As she kicks off her UK and European tour, Lauren Mayberry has spoken to NME about her decision to go solo, the “freedom” to write from a purely female perspective away from Chvrches, and what to expect from her debut album.
First announcing details of her “fun, freaky, sad, weird, joyful” solo material back in July before revealing launch single ‘Are You Awake?‘, Mayberry has been roadtesting her new songs on tour in the US, before kicking off the UK and European leg in her native Glasgow last night.
Speaking about her current mood having got the project off the ground, Mayberry said described it as “the usual new music anxiety multiplied by, ‘What if nobody wants this or if everyone thinks you’re a fucking idiot for wanting to do it’ anxiety”.
“There’s always nervousness,” she told NME. “For any frontperson in a band, but especially a woman, as soon as you say the words ‘solo material’ people get very upset with you. I feel like every second sentence is, ‘I’m not breaking up the band, guys, however…’
“But we’re lucky enough to have fans that care so much that they don’t want it to break up. I feel grateful, but I’m trying to be reassuring to them – ‘Just give us a couple more years guys, it’s going to be fine’.”
Explaining how she compartmentalised the material she was writing as separate to Chvrches, Mayberry said it “it was easy, because it was born out of things that I couldn’t or wouldn’t write in the band”.
“The worse writing sessions were when I went in with someone who didn’t really understand what I was talking about and we would just write a sort of shit Chvrches song,” she said. “I was like, ‘This is a nice afternoon, but what’s the point in this?’ There’s already a universe where I can make that and I enjoy it. I don’t see why I would want to make the Tesco own brand version of that. These are musical and lyrical things that I don’t get to do in the band or don’t feel comfortable doing in the band.”
She continued: “There would be lyrics or concepts that I had come up with over the last couple of years and then thought that I couldn’t do in a Chvrches song. These are things that I just need to say from my point of view. Obviously I’m the narrator in Chvrches, but you’re still speaking on behalf of a group.”
With experience that’s often “very different” to that of her bandmates Iain Cook and Martin Doherty, Mayberry explained that she would often be left feeling that the things she wanted to write about from a female perspective were unlikely to “resonate with them”.
“There are a lot of specific things about the female experience that won’t apply to Iain and Martin,” she told NME. “Obviously they have been very supportive of some of that making its way into Chvrches’ music, but sometimes I don’t want to sing about certain things or perform in a certain way when I’m on stage with men – if that doesn’t sound terrible. They’re the nicest men, but sometimes it’s not a conversation that I’m comfortable having fully in that context.”
Explaining her inspiration across her upcoming debut solo album, the singer revealed how she was looking to make sense of the “isolating” experience of being a woman in a male-dominated music industry.
“I was 23 when Chvrches started, and from minute one it felt like all anyone wanted to talk about was my gender,” she said. “A lot of the narrative was around what I looked like, what the guys didn’t look like and how that fit into the context. It felt odd, and it gives you quite a strange psychological separation from your physical self.
“Everyone was having this conversation about me, at me, and I wasn’t really involved in it. If you spend most of your formative years in those environments, how do you psychologically stitch that back together to have a more connected experience with yourself, your life and your writing?”
While Mayberry “very much enjoyed being part of that touring circus”, she said she had always imagined what that world would have been like if genders were “code-switched”.
“Since I was 15, I’ve been in bands with boys and men,” she said. “That’s been wonderful most of the time, but it would be quite weird if a male musician was in an environment where they were only surrounded by women all of the time. So much of the time, people talk about Chvrches and they talk about feminism, but I was still the only one in most of those rooms in most of those experiences.”
She added: “To me, it was about trying to zoom in on the things that I wouldn’t if I wasn’t standing next to two guys in a band. That was the brief to myself.”
Beyond the lyrics, Mayberry’s newfound “freedom” has always inspired the look, aesthetic and live show of her solo outing to be “more theatrical”.
“Especially on the last Chvrches album [‘Screen Violence‘], we went into that more with the aesthetic and the live shows,” she said. “Even then, it was trying to fit it into a pre-existing format. I used to find the performance stuff so uncomfortable and unpleasant because I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing. I had been a drummer and keyboard player and never a singer, then all of a sudden I was in this position where I was 23 and being looked at and told I wasn’t very good at it.
