Interview Billie Marten: “All the greatest albums were made by putting a bunch of varying characters in a room and watching them feed off each other”

Hey Billie! How are you doing? How’s your summer been?
Hello! Wonderful thank you. It’s been a very intense but delightful summer indeed. Often I feel like I miss summer before it’s even started, and this time around it feels well-worn and used sufficiently. 

Your latest album, ‘Dog Eared’, is now just over one month old - congrats! How does it feel to have it out? Do you find that your relationship with your work shifts once you give it over to the ears of the world? If so, how? 
It’s a great feeling, to put it bluntly. I’m very happy that the ears of the world have it, and for now my factory floor can hit pause. It’s a gratifying experience knowing the work you did is being accepted. Once the thing’s out, you certainly hear the songs in a different way; the nuances, the hidden meanings, textures you hear up against other music, peoples’ takes on what they’re all about - it becomes a communal discussion, which I adore. 

You recorded ‘Dog Eared’ in New York’s Sugar Mountain studio, which must have been a bit of a contrast to the process for [fourth LP] ‘Drop Cherries’, which saw you holed up in Somerset and Wales. For you, how do physical location or notions of place feed into the final product? 
The place affects the music hugely. It’s paramount to the output as your surroundings affect your outlook and emotional bandwidth immediately. ‘Drop Cherries’ was done in a very safe, known place for me. I knew where I was and I felt comfortable, therefore the music turned out like that. Although there were challenges, there arose a lot more impulse for me in New York, as I felt I had to be brave and wonderfully unprepared. The rhythm of the city and living in Brooklyn really set a pace in me that was unnatural but satisfying. It made for interesting sonic choices and less of a ‘softness’, I’d say. 

Additionally, this album saw you throw open the studio door to a whole host of musicians, marking a shift away from the perhaps more insular approach of your previous records. Can you tell us a bit more about what this experience was like? How much did your original blueprints for these tracks evolve through working with so many others? What did you learn from your collaborators, and vice versa?
I feel that all the greatest albums were made as a consequence of putting a bunch of varying characters in a room and watching them feed off each other. Although, I will say I have always done this - it’s just that this time the emphasis was on us all working as a band, rather than a singer/songwriter/director and session players that follow and fill in the gaps.

This time around there was no leader, no agenda, no pre-production, not even a meeting to get to know one another. I had the opportunity to follow, to watch, to listen, to repeat, to be an equal slice of the pie. I loved coming in every day not knowing what the outcome was going to be. I loved coming in and sometimes not even playing an instrument. Because there were so many of us, we had the ease and ability to focus eruditely on our own little section, our own little contribution. It made this natural ‘bed’ of sound, which led to an incredibly textured record (or so I think). [We agree! - Ed]

Lyrically, your work has always been deeply personal and markedly candid. Were there ever any reservations about relinquishing some of this creative control by dint of collaborating? Or any concerns that the intensity of feeling in your writing - your signature artistic ‘essence’ - would be diluted or misinterpreted? 
It was a lesson in relinquishing a lot, yep. Phil [Weinrobe, producer] is certainly commanding in that way, and pushes you to do things that at first you might take as a joke - such as saying “I’m not giving you the album for six months after we finish it” - but inevitably you realise that it’s all about following a certain process that’s new to you, to help things musically come alive. I learnt a lot and am glad that I did. I’d say my essence was given more of a voice rather than it ending up diminished; the band would never do that.

Having said that, the album centrepiece ‘Leap Year’ is also your first non-autobiographical song; where did this idea stem from? Do you think this style of writing is something you’d like to explore more in the future?
I was stuck sick in bed one afternoon and it just came from messing about on my phone. There’s an app called Ioptigan that everybody should get: it’s full of old sample reels of every genre you can think of, and the ‘Leap Year (puppy mix)’ sound is pretty much the original voice memo I made. The sound is ‘Folk And Other Moods’. I just put some chords together in the way I never would on guitar and then a song fell out; it was a lesson in sometimes trusting the classical structure of things. Follow the song to where it’s pulling you to go.

The thematic core of ‘Dog Eared’ seems to be one of duality and liminality - of being neither young nor old, between life stages, and the uncertainty that can come from such an indefinite existence. Do you think the making of the album has helped you make peace with these quite existential questions of the passage of time? In your mind, is the album something of a line in the sand, a marker between your old and new self? 
I think most of living is feeling that you’re in a liminal space. We have such pressure to grow, to evolve, to conquer year upon year, that we often miss pieces of our past that we’ve forgotten, which is why a lot of the writing covers my formative childhood memories. A lot of my writing also covers that feeling of being caught, stuck in a chasm, that isn’t necessarily a bad place, but it’s not the calmest either. I have a lot of questions about who we are and why we’re here, and how we interact with one another, and what our core identity is. Identity is the thing that I’m fascinated by - and that it it’s always changing. I like the line in the sand image; that’s quite fitting.

As you look ahead to an Autumn of touring, is there anything in particular you’re excited for? Is there anything different or new that people should expect from this upcoming run of shows? 
I’m really ready to dig into the album, and because I’m playing with my live band - not the studio band - the sounds are going to be slightly different. The essence of the record will definitely be there, but it’s [a question of] how to mix the whole repertoire into one fully flowing set. I like that all the songs are gently morphing into one - towards what, I don’t know. I’m enjoying touring more and more, so it’s much less daunting than before. 

‘Dog Eared’ is out now via Fiction Records. 

Tags: Features, Interviews, Billie Marten