The English musician spoke with Paste about a jumbotron operator interrupting one of her sets, finding liberation in non-autobiographical songwriting, breaking away from “singer-songwriter” labels, and turning her fourth album, Dog Eared, into a proper full-band celebration.
The first time I saw British indie-folk wunderkind Billie Marten in the flesh, she was, ostensibly, being laughed at. By the midpoint of her set opening for Tennis at NYC’s Pier 17 last month, the audience had devolved into giggles. She made a valiant effort to ignore the bizarre reaction, but when she got a few lines into her quietly devastating song “Vanilla Baby” and could hardly hear herself over the laughter, she had to stop playing entirely. She looked out, baffled, at the crowd: “Why is everyone laughing?” A beat, as something terrible occurred to her. She smiled sheepishly, eyes crinkling even as the horror set in: “Oh God, is there something on my face?”
There was not. Rather, the anonymous Jumbotron operator had, for some inexplicable reason, decided to use Marten’s set as a testing ground for his Kiss Cam chops, and had spent the past ten minutes training the camera at various audience members, slowly zooming in closer and closer on their increasingly strained, confused smiles. (Writing now, I do wonder if there’s a larger conspiracy at play, and this was actually the trial run for the Coldplay Jumbotron shot heard ‘round the world—if it’s all one cameraman, scheming to overshadow concerts one Jumbotron at a time). But Marten, as the person on the stage and thus unable to see the screens in front of it, was the only individual on that rooftop not in on the joke.
Performing a deeply vulnerable song in front of hundreds of people only for them to break into laughter for no apparent reason is, quite literally, every musician’s—every human’s, really—worst nightmare. But even at only 26, Billie Marten handled it with more grace and charm than most people would at twice her age. Eventually, an audience member (who may or may not have been me) took pity on her and yelled out an explanation. It would have been understandable for Marten to seethe, or shrink into herself, or even dress down the cameraman for his attempt at hijacking the show—I can think of no small number of celebrities who would not hesitate to do so. But Marten, for her part, just laughed and cracked some jokes (“Really? During “Vanilla Baby”?). Then: She kept on playing, and the jumbotron interruptions finally ceased, leaving the audience rapt, rightfully mesmerized by Marten’s voice.
When I speak to her a few weeks later, one of the first things I do is apologize on behalf of the audience (and the cameraman, for that matter) at that Pier 17 show. She just laughs, a bright, tinkling thing, the genuine mirth on her face visible even through the lags on my laptop screen: “That was absolutely insane.” She shakes her head, remembering. “He was certainly trying… something!” I joke that maybe he was attempting to prove his mettle as a basketball jumbotron operator, as if this were the technical portion of a job interview where he had to prove he had the skills to maximize a Kiss Cam’s entertainment value. She grins, picking up the thread where I left off: “Yeah, maybe it was his trial shift. The bosses were there, secretly lurking in the audience, and they just wanted to check that he could do it. Just my luck he chose ‘Vanilla Baby’ to do it, but I hope he impressed them and got the job.”
(One thing about Billie Marten, I learn quickly, is that the woman knows her way around a bit. Later in our conversation, we embark on an extended riff about the latest, hippest equestrian activity: horse-neck riding. In the end, I apologize deeply for my failure to properly research horse riding techniques prior to our interview, and she just nods firmly and says, voice dry with disappointment, “Yeah. Do better.” Then we both crack up).
There’s some message I could draw out here—some pithy little affirmation à la “If anything, this proves that if there’s one thing you need to survive in the music industry, it’s a sense of good humor.” But as nice as it sounds, I don’t think it’s quite true. Frankly, you need a lot more than that to stay afloat in the vast ocean of industry. And Billie Marten, who was thrown into the deep end at the ripe age of 12 and had to try not to drown before she could even teach herself how to swim, knows that more than most. In her words, she spent years “deeply underwater in respect to control,” a feeling that reached its peak around the time of her sophomore record, Feeding Seahorses By Hand. Since then, she’s worked to claw her way back up to the surface, her third and fourth albums seeing her finally burst out of the depths and take her first gulps of air, kicking rapidly to stay above the current. But it’s her fifth that shows her finally able to simply float. Released last Friday, Dog Eared is a testament to both the control it takes to let go and the realization that letting go is, itself, a necessary prerequisite to feeling in control of your own life.
