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sinceileftyoublog · 3 years

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Billie Marten Interview: Quiet Confidence

Photo by Katie Silvester

BY JORDAN MAINZER

“Where are you calling from?” I asked Billie Marten during our Zoom last month.

“East London,” she replied, “Like everyone else,” simultaneously rolling her eyes at and embracing the scene in which she’s found herself embedded.

The 22-year-old’s wry sense of humor, observations, and self-awareness complement the earnestness she’s shown on her three LPs, especially last month’s terrific Flora Fauna (IMPERIAL/Fiction Records). Though the rawer aesthetic of the record was influenced by a spontaneous, drunken purchase of a bass guitar, and many of the album’s instrumentals were fleshed out in the studio with producer Rich Cooper, Marten both dug deep within her psyche and branched out to the world around her to tackle the album’s themes of self-care and empathy. Opener “Garden of Eden” doesn’t waste any time, its drums rumbling and guitars scraping as Marten compares caring for people to tending to plants. It’s a sentiment that hits even harder after a year-plus of lockdown-induced isolation, when for many of us keeping our pets and plants alive was the only thing we felt like we could control. Throughout the record, Marten’s honest about her relationship with herself, relatable in her alternating between endurance and self-doubt. “Trying hard to teach myself a lesson / Give my body patience to bree free,” she sings on the hip hop-influenced “Heaven”; even if a partner or folks in the world around her think they’re already self-actualized, Marten’s looking out for her own mental health. On the flipside, a chaotically fuzzy stomp like “Ruin” has Marten declaring that treating others like she treats herself would be bullying: “Got a war with my body / Never win, never lose,” she sings desperately.

Flora Fauna is much more than a collection of the good days and the bad days, though. Marten communes with all sorts of living things, from street pigeons to gardens. And perhaps the most consequential song on the album is “Human Replacement”, a song about women not being able to walk alone at night, inspired by a seemingly increasing rash of violent attacks on women in the UK over the past few years. In its juxtaposition of infectious groove and essential, in-your-face subject matter, it reminds me of U.S. Girls’ weighty “Incidental Boogie”. For Marten, putting herself in others’ shoes, in a sense, allows her to become something else. On minimal closer “Aquarium”, over strummed acoustic guitar, she sings, “Do you wanna go to the aquarium? / I feel I lately wanna drown / Sit down, stare out, shut up, and swim around.” She’s able to nurture an environment by immersing herself in it, like how dirt finds its way on her face and between her teeth on the album’s cover.

Marten’s getting ready to get back out there, with some festival dates in the summer and a UK tour in July. For now, she’s relishing reflection and admissions. Towards the end of our interview, in which she had her camera on but I didn’t, she told me, “I like that your camera’s not on. It feels like I’m in a confession booth.” Flora Fauna’s got to be the greenest confession booth in the world.

Since I Left You: How did you approach the order of the tracks on Flora Fauna?

Billie Marten: I definitely wanted it to follow the classic storyline writing/curve. “Garden of Eden” starts off with the plant, everything’s open, and you really get the main feel of the album there, and “Creature of Mine” is twisting you up to this darker, punchier world, and “Human Replacement” is very in-your-face. “Liquid Love” would be the plot twist. Then, eventually, we float down to the second side of the album and get back into that acoustic-y world slightly more, but it’s definitely still different from the first two albums. Laid bare with nothing but an acoustic...on the last song of the album. I love that it’s quite a loud beginning but very quiet ending, which is what a lot of album campaigns end up being. You’re selling this thing you’ve made for two years, and it’s all, “Look at me, here I am, here’s what I’ve been doing, here’s how much better I am.” That air of improvement has to be there. But in the end, it is what it is. Take it or leave it. I’m not a naturally outgoing, competitive person, so I quite like finishing it with an air of quiet confidence rather than being brash and loud.

SILY: "Garden of Eden” almost has its own quiet confidence. It starts like you’re already in the middle of a conversation.

BM: I definitely wanted it to be immediate, like you’re dropped into my life without any warning. Have you seen Soul?

SILY: Yes.

BM: What did you think?

SILY: I thought it was very good. What about you?

BM: I loved it, and I thought it was the best philosophical education you could have in two hours. It made me think of it that way, because he drops to the real world. I wanted that feeling here.

