Foto-© Thania Rodriguez
Wir kennen Orla Gartland als Woman on the Internet (2021), am Freitag erschien nun ihr zweites Album Everybody Needs a Hero. Mit viel Energie, Ehrlichkeit und ihrem typischen Humor hat sie sich dieses Mal einer Beziehung aus all ihren Blickwinkeln gewidmet und auch sonst waren viele Sachen anders als auf ihrem Debüt.
Wir haben Orla Gartland im August in Berlin getroffen und über die Entstehung von Everybody Needs a Hero gesprochen. Im Interview erzählt sie, warum sich das zweite trotzdem an vielen Stellen wie das erste Album anfühlt, warum sie von der Set-List bis zur Fadenstärke des Merchandise gern alles unter Kontrolle hat und was es für sie bedeutet, auf ihrem eigenen Label zu veröffentlichen. Wir schauen gemeinsam zurück auf ein Debüt während einer Pandemie, auf ihre aktuelle Platte und darauf, warum sie sich für die Zukunft vorgenommen hat, Songs live zu testen. Wir sprechen über die Herausforderungen und Berührungspunkte, wenn man mit der Person arbeitet, die jeden Tag in deiner Küche sitzt und warum es ihr für Everybody Needs a Hero so wichtig war, dass alberne Songs neben unglaublich traurigen stehen. Ihr sei es wichtig, nah am Leben zu sein. Und das merkt man in jedem Satz dieses Interviews!
Congratulations on your second album Everybody Needs a Hero. It’s the first album without a pandemic. Usually people talk about how different it is to release a record during a global pandemic, but for you it’s the other way round. What was it like?
Very different. All of this was on zoom, and that was obviously the worst thing ever. It was very hard to differentiate one experience from another. People like you, people who write interviews and ask questions, you all have such interesting personalities. Zoom doesn’t do any of them justice. As an artist you feel like you’re saying the same thing over and over again because you can’t really connect with everyone’s different personality. It felt a bit more like a job than this. So I’m having a lot of fun just getting to know people and making it feel more real. It’s such a big difference and I feel very lucky. I didn’t feel lucky then. I felt pretty sorry for myself. But it was my decision to release it in the pandemic, we could have waited another year and released it in 2022. But it takes so long between delivering an album and releasing it anyway. Mainly because vinyls take a long time to make. So it was my decision to go ahead knowing that it would still be kind of a lockdown vibe. I think a lot of people find their second album quite daunting because they feel like they’ve done it all the first time. How do you make it live up to expectations? But I think in hindsight I’ve been quite lucky because it feels very different from the first time around. And it means that there are a lot of bucket list things that I can tick off this time that were just logistically impossible the first time around. Like touring more, going to the States, doing acoustic shows in the record store. None of that was possible when I did the first album. I’m actually getting a really different experience this time around and I think it’s quite fun. It makes it feel like the first one or just different.
Do you feel that it has affected your writing and the sound, knowing that this time you can go out and play it live?
I don’t think it affected the sound, but it did affect the process. With the first album I could spend all day on one verse, I could spend all day fiddling with the production. I could be really careful and take my time. And I enjoyed that level of focus. But it also made me overthink things, having all that space and not much life in between. And it was not a very inspiring time because life was on hold. So I remember writing the song Pretending, which is about being at a party and feeling like you’re putting on a bit of an act where you’re introducing yourself to strangers and feeling really self-conscious about it. And I wrote that when I hadn’t been to a party in months. I couldn’t remember what it felt like to talk to strangers in real life. It was a lot of digging through my memory. I really, really didn’t want to write a song or an album about lockdown. I was self-aware enough to know that wasn’t going to age well. I didn’t want to make an album about isolation. It came out in the Covid times but it’s not lockdown music. I found it easier to write this time because in between writing I was living a life, going out doing something or I was having an experience with a friend. There’s just much more coming into your life for you to react to. As a result, there were a lot more songs that I wrote for the second album. With the first album I wrote 11 or 12 songs. There were no spares. Whereas for Everybody Needs a Hero I probably started with 25 songs and then cut it down. It felt easier to say more.
Again you released the album on your own label. Why is it important for you to be involved in all the steps? A lot of artists say they have to wear more hats these days and are responsible for so many things besides music. Usually they don’t like it, but you actively choose it.
Yeah, I can’t get enough of the hats [laughs]. I think it suits my personality to do it independently. You have to have a great manager. I have an amazing manager. Claire [Kilcourse], all hail! Um, but it’s definitely not for everyone. It means you have to have the kind of mind that can hold a lot of details at the same time: everything from production decisions, the tone of your guitar or a lyric. I also love merch. I love thinking about what kind of T-shirts we’re going to do and what the photos and the visuals are going to look like and what song is going to be on the pre-show playlist. I like all the details. It’s all connected somehow. You can tell when an artist is really hands off with an aspect of their project and that’s fine. I can understand that it’s not for everyone to be obsessed with the thread count of your T-shirts. That’s so fair. But I just like it because I think art is very holistic. I’m basically a control freak, that’s the short answer. That’s why it suits me.
If you’re behind every aspect of it, there’s a lot less room for interpretation in the end products. What does it feel like when it goes out there? When everyone is listening and interpreting?
