Interview L. Mayland: To Sleep, Perchance To Dream

For Mayland personally, there is also another reason why they’re feeling particularly energised: turning their hand to solo music under the moniker L Mayland. Their EP’s poetic title, Mayland explains, is a nod to “what thunders along as you’re asleep. It’s such an important part of being a human being; healing happens in your sleep, and growing and forging memories. It’s a very healing place, but being away so much from home, I was sleeping in beds that weren’t my own. A lot at the time on tour, I’d wake up at 2am, like ‘where am I?’”

Mayland also wanted to layer these ideas into the sleepless culture around them; a world of ever-rolling 24 hour news, and the temptation to doom-scroll through every atrocity unfolding across the globe.

Having a safe, warm place to sleep in light of all this is a privilege, Mayland says, but often they would find themselves “feeling scared of what news you’re gonna wake up to”. This played heavily on their mind while writing ‘The Slow Fire of Sleep’, and it still hasn’t faded away. While The Last Dinner Party were away on tour in Japan last month, the UK’s Supreme Court ruling – which, if upheld, would prevent trans people from accessing spaces and services that match their gender – was announced, and Mayland felt helplessly distant from it all. “I fell asleep, and then woke up to everybody responding [to the ruling] on Instagram stories. I just thought, ‘oh my god, something horrible has happened while I’ve been silent and cut off from it all’.”

Spending so long on the road with The Last Dinner Party only exacerbated these feelings of distance, and a yearning for home emerged as a dominant theme. “Home is a house on a hill, wrapped in flames,” they sing on the soaring, and intricately picked ‘Homeward’, alongside warm flourishes of strings.

Mayland observes that these same themes also crop up in The Last Dinner Party’s ‘Sinner’. “That’s also about trying to find a sense of belonging, or feeling like you don’t fit in.” Ironically, Mayland points out, virtually everyone feels this same sense of being a misfit or an outlier. “I totally feel like something’s gone wrong with the human brain,” they say. “I don’t know why we’ve all evolved to be like: ‘I don’t belong’. Everyone is doing that!” In contrast, their solo track ‘Homeward’ “is a love letter to feeling like you do belong in nature and in the natural environment.”

But where is home now? “I’d like to say that home is something that you carry with you,” they add. “It’s my Yorkshire home and my upbringing in the countryside, but it’s also with my partner in London, and my flat, and my cats [rescue pets Melissa and Duncan]. If I can hold on to that, then I can take my home with me wherever I go. That’s the dream. When you asked that, my first thought was my partner. He’s quite mobile,” they laugh, “so that’s helpful.”

One of the EP’s standout moments, ‘Mother Mother’, sees Mayland delving into increasingly personal territory. Growing up in a very small town, they say, they unconsciously absorbed a lot of very particular ideas around femininity: “you know, you leave school, you get married, you have babies; if you’re brought up as a girl, you should want to be a mother.” Mayland vividly remembers applying for work experience at a local nursery as a teenager, and feeling like there was something wrong with them for not feeling the “natural instinct” that had been modelled to them so much growing up.

“Potentially, that was the beginning of quite a long road about gender,” Mayland – who is genderqueer and non-binary – says. “‘Mother Mother’ is about feeling that there’s something wrong with you because you don’t fit a mould. There’s room for so much more fluidity, and that song is about the beginning of breaking out of that box.”

“One of the main conversations when we got to the end of the touring year, and everyone was totally burnt out, was about being perceived every single night. It’s so sad when that starts to become a burden of the job, because it’s such a privilege to be able to go and share your music with people,” they say. “But having to bear yourself like that every night, for so many shows… that was a thing.”

The band ended up cancelling a number of live shows in order to take some time away, and learned some important lessons for album number two, Mayland says. “We have a totally different approach to it. We know now what our limits are. The way it was handled wasn’t necessarily always with our input. Things were booked in without us being asked,” they say. “Now, I think we’re just so much more empowered: we’re the bosses. Hopefully, touch wood, we never have to cancel a show again because of burnout, because we should be in more control. That would be really nice, because it was horrible.”

Despite The Last Dinner Party’s rammed schedule, Mayland sees ‘The Slow Fire of Sleep’ as just the beginning in terms of their solo work, and hints that they might not be the only member striking out alone.

“We talk a lot as a band about how we all have individual goals, and other things we want to do. We want to do it in a way that allows us to either have some downtime or pursue other creative ideas. I think that definitely will be on the cards in the next coming years, for all of us, not just me.”

What, then, does the future hold for Mayland’s own musical development? “I’d love to pay respect to the roots of folk a bit more, and write songs that are a bit more direct politically, going from introspection to wider-scale outrospection. One of the songs I wrote for the live show is more in that vein, which was an interesting exercise. I feel like I have more places I want to go.”

‘The Slow Fire Of Sleep’ is out now via Island. 

Tags: Features, Interviews, From The Magazine, L Mayland, May 2025