WHEN MARTEN BEGAN WORKING on Dog Eared, she had one firm rule: Whatever it became, it couldn’t be another “singer-songwriter” record. That label, she explains, has grown so broad it means almost nothing—and yet she’d been pinned under it since childhood. “I was aware that the entire genre of singer-songwriter had become so large that it was encompassing basically all genres of music,” she says. “As long as I had a guitar, then it was folk, and I’m a singer-songwriter. Even if you’re not writing your own songs, you’re a singer-songwriter.” It wasn’t that she looked down on the genre (“I’ve very much based my entirety on people of the past doing exactly that”) but rather that, under its weight, she’d spent too many years associating music with isolation.
Feeding Seahorses by Hand bore the scars of that confusion. By the time Sony dropped her in 2019, she felt nothing but relief. “There’s a lot of kind of visceral feelings around that time, and confusion,” she says now. “I didn’t know the system. I felt… mostly just very confused.” That experience taught her something she’s still learning to navigate: “In some ways I do think happiness is control—but it’s also letting go of everything at the same time.” Her subsequent records saw her slowly regaining that balance, but Dog Eared marks the first time she’s felt free to make something not just hers, but whole—something that refuses to leave a flattened stage-friendly version of her boxed into a corner, strumming alone under a spotlight.
“I think that, if you’re a solo artist, you want to throw the least amount of attention onto yourself as possible,” she explains, laughing a little. “We have attention all day long. All the live-long day. The last thing we want is more.” I suspect this claim to be somewhat less universal than she thinks. In all honesty, I can think of few solo artists who seem less enamored with the spotlight than Marten—but maybe that says less about the degree to which her peers crave attention than it does the sincerity of her own reluctance (though, as someone who’s seen her live, she couldn’t do a better job at hiding it). “I had become tired with myself,” she says, plainly. “I was surrounded by this vacuousness that slowly ripped away at me. So to be plunked into a room that was exactly the opposite of that [vacuousness] was precisely what I needed.”
It was for that reason she insisted Dog Eared be built not around herself, but around a band, recorded live with a roomful of other musicians whose fingerprints are all over the finished album. “It was the perfect dose of interplay—it was so deeply inspiring and made me work harder,” she says. “I got to perform for the right people, all internal musicians themselves and with no larger judgment. There is no other word that accurately depicts what I was feeling: I was just so inspired. It was exhilarating.”
That exhilaration is palpable in the recordings. The team—producer Phil Weinrobe, Vishal Nayak and Joshua Crumbly on rhythm, pianist Michael Coleman, and three whole guitarists (Michael Haldeman, Sam Evian, Adam Brisbin), plus guest appearances from singer/guitarist Núria Graham, percussionist Mauro Refosco, Sam Amidon’s fiddle, and Shahzad Ismaily on, well, everything—recorded together over just six days in Brooklyn, their chemistry immediate. Marten describes the sessions as almost democratic, the songs often taking shape in real time. “All we had were voice notes from me of immediately having written the song. So with that, you can kind of take them anywhere,” she recalls. There were no preordained arrangements or rigid templates, just a shared language of rhythm and instinct. “We honestly just sat down and put our phones into a bowl outside and then we came in and sat down for eight hours a day. And whatever you’re hearing on the record is literally exactly what all those guys did.”
The sound of Dog Eared is somewhat hard to pin down, and that’s exactly the point. Marten herself struggles to name it, describing it as a “lava lamp” of rhythms and textures, filled with little “bleepy bloopies.” She immediately cringes: “Oh, God, I just said ‘bleepy bloopies.’ We don’t have to put that in print,” she laughs, self-effacing—but it fits. The record shimmers and swirls, full of odd little angles that feel accidental at first but deliberate on closer listen. Where her earlier work prized polish and restraint, this one feels looser, stranger, more alive; less about holding the line than about seeing where it might bend. Her own parents hated the record when they first heard it: “They did not like the dissonance. They did not like how my voice sounded. They did not like the songs. They just fucking hated it.” But, for Marten, that was a sign that she was doing something right (and her parents came around in the end, too).
“Something I realized on this record was, ‘How much of what I’m known for do I want to perpetuate?’ And how much do we change and evolve?” Marten says. “A lot of it is about identity and change and what we choose to bring with us and what we choose to leave behind. It’s kind of an awesome thing to look back on.”
