Billie Marten

Sometimes the most liberating thing a songwriter can do is surrender complete control. For Billie Marten, that meant flying to Brooklyn in July of last summer, descending into producer Philip Weinrobe’s basement studio, and trusting complete strangers with her music. “I basically had no control, no authority, couldn’t hear myself sing or play, so it was kind of all him,” Marten reflects on the recording process for her latest album Dog Eared. “It was a large leap of faith.” For her The Influences session, she had a bit more control and recorded Feeling, traditional song All My Trials (learned through Nick Drake) and John Martyn’s Couldn’t Love You More.

The result of giving the reins to Weinrobe (who also worked with Adrianne Lenker, Buck Meek, Cass McCombs, Lonnie Holley and Kings Of Convenience) is an album that English friends have described as sounding ‘very American’, a compliment in the ears of the Yorkshire-born songwriter. “It sounds very self-assured,” she notes, explaining how the experience of working with unfamiliar musicians created something fundamentally different from her previous work. “There’s no one kind of guessing. We made sure that we weren’t making that sort of record. It was supposed to be a band record and everybody has their part, you know, equally.”

Finding newness in unfamiliarity

The decision to work with unknown musicians wasn’t born from dissatisfaction with the UK scene, but from a hunger for something different. “Sometimes you want something else. I just wanted a different flavour.”

That different flavour came through Phil Weinrobe, a producer Marten had only spoken to on the phone for a few months before their collaboration. “I really liked his personality. It’s quite rare to find a producer that sort of gives more than the artist. Because, you know, they’re sort of receptors of sound. He had so much energy, and I was looking for that.”

The recording process was intense and immediate. “All I had were very basic voice memo, acoustic demos. So, we didn’t do any pre-production. We didn’t have an idea of what they were going to sound like,” Marten recalls. No rehearsals, no preparation, straight into the studio with a collection of strangers, including Spanish musician Nuria Graham, whom Marten had flown out after admiring her work. “We never met but I told her I liked her record and then I said, do you want to come and make mine sound like yours? And she did.”

The liberation of being a foreigner

The album is “kind of all about identity and questioning that and who we are as a child versus who we are as a fully formed adult,” and the experience of being in New York as an outsider became crucial to that exploration. “I love being seen less somewhere else. I guess you’re a bit more elusive if you don’t know your surroundings and the people walking around.”

“If you’re in a different city by yourself, it can feel like you can be anyone you want to be,” Billie Marten continues. “So, I felt that I could present something different. Your own expectations of yourself can be put aside for a little bit maybe.” The liberation was profound: “Very much so. Maybe I’ll have to do each album in a separate country. Do the next one in Japan.”

“Sometimes there’s a synergy that you have with them”

For The Influences session, Marten chose covers that reveal the width of her musical upbringing. The traditional song All My Trials came through Nick Drake, whose autobiography she’d recently devoured. “They were talking about this song that him and Gabrielle, his sister, were playing together just to test out his new four-track. And it’s full of mistakes and it’s a really bad recording but their harmonies are really beautiful.”

Drake’s influence runs deep for Billie Marten. “I’ve always loved Nick Drake, and he was the first kind of, I’m sure everyone feels this with musicians but sometimes there’s a synergy that you have with them, and you don’t know them, but you know that you think the same.” What draws her to Drake is his warmth: “And how he would always sing about something dire and desolate, but it would sound really comforting like a hug which is something I quite often do.”

And then there’s John Martyn’s Couldn’t Love You More, which she calls: “One of the greatest love songs of all time. He was my dad’s favourite, so that’s actually why I’m called Billie Marten. I just stole his name, and I changed a letter.” Despite Martyn’s troubled personal reputation his musical legacy remains untouchable for Marten. “His music’s great. He’s my favourite.”

The art of not giving up on art

Billie Marten’s approach to songwriting mirrors the kind of persistence required for a difficult crossword puzzle. “You know that initially you can’t fill in all the answers, especially the Times’ Sunday crossword. But if you keep going and you don’t give up and you go and wash the dishes and come back and then you have the answer.”

“I’d liken songwriting to that exact thing. Don’t give up. Just sort of sticking it out. And you know that it’s within you.” For Dog Eared, she pushed herself harder than ever before. “I always just want it to be better than the last thing, and I want to try harder and explore myself fully and banished some demons and things like that. I think it was the hardest I’ve tried in terms of writing you know, I’ve not settled.”

The result is an album born from vulnerability, trust, and the willingness to be uncomfortable. Working as ‘underground moles’ in that sweltering Brooklyn basement, Billie Marten found something she couldn’t have discovered at home. “It was very hot and sweltering and smelly, and I was living in Brooklyn, and we made the album in Brooklyn at my producer Phil Weinrobe’s house, but we were in his cool basement,” she remembers. “It was an excellent time.”

Billie Marten’s stunning new record Dog Eared is out now on Fiction Records.

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