LAUREN MAYBERRY
Lauren Mayberry still remembers what it felt like to sit alone in her teenage bedroom, headphones on, listening to artists like Tori Amos and Fiona Apple as if it was some kind of private spiritual practice. At 15, she was already playing in bands, and although there was plenty of music she and her male bandmates could agree on, she knew from experience that they would just tease her if she tried to get them into Tori or Fiona or PJ Harvey or Kathleen Hanna. She says, “It was a lot of confessional female singer-songwriters, and I thought of them like, ‘These are my friends who live in my headphones.’”
Ahead of last year’s 10th anniversary of Chvrches’ groundbreaking debut album, The Bones of What You Believe, Mayberry felt reflective in a way she hadn’t anticipated. Looking back at all of the incredible moments of personal evolution and musical growth during these years with the band, she realized that she still had a creative wall she needed to push through. Much like the artists who only lived in her headphones as a teenager, there was a part of her own artistry she had locked away. She says, “There’s things I’ve never been comfortable performing or sharing with a band of men, for various reasons, even if they’re very nice men.” With her new solo work, Mayberry has been able to write about sexuality and empowerment from a profoundly personal perspective, for the very first time.
As she got into the mindset of finally making something truly her own, Mayberry’s mood board culled a wide array of inspiration, including “things like Cabaret and Chicago that feel very physical,” but she says, “they’re still quite dark, and there’s a subversiveness to that.” She reconnected with the influence of 90s British girl groups like All Saints and Sugababes, as well as artists she fell for during her university days such as Fiona and Jenny Lewis and Sleater-Kinney. “Those are artists I love, who are very formative to how I think about music and approach music,” Mayberry says, “but I’ve never been in a band that referenced any of them cause it just wasn’t that kind of universe.”
Mayberry says she felt a bit apprehensive at the beginning of the process, worried she might not have enough material, but a well-timed pep talk from her friend Matthew Koma (her main collaborator on the album) reminded her that she had a whole reserve of lyrics and ideas she’d been collecting for years. Once she got into the studio, whether with Koma or songwriter Tobias Jesso, Jr. (who co-wrote the unadorned piano ballad “Are You Awake?”), or producers Ethan Gruska and Greg Kurstin, the ideas were abundant.
At their first session together, Mayberry and Koma came up with a handful of songs, including the defiant, leftfield pop masterpiece “Shame,” co-written with Koma and Caroline Pennell – a song reminiscent of Love. Angel. Music. Baby.-era Gwen Stefani that Mayberry says helped to concretize her vision for the new era, and how it would allow her to explore themes and styles that hadn’t felt quite right for Chvrches. “I had the idea for a while of a song that had the tagline of “what a shame”, but in a sarcastic way,” Mayberry says. “And the word “shame” having a double meaning – the shame you feel and internalize, but what a shame you feel like that and can’t change it.”
New single “Change Shapes” expands upon the themes of how traditional gender roles have impacted her life and career. “I feel like I perform to the general public but also play a character inside the internal experience, because there is so much negotiation involved in my existence there,” says Mayberry. “How do I keep people happy enough that they’ll let me do the creative work that I want to? I feel quite fake and hypocritical sometimes because so much of the narrative around the band is “feminist”, but my experience inside of it hasn’t been a lot of the time. I feel like I did all this work to make things function but when you DO adapt yourself in that way, it’s seen as manipulative, in order to get what you want.”
Mayberry’s remarkable debut shows – during US and European solo tours last fall – gave her a chance to experiment with different ways to occupy the stage, to shift preconceived notions in the audience and in herself. “So much of the band era has been people talking about my gender and my body, and that can feel really dissociative, because I’m not really involved in that conversation,” she explains. “And so I would try to forget that I have a body. But when I think about artists I love like Kate Bush, or PJ Harvey or Gwen Stefani, their body was such an important part of the performance and the work that you can look up a picture of them at any point in their career and know exactly what record it’s from. When I was thinking about my solo shows, I knew I wanted to find a better way to connect with that, because I can’t not have a body. Whether it’s through subtle choreography or dressing however I want to dress – whether it’s hyper feminine or androgynous – I can do it and not be worried about what people are gonna say.”
In discovering who she is as a solo artist, Mayberry has accessed a new world of inspiration, and a deep well of creativity she’s had within her all along. “This whole process has been quite liberating,” she says. “I feel much more connected to my whole self. It’s very exciting.”
