma helped me to figure out ways to live with it without feeling the need to self-destruct. You can’t run from yourself. Everywhere you go, there you are. “Clean Slate” emphasizes that the only way to free yourself from your demons is to face them.
MUNDANE: This is your first solo album after more than fifteen years writing, singing, and playing guitar with The Crane Wives. Musically, what could you explore as Lee Emi that didn’t necessarily belong within the language of the band?
LEE EMI: Part of what makes writing with and for The Crane Wives so unique is how collaborative the process is. We’ve always been very intentional as a band to make sure that every member contributes to the arrangement of a song and the overall sonic universe of an album. We’ve done our best to share the spotlight as evenly as possible.
With Lee Emi, I was challenged to create songs almost completely independently, leaning into themes that are deeply personal and working to tell a more complete story from my perspective.
This project has allowed me to focus more intently on what speaks to me, and it’s been both terrifying and exhilarating to share this personal journey with an audience.
MUNDANE: You describe the record as having a dark indie-pop-rock sound with a real sense of bite to it. When you began shaping DESTROY EVERYTHING, what did you want the album to feel like sonically, and which musical instincts did you find yourself pushing further than you had before?
LEE EMI: For a long time, most of the songs I wrote were preserved as GarageBand demos before being presented to the other members of The Crane Wives. I utilized distorted vocal harmonies in a lot of places to replicate more complex instrumentation, especially when I was newer to the guitar and far less confident in my abilities as a guitarist.
With DESTROY EVERYTHING, I leaned into those cascading vocal harmonies and crunchy textures from my bedroom demos. A lot of the music on this record comes from dark, ugly places, and I really wanted those dissonant feelings to be sonically reflected in the overall tone.
I also pushed myself to perform all of the guitar parts on this record instead of calling on some of my more talented friends, exploring what I could create instrumentally on my own without outside influence.
MUNDANE: Even the name Lee Emi connects your original Korean name, Lee Sang-Eun, with the identity you grew up with in Michigan. How did reclaiming that part of your name affect the way you approached making music under your own identity for the first time?
LEE EMI: For a long time, the name Lee Sang-Eun felt like a costume that I kept in the back of my closet with the child’s hanbok I’d worn as a toddler. I think embracing this part of me that I had tried to push away for so long gave me permission to say more about that journey to reconnect with my Korean origins in my music.
MUNDANE: These songs emerged across an extraordinary convergence of experiences: the pandemic, your kidney disease diagnosis, questions surrounding adoption and belonging, and a broader reconsideration of identity. Did songwriting help you make sense of those experiences, or did the meaning of the songs only become clear once you looked back at them as a complete record?
LEE EMI: I think it was a mix of both. There were several songs on the record that were written over a decade ago, and part of bringing them into the present was allowing myself to see them through the lens of time and experience.
I was able to invest different meanings into them and pair them with more recently-written songs to create a narrative that better represented the struggles I was currently dealing with, and overall this album has afforded me a lot of catharsis in ways I couldn’t have predicted when I first started writing for it.
MUNDANE: The tracklist is filled with images of disappearance and destruction—“Black Hole,” “Empty Spaces,” “Smoke In Empty Rooms,” “Before The Lights Went Out”—before eventually arriving at “Clean Slate.” How deliberately did you sequence the album as a journey from collapse toward reconstruction?
LEE EMI: I’m a big fan of concept albums, and while this record wasn’t written with the intention of being a concept album, I really wanted the listener to feel like they were experiencing a story from start to finish.
This record is about all of the things you’d like to leave behind, culminating with the knowledge that you cannot escape yourself, and so I arranged the tracklisting to reflect that.
MUNDANE: You’ve accumulated years of experience as a songwriter, but you’ve said that only now do you feel you have the experience and confidence to “just do the job well.” How has your relationship with songwriting changed from the person writing those early Crane Wives records to the musician making DESTROY EVERYTHING?
LEE EMI: 16 years is a long time to be a part of this industry. Lots of things have changed since The Crane Wives started writing and touring. That time has taught me how to be adaptable and how to trust myself, if nothing else through sheer resilience of maintaining the course of this kind of career.
I think a big part of making art is pushing through those big feelings of self-doubt that come with the creative process, and after all these years, I’ve learned that I can trust in the songs I write and the sounds and textures that speak to me.
It doesn’t make the process any less scary or vulnerable, but I’m putting out work that I’m proud of with this record, and I’m leaning into that sense of self-trust.
MUNDANE: There’s an interesting tension in this project between deeply personal subject matter and songs designed to exist within a powerful indie-rock setting. When you’re writing about something vulnerable, how do arrangement, guitars, dynamics, and production help you express emotions that the lyrics alone can’t communicate?
LEE EMI: I wanted the instrumentation and arrangements of these songs to create a world for the lyrics to live in, one that reflects the feelings that I have trouble naming with words.
I tried to give DESTROY EVERYTHING more depth with the production, taking risks with textures and dissonance and utilizing unusual sounds to create a feeling—for example, we filled a trombone with water and exhaled through it slowly to create the ragged breathing in “Smoke In Empty Rooms.”
We used thigh-slaps and a plastic tube full of Pogs to create a woody percussion for “Clean Slate.” Chains were dropped onto a wooden box to emulate the dragging of shackles in “Margaret.”
All of these sounds are meant to communicate more than lyrics can alone.
MUNDANE: The record seems resistant to the idea that we eventually discover one definitive version of ourselves—instead, identity remains something we continually construct. After making an album about dismantling what no longer serves you, what are you most interested in building next, both musically and personally?
LEE EMI: Healing isn’t a destination, it’s an ongoing process. You have to put in the work every day. I’m looking forward to continuing to do that work, building what I hope is a catalog that demonstrates my growth as a musician and as a human being.
I’m already working on songs for a future release, and I’m excited for the journey that comes with fleshing them out and creating a world for them to live in.
No definitive self
Perhaps the most compelling thing about DESTROY EVERYTHING is its refusal to treat healing as a completed storyline.
Emi is not presenting the record as evidence that she finally discovered her “true self” buried underneath everything else. The album argues for something more complicated: identity isn’t necessarily waiting to be uncovered intact. Sometimes it has to be continuously built, challenged and rebuilt.
That idea becomes especially potent considering the circumstances surrounding the project.
Adoption raised questions about which parts of identity are inherited, assigned or chosen. Illness forced a confrontation with the physical body itself. Therapy provided new language for experiences that had existed long before they could be understood. And returning to decade-old songs allowed Emi to witness how dramatically the meaning of the same words can change as the person interpreting them changes.
The result is an album where past and present versions of its author coexist.
Sometimes uneasily.
That discomfort is part of the point.
At eleven tracks, DESTROY EVERYTHING moves through black holes, empty spaces, smoke, darkness, destruction and the fantasy of wiping everything clean. But its conclusion does not actually offer erasure.
It offers continuity.
You carry yourself forward.
The challenge is deciding what deserves to come with you.
For Emi, reaching this point has required sixteen years of songwriting, years of therapy, a pandemic, serious illness and the gradual development of something deceptively simple: trust in her own instincts.
“It doesn’t make the process any less scary or vulnerable,” she says.
It shouldn’t.
The uncertainty might be the clearest proof that the process is still alive.
DESTROY EVERYTHING arrives October 2, with Lee Emi celebrating the album the following night, October 3, at The Pyramid Scheme in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And despite having spent more than a decade bringing this particular collection into existence, she is already writing whatever comes next.
Because destruction, as this record ultimately understands it, isn’t the opposite of creation.
Sometimes it’s the first step.