SILY: I read an interview you did that had the title “We really are just plants,” and I was thinking that while reading about the record before it came out and eventually listening to it. Was it important for you to start the record with a song that compared us to something that’s also living but we don’t always think about as living?

BM: Absolutely. Well said. We’re actually really easy to take care of. That’s why I wanted to simplify it down in the melting pot. Take away emotion from it. In the end, we just need water and light and a bit of space, but not too much, to survive. I was very aware of that whole concept. Especially in London, it’s, “Look how much I’ve grown or will be growing in the future,” not, “How’s everyone else doing? How’s your soil?”

SILY: On “Liquid Love”, you sing about “wanting to wake up as a human every morning.” Does that song point to an eternal optimism?

BM: That was very much an affirmation type line for me. That line about waking up every morning was about how glad I was able to do that, because not everyone gets to do that for a long time. The song’s a love/hate relationship with drinking, which I was doing quite a lot of in the first few years of music. I get hangovers really badly. It doesn’t take me a lot to be completely out of action for the entire next day. That line was about just waking up and feeling proper and normal as a human, because I’ve spent a lot of days not being able to function, and it was really getting to me. We rely on our conscience to remind us to take care of ourselves all the time.

SILY: Is your relationship with drinking now different?

BM: It’s definitely a lot better, and I’m a much happier person. I don’t use it the same. I don’t need it in my life; I just enjoy it. 80% of us probably have the same struggle with it. It’s something you can control, and something that takes us out of real life entirely. It takes up your attention for hours and hours at a time. It’s an incredible mask for genuine problems. With music, it’s around a lot of the time. Some people just can’t function without it. I have big realizations all the time. My body’s telling me to stop doing it and stop smoking as well. I keep getting tonsillitis every month. I think it’s its way of saying to chill out.

SILY: The theme of being able to control certain things seems to pervade the record. It relates to nature, too. On the album closer, your garden seems to represent a balance, a place where you can influence nature but not control it.

BM: I have a really strong urge to protect an environment. I use the word cradle a lot. It’s important that humans can do that with other ones. I wanted that side of confidence I’ve developed but to let people know it’s okay to be and remain vulnerable. I think those are some of the best sides of people. If I think of my friends, I don’t think of them as who they are when they know they’re being watched. I tend to think of what they’ve been through, their low points, who they are when they’re being honest. “Aquarium” is very much that sort of confessional poem.

SILY: There are other natural entities in song titles on here that symbolize something, like “Walnut” and “Pigeon”. I think I read the latter is a yoga pose?

BM: No. I was literally referring to the one-legged pigeons that hang around London that are all gammy and rough and ready and tough characters.

SILY: The pigeon is really smart and historically used for a lot but we think of them as rats.

BM: They’re complete vermin.

SILY: It’s almost like the way we treat nature and/our ourselves.

BM: Exactly. There’s such a different between a rural pigeon and a capital city pigeon. They’re almost completely different species. It’s funny. I’m getting a lot of misconstrued things coming out of this record, people saying I’ve left London, I’ve found spirituality, the pigeon thing. All of these things just aren’t true.

SILY: That’s sometimes a good thing. Of course there’s a line where someone says something completely wrong and claims it to be true, but do you like in general for people to be able to interpret your lyrics the way they want to?

BM: Yes. I’ve had a lot of experience [with the former], especially because we’re doing these things on Zoom, and then you read the written piece and it’s so different from how the conversation went. It’s an interesting social experiment. But I love when people take images and phrases and meanings for themselves and make them their own. It’s a great sign someone’s getting something from your music even when it’s not happening in your head.

SILY: On “Creature of Mine”, that post-apocalyptic, “this is our last chance” type vibe--Is that a scenario you often entertain, and how do you feel about it?

BM: I’m a sucker for diving deep into rumination in a very large, existential plane. Thinking just spirals until it gets bigger and bigger and you get to a point where you’re completely irrelevant. Like watching Cosmos or David Attenborough. [It puts] your existence into a tiny hole. I think sometimes that’s really positive because it helps me understand when I’m nervous for a performance or gig, it’s good to put yourself in perspective. However, it sometimes makes you not want to do things because they’re ultimately not important. It’s a fine balance with that style of thinking. It’s automatic for me. It’s my constant thought train.

