FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
Part Fifty-Four: Laura Mvula
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LIKE I am doing with…
next week’s Modern Heroines subject, MARINA, it might have been prudent to wait until Laura Mvula’s new album, Pink Noise, is released before writing more. Not only do I want to build up momentum for the album and get people buying it; I also think that I have opportunity to look back and see how far Mvula has come. I think Pink Noise is shaping up to be her finest album yet. In terms of inspirations, there is a lot of the 1980s to be found – a lot of artists at the moment are experimenting and bringing the decade into their mix. I am going to drop in a couple of interviews that Mvula has conducted. Before that, here is a little information about Pink Noise:
“Pink Noise explores a side of Laura previously uncharted. As triumphant as ever, the album is a battle cry and stark reminder of the sheer talent of the critically acclaimed artist. This is Laura in a new found light - still reflecting her distinctive signature sound but showing the progression of an artist who has come into her own. Contrasting confessional lyricism with compelling and infectious synth pop, Pink Noise feels completely and uniquely Laura. Her artistic prowess knows no limits - take the neo-soul meets art pop of ‘Remedy’ for example, or the darker, pulsating ‘Conditional’ that injects bombastic funk into indietronica. She feels rejuvenated too, especially on electro pop stunners ‘Magical’ and ‘Before The Dawn’. This is Laura Mvula at her most ambitious to date, leaving no stone left unturned in this cosmic new realm.
I have always loved Laura Mvula’s music - though I think she has hit on a sound right now that suits her perfectly. So fresh, uplifting and memorable, there is a mix of emotional weight and the lightness one feels. Pink Noise’s singles have indicated that we are going to receive a triumphant and awesome album on 2nd July! Go and follow Mvula on Instagram and have a look at her official website. I think that Pink Noise is going to be among the very best of 2021. I am going to work my way up to a new interview from Mvula. Pink Noise is her third studio album. I want to look back on her previous album, 2016’s The Dreaming Room. It is a gorgeous record that exceeds her debut, Sing to the Moon (2013). After five years, there is a huge appetite for a new Laura Mvula album. I think that she is not only an incredible songwriter and artist; Mvula is inspiring and incredibly interesting. I feel she will be a huge name of the future and someone who will continue to inspire others. Pink Noise is a sonic shift away from The Dreaming Room. That said, I really love her previous album. In their review, this is what AllMusic remarked:
“The Dreaming Room is somehow more sumptuous and emotive than Sing to the Moon, Laura Mvula's impressive 2013 debut. Written and produced primarily with Troy Miller, who she met while working on the soundtrack for 12 Years a Slave, it's another categorically evasive set that updates and amalgamates traditional forms of blues, jazz, R&B, and orchestral pop. For all its unearthly charm, it nurtures the soul. Mvula's rich voice prances across songs of perseverance, salvation, survival, hope, and pride. Everything is transmitted with a contagious form of optimism, even in darker moments like "People," where Mvula mourns "They strip us down and rape our minds, our skin was a terrible thing to live in," then marvels "How glorious, this light in us," her words accentuated with a congruent verse from Wretch 32. The only other guest appearance comes from Nile Rodgers, whose golden and unmistakable rhythm guitar is threaded throughout "Overcome," one of the many highlights of this powerful album”.
I was captivated when The Dreaming Room came out. Phenomenal Woman and Overcome are two of the strongest cuts of Mvula’s career. I have mentioned Phenomenal Woman when I recently reviewed Laura Mvula. It is a sensational song. Before collating some interviews, I want to quote from The Guardian’s review of The Dreaming Room:
“The Dreaming Room is a rich stew. It’s vivid, cramming a lot of information into barely half an hour of music. Even the most commercial tracks are pretty odd – as evidenced by the off-kilter funk and yelped, incomprehensible chorus of the single Phenomenal Woman, Mvula’s interpretation of her grandma’s instruction to “write a song I can lift me spirits, write a song I can jig me foot” – and even the quiet moments prickle with intensity: the ostensibly straightforward piano-and-vocal section in Show Me, recorded in such a way that Mvula appears to be singing directly into your ear, the tranquil piano chords disrupted by the noise of her feet on the pedals. Lyrically, it’s preoccupied with relationship woe and black empowerment. The artist who declined to attend the Brits in protest at its woeful lack of black nominees is present on People – “our skin was a terrible thing to live in” – while there’s also a lot of raw, often harrowing stuff about Mvula’s divorce, the tracks on which she appears to come to terms with the collapse of her marriage outnumbered by those where she seems inconsolable: “I miss the wonder of a future with somebody,” she sings on Show Me’s hymn-like opening, “Oh God, where are you?”
