Emma Carroll is leaps and bounds from resonating with any length of the word cliché, but she did just happen to be in the right place at the right time about a year ago. Carroll, better known to a small fan-base as Lil Freckles, Lil Frexxx, or simply, Frecks, was working as a production assistant on the set of GIRLS last year, doting on Dunham et al, when she was given an offer she couldn’t refuse (I’m done with the clichés now).“Lena was like ‘I should put you on the show,’ and I was like ‘fuuuck yeah,’” she tells me over the phone, waiting for Hurricane Arthur to pass over NYC. “They were just, like, super nice to me, and they gave me this awesome, cool opportunity.” She appeared in the latest season of the show as that girl who did that rap blurb about modern chivalry before Marnie went on stage and made everyone feel weird.She was that little white, freckled firecracker spitting lyrics like “wink, wink, kissy-face, puppy on a pony. He textin’ mad emojis, what he really means is ‘blow me’”. That’s Lil Freckles. “That was my first live performance,” she tells me. “I didn’t know what to expect, and the response was really amazing. It kinda gave me a bit of a — I don’t wanna say fan-base, ‘cause I feel like an asshole — but it was just really great exposure.”The 26-year-old from Queens who also moonlights as a comedienne, a writer and a TV show assistant (on a different show now), says she began experimenting with rapping about a year and a half ago. “I was working as a PA on a show and we were messing around, and that’s the first time I went to the studio. It was fucking amazing, but it took me a little bit of time to take myself seriously.”But with the help of her ‘hell-yeah’ confidence, and some supportive friends to boot, Carroll was on her way to becoming Lil Freckles. “I started recording all the time on the weekends and started to believe that I could actually do it.” And that’s just the type of attitude that set the tone for “Making It” – the second-last song on her eight-track mix tape that just dropped last month. The song talks about Emma’s hopes, dreams, and, of course, clitoral stimulation.
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“I want a picture with Missy, plus I wanna get fingered by Drizzy, a contract from Disney, a boyfriend from RIS-D, a house, a picket fence and an adorable Jack Russell to catch my fuckin’ Frisbee.” We feel you, Emma. We all feel you. But, until she wins over Drake’s heart (or libido), Carroll will settle for a guy who likes Wheelchair Jimmy (almost) as much as she does. “If he wants to sit in a dark, air-conditioned room with me and listen to Drake and talk about, like, how the lyrics are making us feel, that’s always good,” she laughs, divulging the secrets of what it takes to get into her pants. “Or, say, he thinks I’m kinda pretty.”Lil Freckles tells me she’s still getting used to the newfound cockiness that comes part and parcel with the rap game. “Sometimes… my persona is part of the rap persona part of me where I’m like, ‘I give zero fucks right now,’ but in real life, I give so many fucks,” she tells me, alluding to a once-bitten kind-of-thing she experienced when a blogger went to one of her shows and tore her apart on the Internet the next day. The bad press was a bit of a blow to Carroll, but, she went right back at her, Tupac-Biggie style with a song dedicated to the blogger off her mix tape, Plan B, called “Kiss the Ring,” which starts off, “This blogger said that I was disgusting and talentless, and that I looked like a teenage sorority girl, and I don’t even know what the fuck that means, so whatever. She also said I was gonna be famous.”With the way her horizon is looking, Lil Freckles has already made it as the “Rookie of the Year” — another track off Plan B. “I’m just so excited that anybody wants to hear what I have to say at all, it’s just been so cool,” she tells me. The future is looking shiny for Carroll, who says she’s got music video plans in the works, and live performances going on whenever she has the time, since it takes a bit of tenure in the rap game before you no longer have to juggle jobs. “I just love recording and I hope I can keep going. I feel like, for being a year in, I’m doing pretty well.”Hillary Windsor is Halifax Girl living in a Halifax world