SILY: Are there other places on the album, even if not in the same context, where you refer to that spiraling thought process?

BM: I think “Ruin” is especially difficult in that I was noting down my thought process, and that’s what the verses are. I don’t know why I do it, but it makes me feel good. I needed to do that to get it out of me and understand how ridiculous that thought train is. The chorus tries to put this analogy of [wasting] time being a crime. That’s what I was doing: I was wasting a lot of time thinking about it, so every time I sing it, it’s a weird slipstream universe type thing.

SILY: I asked the question hoping you would say “Ruin”. When you sing, “Got a war with my body / Never win, never lose,” it reminded me of that thought process. It goes in a circle. It’s not a linear thing.

BM: There’s no point in putting an element of battle into it. There’s no opponent. It’s just you. You could try and find opponents with other people, but that doesn’t usually work out either. This whole album is fleshing out these huge subjects I ultimately have no control over. Putting my two cents in and leaving it at that, making these musical, experimental creations.

SILY: “Human Replacement” seems to be one where the juxtaposition between the instrumentation and subject matter is sort of contrasting. It’s this funky strut, but the song’s about women feeling and being unsafe alone at night on the streets. Were you conscious of that contrast making that song?

BM: Me and my producer [Cooper], that was the first song we did together in this album, so it needed to come out very immediate. I just had that [sings melody], and he sat on the kit just trying it out. I had no idea what I wanted to talk about. I was going into this Queens of the Stone Age, grungy, late-night mood. I didn’t have the narrative because what they sing about wasn’t relevant to me. I was looking outside and hearing all the sirens and hearing about what was happening in the news every day, and it was a subject that needed to happen. I wouldn’t say I’m in any way a political writer, but it is a massive problem. It’s a shame that narrative came out of me. The subject matter had to match the severity of the song. I couldn’t really talk about my own feelings in that song. It had to be a bigger subject.

SILY: Are songs like those more or less difficult to perform live?

BM: I don’t know. I worried about playing that one live because it’s so serious. My between-song chat is very much not serious. It’s my personality, which is who I am when I’m not performing. So I was worried I wouldn’t give it the air time it needs. Then again, most people don’t even listen to lyrics. They just like the way a song feels. It’s important to entertain those people as well. It can’t be all doom and gloom. I would say it’s harder than talking about myself, which I’ve been doing since I was 12.

SILY: How was playing your gig?

BM: It was at Banquet [Records], a record store in South London. I thought we were gonna be in the actual shop, me and my long-term collaborator and bandmate and TM Jason. He just makes a bit of [drum] kit, and I’m on acoustic. It turned out to be in this proper venue in this theater. It was a gig. I’m really glad we got pushed into that environment. Anything else would have been a lot more daunting.

SILY: Was it your first time playing many of these songs?

BM: Yes. There are still ones I have no idea how to play. I need to figure that out quite soon. [laughs]

SILY: Are you looking forward to touring?

BM: Yes. Massively. I really needed this break to make me realize that because I think gigs can be really hard for people. I definitely find that. There have been certain moments where I wish I wasn’t going on stage. Now it’s just like we have been given this gift again of living normally. It would be incredibly inappropriate to feel otherwise.

SILY: What else is next for you?

BM: Definitely writing. I want to start recording again. I can do it now since we’ll be so busy. It’s shaping up into a completely different soundscape again, which is interesting. You’re always going.

SILY: Anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading lately that’s caught your attention?

BM: This band called Coco. I don’t even know how I found them. They’ve got no information about them whatsoever. I think they’re American. They have 3 songs on Spotify. They’re very very good. To be honest, I’m not very good at watching things at the moment. I watched Nomadland and loved that. Mostly it will always be The Simpsons. To be honest, I’ve been too busy recently. I’ve been looking forward to June. Wait, we are in June! It’s the 2nd day of June. Well, I’m looking forward to this month, where I can do more domestic things again and stop talking about myself. [laughs]

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#interviews #billie marten #banquet records #flora fauna #katie silvester #zoom #rich cooper #u.s. girls #soul #cosmos #david attenborough #queens of the stone age #coco #spotify #nomadland #the simpsons

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