Those sentiments animate nearly every song. Dog Eared opens with “Feeling,” a kind of quiet exhale and reset, built around a loose, tumbling rhythm and lyrics that picture a younger Marten slipping into a future she doesn’t yet understand: “I am on my way / I am in between.” It’s a fitting prologue, full of childlike wonder and unease, and it establishes the record’s preoccupation with change: gentle, inevitable, and often beyond one’s grasp. “We are oh so lightly here,” Marten sings, “Softer than a rabbit ear.” From there, the record blooms into stranger, sharper colors. “Crown” takes what began as an acoustic sketch and turns it into a slinky, sinewy groove, her voice curling around lines like “She drinks my blood / And I wear her crown,” its mix of menace and intimacy both seductive and uneasy. Later, on the beautifully dissonant “Clover,” oxymorons pile up like stray petals—“act naturally,” “old news,” “loving hate”—as she wrestles with the burden of appearing strong while feeling small. “No Sudden Changes” cools into a slow, jazzy lockstep in time to reiterate the equally comforting and terrifying truth that change, even as gradual and minute as it might seem on the day-to-day, is the only real constant: “No sudden changes / No sudden moves / Nothing stays in place.”
One particularly notable change on Dog Eared is that it holds Marten’s first-ever non-autobiographical song: “Leap Year,” which tells of lovers who meet only once every four years. She calls the track “incredibly liberating,” and it’s easy to hear why: For once, she wasn’t writing to explain herself or square the gap between how she feels and how people see her. “It feels like I can perform more, because I am not being seen, or I’m being seen less,” she explains. “You know, there are certain songs that you play for so long that you stop hearing them. But ‘Leap Year,’ for me, was just… Oh, so fun.” She pauses, grins. “I’m having a lot of fun singing these songs.”
Even so, some things stay the same: Marten’s voice remains ethereal as ever, and her penchant for threading in mundane bits and pieces of everyday life (particularly references to animals and the natural world) can be seen in nearly every track. “I’ve realized that I’m just a deeply simple human being who likes very simple things—like, four or five essentials—and then I’m good,” Marten laughs. “Essentials like the things I talk about in the album; very exact, sane minutiae. Plants and animals, water and food, meaningful connections. That’s enough for me.”
Marten is no longer trying to sand herself down into something tidier, nor contort herself into a silhouette more befitting the cliché of the tortured artist. “I’ve always struggled with existentialism—you know, it’s really made me quite mentally unwell sometimes—and I have a natural cynicism. I think that’s the case for most of us, though,” she says. “So I’m not saying we need to get rid of our darkness; I think it’s such a beautiful part of us. But I am actively, as I age, becoming more and more aware of how much darkness I let out, and how helpful or hindering that is to other people.”
There’s a kind of quiet joy, even a kind of grace, in hearing her speak this way—not pretending that she’s figured it all out, but also no longer pretending she needs to. “Maybe the key is to not push so hard in a certain way,” she muses. There was a kind of faux-bravado, she admits, in the persona she donned for her third album in particular, Flora Fauna, the first released after her break with Sony. “I tried to push into this confidence and bravado and velocity as a way of getting over the vulnerability, and I regretted it immediately. But, well, we all try things out. And that’s okay. I think, though, that I’ve realized that none of us need to push so hard, you know? When we’re pushing, we’re pushing a part of ourselves away. And that part can actually just remain there as an element of our essence; it doesn’t need to define us, but it also doesn’t need to vanish entirely.”
That, too, is a throughline on the record—a willingness to let all her past selves remain in the room rather than pretending to outgrow them. “It’s like, there’s so many elements of the past in there. It’s still me. I’m still writing the same way. It’s just become something else,” she admits. “We can’t erase our past selves. You know how it is when we go and see family… Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter where this comes from. We’re so aware of it anyway. We’re never going to find that source.”