It should be much harder work than it is. But like Joanna Newsom, Mvula pulls the listener along with her through the most serpentine songs: however winding their routes, the melodies are almost always beautiful; however much the musical scenery shifts, it is always striking. You do wonder what its commercial fate will be. Despite the discrepancy between its advance publicity and its contents, Sing to the Moon went gold, but there are moments here strange enough to make Sing to the Moon sound like the work of the new Adele by comparison. Or perhaps audiences will be seduced by The Dreaming Room’s invention and originality, which would be entirely fitting”.
Both of Mvula’s albums have been nominated for Mercury Prizes. I am not sure whether Pink Noise will be released in time to receive a nod this year – perhaps it will be in the shortlist next year. It shows that she is a consistent and hugely impressive artist! I want to bring in a couple of interviews, as it is interesting learning more about Mvula. Things have changed quite a lot since The Dreaming Room was released. There is an interesting 2016 interview from The Guardian that caught my eye. Before quoting a section about The Dreaming Room, there was one regarding her upbringing and her parents that was very interesting:
“I grew up in a very Christian household,” she begins. “The family unit was… tight. Our socialisation, mine and my siblings, was centred on family, church life, school.” It was “a house of love. But if I was to be critical, I would say that there was a lot of growing-up I wasn’t exposed to.” When she went to sixth form college in Solihull, aged 16, “it was the first time I took a bus”. She says that she enrolled at the Conservatoire, aged 18, with the chief intent of finding a musician to marry.
“It was. I wanted a saxophonist.” Mvula shrugs: she was a child of the 90s, sax was cool. Her point, anyway, is that “I was sheltered. Massively sheltered.”
At the Conservatoire she met someone right away. “Themba. Just a stunning human being to look at. He had such presence.” She spotted him while they were singing in the same choir. “I literally said to myself, ‘Yes, thanks!’ Even without speaking to him.” They became friends, then a couple. “We had a lot in common. Fathers in the church. Two siblings. I felt a very instant connection. I wanted to spend all of my time with him – I did spend all of my time with him. Not a lot of studying in those years.”
They got married after graduation. Everyone approved the match. “Particularly in church, we were put on a pedestal. I could think to myself: ‘We are people who lots of people admire and now we get to build our own way of life.’” Themba encouraged Mvula’s musical ambitions, forming choir groups and jazz ensembles with her. It was Themba who suggested she write music of her own. The demos that resulted from this – Mvula working on a laptop, equipped with not much more than a mic, a keyboard and a piece of composition software – caught the ear of a producer, Steve Brown, and his manager, Kwame Kwaten. Both would become key figures in Mvula’s career to come.
PHOTO CREDIT: Julian Broad/The Observer
Mvula believes that she’s written “a beast of an album in The Dreaming Room. I never thought I’d be able to. I couldn’t be left in a room on my own. So how could I write?” She only got around this obstacle, she says, because for weeks on end Dionne and Mariama “found ways to be in the room with me, but not in the room”. They’ll have to do something similar again, soon, when Mvula takes to the road for a run of gigs. She feels guilty about this (“These are people who have lives of their own”), but at the same time she doesn’t feel ready to give up her career. Music has been “a way to grieve about my marriage, and make sense of what it means that my life has changed”.