The more you put yourself into something, the more vulnerable it is. If you decide to write songs about your life and you have to be in the photos and you have to be in the music videos, it’s very much “Here I am!” I can understand why it’s not for everyone. Some people want to deflect or hide behind it. Some artist friends I know are the most shy, introverted people, and they have to try to be a much showier personality to do this job. I find that very interesting. But I think the more I am willing to put myself into something, the prouder I will be of it in the end. It’s not about how many records we sell. If I can hold that vinyl in my hands and know that it’s a time stamp of where I was in my life at that time and I just tried my best, that’s what fills my soul. That’s how I see it anyway. When your team is small, all those things are easier. There are just less cooks in the kitchen. There’s no record label A&R telling me this song can’t be on the album because they don’t think it’s good enough. I am lucky with the setup I have. It’s a privilege. It’s an aspect that I really enjoy. Sometimes it’s got nothing to do with the music. It’s so weird. It keeps you inspired to think about all the different ways your art can be distributed.
It’s interesting that you’re so protective and a self-proclaimed control freak, but then you work with close friends. I find that challenging because of the emotions involved. You can trust them, but at the same time you care about them.
I learned a lot about that when I did FIZZ, a band I did last year with my best friends [Dodie, Greta Isaac and Martin Luke Brown]. Those guys are my best friends in the world and to be able to do this work together was particularly vulnerable in a way. I was trying to make sure everyone was okay, trying to capture everyone’s experience. I think there’s a pro and a con to everything. I worked with one of my best friends in London. Her name is Lauren Aquilina and she’s an amazing artist and songwriter. She co-wrote some of the songs on this album. We’ve been best friends for 12 years or so. We were internet friends when I was living in Dublin. We used to talk on Skype when we were teenagers, and we lived together for five years. To have been friends for that long and never write together, it was really vulnerable. I got really shy about asking. I had to work myself up to it because it’s something that’s so important to me and she’s someone who’s in the kitchen all the time. There’s no secret. But the other side of it is that Lauren knows me so deeply. She knows the chords that I like. She knows my sense of humour. She knows my history. She knows who my friends are. She has all this deep, deep context. That made writing together really cool because you don’t have to reintroduce yourself to a stranger. Sometimes writing sessions are like interviews, you’re meeting strangers. It’s very vulnerable. It doesn’t always work out. Working with Laura, we just skipped all that. But it was also very vulnerable. Working with people you care about always has its challenges. But I think there’s also so much good. I felt very lucky to be able to write with her and any of my friends.
Your humour is an important part of your writing. For Everybody Needs a Hero, you stepped away from it at times. When is it time for humour and when not?
I wanted some variety. Some conversations with friends are goofy and playful and funny. Sometimes you have a deep conversation and you’re all crying your eyes out. If an album is a time stamp to capture a snapshot of where you were at one point, then it feels more true to life to me to have both. On this album there’s Late to the Party, which is so bratty and goofy and very tongue-in-cheek. And I put on this character of being kind of a dick, basically. But then there’s Mine, which is devastatingly sad and very heavy and very hard to write. Those are probably the two furthest away and there’s a lot in between those two points. That’s quite normal for me because I think that’s the way life is. I didn’t want the album to be monotonous. I would like to do that at some point. I’d love the challenge of writing an album that’s committed to a mood, because I like that as a fan of music. I like putting on an album and knowing what you’re going to get and staying in one world for 40 minutes. I’d like to do that one day. But my first album and this one were very diverse. It just felt natural where I was at the time.
What is Everybody Needs a Hero a snapshot of?
It was written in the last year or two. Kiss Ur Face Forever was the first song we wrote for it. That was at the end of 2022. It’s more focused than the first album. It’s about one relationship and looking at the same person, almost writing diary entries about how you feel about them on a different day and trying to celebrate the multiplicity that you can feel. I don’t know if it’s just the way my brain works, but the path of thought is never straight. When I’m in a relationship, one day I’m full of love and I’m so sweet and good-hearted about it. And the next day I’m like “Oh God, I don’t even know who you are”. So even though it’s about one person and one relationship, it still jumps around a lot. But again, it just feels true to my life and my brain at least. I do want light and shade and big dynamic jumps.
How do you plan to bring that to the shows?
I love writing setlists. It’s a real skill, especially when there’s so much variation in mood. It’s always interesting to think about how you want to change the atmosphere of the room. For example, one part of the set where we deliberately embrace the low energy and put together songs that complement each other. Maybe I’ll pair Mine with another song that’s stripped down but not as heavy in mood, so you’re not taking people to the pits of hell for a full 15 minutes. Sometimes there are quite boring logistical things to think about. If you’re changing guitars, you might want to put two songs together that both use the same guitar. We haven’t played all the new songs live yet. I’ve tried a few with the band so far, so I’m excited to see how they fit in and which songs I can do a new arrangement on live. That’s fun too.
Do the songs become different things during touring?
Yeah, I think so. As well as making an album that’s a bit more consistent in tone, I’d like to make an album that’s been road tested. I think you play songs differently after a while and when you test songs live the truth is so clear. Sometimes you play a song and you think: “Oh, it should be faster. Obviously it should be faster, duh”. These things aren’t always clear when you’re in a hyper-focused studio environment and then you get in front of a crowd and you feel that you’re tapping your foot faster than the song is. Testing new songs is very revealing because people don’t know the lyrics. Everybody’s watching you a little bit more. It helps you get to the truth and the right answers a bit sooner. They will all change shape in the same way as the first album and the EP songs. I play them a bit differently now. It happens a lot without trying, but I’m up for it. As a fan of other people I like it when something sounds different or just better live because there’s more energy.
It’s exciting to find the little changes.
I love these easter eggs and clues and things. You can be a casual listener to somebody and listen to it on the bus on the way to a gig and think it sounds good. But there’s always the inner circle, the people who know every word. Those are the people who will notice if you change a lyric live. They also know when I get my lyrics wrong, which happens when I’m nervous.
Thank you for the interview!