And you can hear that sentiment pulsing through Dog Eared. Nothing here is precious, but everything feels lived-in: the double basslines of “Goodnight Moon,” Haldeman’s pedal “woop”s on “Crown,” the loud, clattering percussion on “Swing.” Even at its most polished, the production never veers into clean sheen. Instead, even the softest moments are underpinned by something jagged. The rattle you hear on “No Sudden Changes” isn’t some delicate studio prop but a splintered wooden baby rattle handmade for Weinrobe’s daughter, shaken hard enough to cut through the mix (“If you listen for a rattle, it’s really loud. It’s really quite jarring”). The harmonies are rough by design: Marten credits Graham’s voice—bright, unique, and hard—for adding the kind of sharpness she could never get from doubling her own vocals.
Rhythm itself also serves as a propulsive force, foregrounded in a way none of Marten’s prior records had dared. “All of this album, I feel, has an emphasis on rhythm, which is something that I’ve always wanted to do,” she says. “But the songs couldn’t really go there before—because it was being shadowed, or I’d gotten lost.” Those, however, were “singer-songwriter” songs, the label Dog Eared was intended to subvert. So now, on this record, Marten is free to let her voice be just one instrument in a larger whole, threading softly luminous melodies through a band that keeps tugging at the edges of what her songs can hold. “I wanted to make sure that nobody was softly playing,” she adds. “I just wanted something… proper, as we would say in Yorkshire. Proper, like just… girthy and meaty.”
But while the (oddly innuendo-ridden) way Marten describes the record’s sound might feel at odds with her previous work, that doesn’t mean Dog Eared itself reads as a total shift from what came before. It wasn’t really intended to be, after all. “It’s not really even a departure,” she says. “We’ve—Oh, God, I’m trying to think of a driving metaphor. We’ve not turned hard left, we’ve not done a U-turn…” At this point, she’s nearly mumbling to herself, deep in car-metaphor subspace. It’s only when I offer up “changed lanes” that she emerges from those murky depths, enthusiastic and bright. “Yes! We’ve changed lanes. That’s much better than what I was going to say. I was gonna say we’ve gone on the hard shoulder, which is basically just stopping, and that’s not it at all.”
Those balancing acts (between past and present, control and letting go, asking and answering, vulnerability and performance, light and dark, self and others) are what give Dog Eared its depth. It’s Marten’s most collaborative album yet, and somehow also her most personal. Not because it tells you who she is, but because it finally sounds like she’s stopped trying to.
FOR ALL THE CARE Marten poured into Dog Eared, she seems keenly aware of the noise that surrounds it, the machine it’s being fed into. She has no illusions about how the record might be heard, or how little control she has once it leaves her hands. “Well, the more you make, the more of a target you can be,” she says. “As time goes on, it becomes harder and harder not to let your negative thought processes—or other people’s—guide your creative work. People are ultimately expecting either the same thing that you did on the very first day you went into the studio, or they’re still expecting you to do something different.”
She learned that the hard way, far too young. At the time, she didn’t think much of it—largely because she didn’t know what to think of any of it. “I didn’t really have any expectations,” she recalls. “I was quite wobbly. I didn’t think it would really stick, I didn’t think people would still be there listening.” She pauses, thoughtful, before switching to present tense, her words now chosen carefully, stacked slowly atop one another as if to make sure the structure doesn’t fall. “It just feels like… If I can continue to make music for a very long time and have the right people listening, then… I’m happy.”
But even that modest hope—that the songs themselves might speak loudest—feels like a gamble in a landscape this cacophonous. A few days after performing a stripped-down acoustic set, she caught sight of a comment left beneath a clip: “Beige.” She repeats the word again when detailing the story to me, mock-affronted: “Beige!” Worst of all: “And he got three thumbs up. Which means that four people agreed.” (It is refreshing, truly, to see an artist skip the act of “Oh, I never read YouTube comments.” Celebrities or no, they’re only human, right? Of course they’re going to read at least some of them.)
It’s this tension between the quiet, patient world she’s built on Dog Eared and the churn of the world it’s entering that seems to trouble her most. The same vacuousness she sings about still creeps in at the edges. Dog Eared is Billie Marten letting go of the stereotype that had defined her up till now, taking control of her own narrative in the process—but only so much as anyone, these days, can control any narrative. Which is to say, hardly at all.