“I wasn’t very good at it initially, but the thing that helped me find comfort was leaning into the more theatrical and silly things so it is completely removed from your normal self in some ways. Now when I think about the aesthetic, a lot of stuff on the moodboard is cabaret, Fiona Apple or PJ Harvey. I love that PJ Harvey always uses her physical self so much as part of the art.
“For me, it feels easier to pull together themes, concepts and narratives because that’s what’s driving the conversation more in this space.”
Mayberry said that she’d felt encouraged by the crowd’s reaction to the new material – as well as the special cover she delivers for each city – and that ‘Are You Awake?’ was not necessarily representative of the other “bangers” she had in her arsenal.
“I wrote that one on a rainy day in Los Angeles while thinking to myself, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing here – this is a terrible idea. You’ve missed everything in everyone’s lives because you’ve moved away to make this thing and maybe that’s dumb. Everyone else has made the right decisions and you’ve chosen the wrong things to focus on. You’re an idiot’,” she recalled. “Then I got a song out of it!”
Mayberry went on: “When we talked about what songs to release first, my impulse was ‘Let’s get the fucking bangers going!’ Then when we thought about it, it seemed like something that was so not in the Chvrches universe would be the best thing to start with to cleanse the pallet and scorch the earth.
“It was interesting for me to hear my voice in that context when it is so up-front and – I hate the word ‘vulnerable’ – but vulnerable. It’s not hidden behind any production; there’s just a handful of elements. To me, that feels terrifying. I guess that’s why it should go first, but it’s not going to be an album of piano ballads.”
Fans have had an early taster of the upcoming album at Mayberry’s US dates, which included support slots with Death Cab For Cutie and The Postal Service celebrating the 20th anniversary of their seminal albums ‘Transatlanticism’ and The Postal Service’s ‘Give Up’, respectively. “This tour offer came through and it seemed too good to be true,” she explained. “Obviously I love both those bands, both those records, and I love Jenny Lewis and Rilo Kiley. I feel like a bit of a creep because I’ve been lucky enough to be in and around the Death Cab cinematic universe for a while now.”
She admitted that it was “quite poetic” that she should launch her record on the road with The Postal Service as they were a band that “Chvrches talked about a lot right in the beginning” when they were forming. The trio are currently celebrating the 10th anniversary of their debut album ‘The Bones Of What You Believe‘ with an expanded reissue, but Mayberry said that fans shouldn’t expect any further Chvrches activity for a while.
“Everybody has things that they’re working on,” she said. “It would be weird to be in any job for 12 years and not do anything else. Four albums in a row is pretty solid, so it’s important to get new stuff into our brains. Then, as and when we come back for the fifth album, it has to be moving the conversation forward – it can’t just be a different version of the same thing.
“After 10 years and four albums, this is a good time to take a minute. Everyone go on your own adventure so when we come back we’re not just having the same musical conversations over and over.”
For now, Mayberry is set on planting her own flag with the remainder of her solo dates.
“I feel comfortable because I know how much time, care and passion I’ve put into it,” she added. “I wouldn’t ever expect people to pay money for something that’s a bit half-baked. The record is mostly baked, it’s just not here yet.”
‘The Bones of What You Believe (10th Anniversary Edition)’ is set for release on October 13 via Glassnote.
Mayberry’s remaining tour dates are below. Visit here for UK tickets and here for EU tickets.
OCTOBER
6 – Birmingham, UK, O2 Institute 3
8 – Manchester, UK, Gorilla
9 – London, UK, Scala
11 – Amsterdam, NL, Melkweg Oz
12 – Berlin, DE, Lido
13 – Munich, Strom
15 – Paris, FR, La Maroquinerie
16 – Cologne, DE, Luxor
17 – Prague, CZ, Rock Cafe
19 – Vienna, AT, Flex
21 – Zurich, CH, Bogen F
22 – Milan, IT, Magnolia
24 – Barcelona, ES, La Nau
25 – Madrid, ES, Sala Capernico