By the time Billie Marten was 20, she’d already lived out an entire career: a nomination in the BBC’s Sound of 2016 poll at 16; a debut LP released via Chess Club Records, a subsidiary of Sony Music, the same year — and then an unceremonious dump into what she describes as the “cesspit whirlwind of pop music” when Chess Club parted ways with Sony, leaving her at the mercy of the major label for her second.
“I knew that it wasn’t going to work. I kept telling people that I wasn’t going to be that artist,” she reflects now. “There was something fundamentally misunderstood where sometimes people are there to be moulded and to become superstars, but I knew that I wasn’t going to write those songs or have those songs written for me.”
Instead, Marten — now 26 — stepped away from the Sony machine and set about carving out her own path, inspired by the autonomy and integrity of artists such as Joanna Newsom and Fiona Apple. With her rich folk music that’s both booksmart and emotionally literate, you could line her up as a next-gen Laura Marling. But Marten’s new work is broader than that — she’s collaborating with a 10-piece band and consciously working to ditch the singer-songwriter label.
Dog Eared, the name of her latest album, is partly a reference to her tumultuous journey so far. “I sometimes feel like big chunks of me have been taken and shared before they were ready,” she says. A record that consistently questions ideas of identity and place — of “how, when we’re growing up, we’re always trying to do it faster and yet we spend the rest of our lives regaling tales of youth” — it also finds solace in nature.
Marten, who grew up in North Yorkshire, describes the natural world as “the only thing that is true; the only thing you can trust”. The resplendent white stallion she rides in the video for recent single Leap Year acts as a visual representation of its power. In reality, however, Marten had inadvertently employed the Mariah Carey of the equine kingdom. “He’s called Titan and he was Galadriel’s horse in The Rings of Power,” she laughs. “He got sponged in buttermilk before the shoot and none of the crew were allowed to interact with him, or me when I was on him.”
In Marten’s eyes, if she can pass the spotlight over to her mane-whipping co-star then it frees her up to focus on more important things. “I’ve had to develop certain skills that I was definitely not born with,” she says. “I’m naturally a huge introvert, but musically I’ve found a rhythm that I’m enjoying very much. There’s an ego to being an artist, however there are ways you can make it less tortured and more enjoyable for yourself.”
Billie Marten’s latest album, Dog Eared, is out now (Fiction Records)
