Following two thoroughly encouraging debut releases, we had a chat with emerging UK artist MARNEY.
Just three months on from the release of her debut track ‘California’, MARNEY looks set to become a real contender in the UK pop scene due to her unerring knack for crafting memorable and poignant tracks that bleed with a cathartic and heartfelt gravity that sticks with you for well beyond your listen.
The artist’s sophomore release and new single ‘Good Man’ only cements this. A break-up track with a difference, the track explores the reality of having to pick up the pieces after a relationship ends without having anything or anyone to blame. No toxicity, no hard feelings, just life taking its course, and the melancholy and bittersweet feelings that come with it. Having already established a lifetime of depth and emotion on her two initial releases, and with an EP slated for release later this year, we at CLOUT have earmarked MARNEY as an artist to keep a close eye on, and sought to find out some more about the inspiration behind her work, and what else the future holds for the emerging artist.
Who TF is MARNEY?
I’m a songwriter, singer and artist who lives in London. I’ve spent my whole life in this city and never want to leave it.
I’m a Libra, a die hard My Chemical Romance fan and I’m ‘mom’ to a black cat called Salem.
I’m a great gift giver and I make a wicked roast dinner and really good fried eggs.
How long have you been making music?
I’ve been writing songs and poems for as long as I can remember. I started songwriting as my profession when I was a teenager, it was my first real job but I’ve spun a million different plates along the way.
I’m a really slow writer. I take a long time mulling over lyrics, writing down words and ideas until I eventually force myself to sit at a table and finish a song. I find it hard to go back and edit lyrics if I’ve demoed a song already, usually I know if I think the song could be good and then work really hard at making it good. There is no greater feeling than having written a song I love, and no worse feeling than the thought of starting one.
Why do you make music?
This is such a hard question, I’ve sat for ages trying to answer this. It’s just been what’s compelled me. I don’t think it started from any philosophy or intention, it just happened.
I’ve always been obsessive about music… sang along, read the lyrics to songs, watched live DVDs and videos all the time. I think the thing that made me start making it, instead of just being a huge fan, was wanting to BE the artists I loved. I was and still am obsessive about the artists I care about. As an artist, you get to make choices in how you express yourself, pop stars are the greatest inventors of themselves.
What are your biggest influences?
I pay a lot of attention to contemporary music, we live in the loudest and most fast moving era of music to date by a wide margin. As much as I love older music, it’s modern songs that I’m playing in the studio as references. I grew up listening to a lot of country music and I still pay close attention to what’s coming out of Nashville; Ruston Kelly and Hayley Williams are on heavy rotation. Beyond music, film and TV is always hugely influential on me, both the soundtracks to them and the shows in and of themselves. I want to be consumed by a world: the clothes, the interiors, the weather – those elements all feel very present to me when I’m writing or recording. I usually have an image in mind of where something is heading, often more so than a sound. I love music videos as an art form and only want to make songs that I can imagine a great video for. I’m charged up by anyone who has creative vision and power, whether that’s the likes of Michaela Cole, Kacey Musgraves, Gerard Way or Raf Simons.
What would you say has been your best moment so far?
Making the videos for this EP was one of the highlights of my life. I fought to get out of a record deal that meant I could make and release these songs, as I wanted to. Making the videos was such a combination of creative realisation and shoestring hustle. I was quite choked up walking down Hollywood Boulevard dressed as Superman because I had that image in mind for the California video, for so long before it came to life. I felt completely empowered and excited as an artist, which is not the base level feeling that I have as an artist most of the time.
How would you describe your sound to somebody unfamiliar with it?
It’s moody, melancholy, modern pop music. Songwriting sits at the core of the process so I hope it’s melodically and lyrically engaging. It’s unattached to one genre or instrument, I aim for it to feel cinematic and like it’s part of a wider universe of songs. Whatever best serves the song is what I aim for. If that’s dystopian synths on California with words from a preacher? Great. If it’s flamenco guitars and Western swing whistles on Good Man? Let’s go there.
What’s your dream “I’ve made it” moment?
These are easy, I fantasise about them a lot. I think I could die very happy if I had a song used in a Baz Luhrmann film, especially if it meant getting to wear an outrageous outfit on a red carpet with him. Otherwise, it would be getting an email from Gerard Way saying he loves a song and wants to use it as the dance sequence song on the next season of The Umbrella Academy. I think acknowledgement from your heroes or getting to step into another world that I adore, like cinema, would be an “I’ve made it” moment. Or being friends with Alison Roman because she loves my songs.
We love your latest single ‘Good Man’, could you tell us some more about it?
Thank you! I had ‘Good Man’ written down as a title on a page of potential ideas. Ashley Gorley, my co-writer on the song who is an amazing country writer picked it out and said – ‘Let’s write this song’. He had an idea that it could have a country-style twist: a man who’s good at all the wrong things, but I knew the song wasn’t that. I was in the midst of my first real heart break and I wanted to pay tribute to a good man. I wrote the music and melodies in a session with Ashley and Matt Rad in LA and I then went to my Air BnB and wrote the words. They appeared quickly and became a stream of honesty about how I was feeling, it’s a bittersweet idea. When Adam Argyle and I came together to record the song, I was pushing hard for rolling acoustic guitars. I’d been listening to Fireside by Arctic Monkeys a lot around the writing of that song and those guitars had stuck with me. They were hard to play but Adam totally got it. When we started, it sounded like an Irish band which felt like great energy. We were playing Roxanne from the Moulin Rouge soundtrack and started to build up an idea around that, before realising it should be a Narcos-esque desert soundtrack. It fit perfectly because we already had the video in the can and the two ideas dovetailed perfectly.
What else do you have planned for the near future?
I’ll be putting out another song in a few weeks time, I have two more to release from this project which both have accompanying videos. They’re really different songs, one is up tempo and fun and the other is the saddest song from this collection. I’m putting up a live set from home as shows still feel out of reach. You have to be creative with what you can do as a new artist, especially when you’re releasing music when the world is experiencing what it’s experiencing. I’ll be doing as much as I can around these releases, to give them as much life post-release as went into them pre-release, and hopefully bring some new people along for the ride.
And finally, who is your biggest fan right now?
A friend of mine has a very little girl who does ballet on her bed to both California and Good Man so she’s really delivering on the ‘biggest fan’ front and if I was a better person, that would be enough to content me.