Case in point: Google her this past week, and you’ll find multiple interviews conducted, presumably, about her new album, but all boasting narratives that have less to do with the record in question than Marten’s admittedly eye-catching declarations about the industry dissatisfaction that fueled it. There’s “Billie Marten on surviving the ‘cesspit whirlpool of pop music,’” there’s “Billie Marten: ‘Mostly, artists are in financial ruin no matter how successful they appear to be,” there’s “Billie Marten Raises Concern Over Artist Struggles in Streaming Era: ‘It’s Capitalist Mentality and We’re All Paying Taylor Swift.” These are real critiques, and important ones deeply worthy of publication; these are conversations we desperately need to have. But, at the same time, they’re also not the album. And that, in a way, is her whole point: How do you make something meaningful when you already know how it’s going to be swallowed up in our collective search for social and literal capital, for profit and clicks and clout?
“It’s the hardest age we’ve ever had to make something in,” Marten tells me at the top of our conversation, a genuine sadness making its way into her tone. “I think it is—honestly, very sadly—the least creative time we’ve ever lived in. As each day comes around, it gets actively more and more difficult to make something. The hardship starts even before you’ve made the thing. It’s just: ‘Who are you? What do you represent? Where are you from? How much money do you make? Who are your parents? What’s your sexuality?” Her voice picks up speed with each item on the list, the questionnaire so rote at this point that she sounds less frustrated than simply tired.
I would be lying if I said some inkling of guilt didn’t trickle in as she spoke; as a music critic myself (and a chronically online one at that), it would be tremendously hypocritical to act like I have any moral high ground here. Clicks are clicks. Readers are naturally more likely to flock to bombshells and controversy than they are in-depth discussions of albums, and publications are naturally going to try to take advantage of that. Every one of us uses our limited time alive trying to accrue the most value and up our social capital, just so we have more to spend in our next attempts to turn a “profit.” We post concerts on social media to prove we were there, set Instagram stories to songs to showcase our taste, and listen to artists we think make us cooler than we are.
No one, not even artists like Billie Marten, are immune to this. At the time of our Zoom call, she had just come back from this year’s Glastonbury Festival, and admits something about it left her reeling. “Being around that mix of, like, maximum celebrity culture plus the average man in a field, and just thinking about it today—it’s just really kind of… Gross. It was gross. I found myself getting excited about who was watching the same gig I was watching, and what it meant, and— Just, the influx of information we were all getting and the way we were trying to make it mean something whilst trying to just watch a show was pretty horrible.”
It’s all a little depressing. To call back to a certain rogue Jumbotron operator: These days, it feels a little like—even at a concert, even with the artist in front of us and the music alive and real and fleeting—the lens, for some reason, is focused on the audience instead. The artist, then, is relegated to a hollow cardboard cut-out, as two-dimensional as the pictures snapped of them; the live music faded into irritable background noise, replaced by the in-studio version (thank you, Instagram music) when posted to someone’s stories. Simulacras of simulacras all the way down.
This is a grim enough fate from the perspective of a listener or a critic, but it’s hard to even fathom where it leaves the artists themselves: Why make music at all when, in the end, it’ll get less attention than what you say in interviews about it, what you wear when you perform it, what you do to market it? How do you retain the meaning of a song when you know the Jumbotron at the concert might not even bother showing you when you sing it, when the audience will be too focused on their own faces to hear the words? What do you do when you’ve spent nearly all of your formative years—in Marten’s words—“surrounded by this vacuousness that slowly rips away at [you]”?
And yet, for all her cynicism, she keeps showing up—to the songs, to the studio, to the stage. The recording of Dog Eared wasn’t a cure so much as a reminder: that it’s still possible to make something real, even in a culture that seems determined to turn it into noise. For six days in Brooklyn, she and her band left their phones outside, sat in a room together, and made music without second-guessing what it would mean once it left their hands. That night at Pier 17, she endured the Jumbotron’s hijinks with good humor, then finished “Vanilla Baby” to a newly silent crowd. You can’t control the audience’s reaction, the media’s headlines, the industry’s whims. All you can do, really, is let go of everything but that which you yourself can control, as small as it might be. Even if the lens insists on staying on the audience, Marten will keep her eyes fixed on the song.
Casey Epstein-Gross is an Assistant Music Editor at Paste. Her work can be read in Observer, Jezebel, and elsewhere. She is based in New York and can typically be found subjecting innocent bystanders to rambling, long-winded monologues about television and film, music, politics, and any number of opinions on bizarrely irrelevant topics. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].