With her computer open on the table, it suddenly occurs to Mvula that she can show me some of the curious processes that went into composing The Dreaming Room. While writing, she explains, she often recorded herself using her laptop’s camera – in case she should hit on a “moment in time thing” and later want to recapture it. Many of the videos Mvula shot are hours and hours long. We scroll through them. They tend to show her hunched over a keyboard in casual clothes or pyjamas. One video has her sitting in a desk chair, singing phrases into a microphone, when suddenly she whips off her headphones and disappears from view”.
The third album from Mvula has come after a period of transition and struggle. Rather than there being personal trauma and romantic strife, the songwriter has changed label. I do not know what her experiences were like with her old label. It seems like she is in a better place now. Mvula discussed this with the Evening Standard this year:
“There are a few lyrics on Laura Mvula’s forthcoming third album that will make the listener think she’s been through a nasty break-up. Take this, on Conditional: “I don’t cry no tears for you/I needed love unconditional.” Or this, from the comeback single, Safe Passage: “Never imagined I would ever be free from your story/Staring in the face of it, I finally see I’m everything I need.”
And they’d be right, but this isn’t necessarily romantic trauma. At the start of 2017, the Birmingham musician’s record label, Sony, told her they were dispensing with her services via a brief email. Both of her albums to date had received wide acclaim and prestigious Mercury Prize nominations, and the first, Sing to the Moon, had been a gold seller. Prince had messaged her to ask to be on a track on the second, The Dreaming Room, which he loved, but she had to turn him down because Nile Rodgers was already on it. Talk about a rock and a hard place. So this bad news came as no small surprise.
“I thought I was an important artist. I just remember feeling I’d been unfairly treated, not necessarily with the decision itself but with the manner in which it had been dealt with, which I thought was rude and careless,” she says. “I’d apologised so much for who I was right from the beginning. I’d tried to be the most palatable version of Laura that I could be, and played this game with real class and elegance, so to be let go in that way, I just felt, ‘Hold on a second!’ The least I could have had was a real conversation.”
She discovered the term because she wanted to be able to describe the sounds she was going for, which can be better summarised for the layperson by saying simply, “really really Eighties”. The processed boom of the drums opening Safe Passage reminded me of the beginning of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love, though Mvula says she was going more for Phil Collins’ In the Air Tonight. Weighty analogue synthesizers dominate the songs. The rolling bassline and artificial horn blasts of the brilliant Got Me have strong echoes of When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going by Billy Ocean, no less. The ballad What Matters would fit nicely on the end credits of a John Hughes film and features an unrecognisably smooth contribution from rocker Simon Neil of Biffy Clyro”.
I will leave things in a bit. Just before then, there is a song from Pink Noise that will be highlighted by many reviewers. It is the single, Safe Passage. I reviewed the most-recent single, Got Me. Safe Passage was the first single to come from Pink Noise. This NME article provided us words from Mvula regarding the story behind the song:
“Describing the new track, Mvula said: “‘Safe Passage’ is a poem about the vehicle that takes us all from the space where we feel like we’re drowning, and we’re trapped to the promised land, which actually exists.
“It’s not a dream, it’s not a fictional place. We can go there. We can go there like right now. We just have to tap into ourselves to our love relationships. ‘Safe Passage’ evokes that feeling in me. It reminds me of a time when feeling positive emotions was much simpler, much less complicated.”
Mvula added: “Writing the song was a struggle because I had to really dig for it. But as it revealed itself to me, it struck me down like lightning on the Damascus Road, and I was grateful for it. I was so scared of letting myself down.
“And I was so exhausted of caring only about pleasing people and things around me. And I wanted and needed release from that. That’s what ‘Safe Passage’ is”.
I will leave things there. I am a big fan of Laura Mvula, so I am really looking forward to seeing what Pink Noise offers up. From the singles so far, it sounds like another triumphant release! I feel Mvula is one of the best and most inspiring songwriters in the world. Let’s hope that she has many more albums in her. In Laura Mvula, the world is lucky enough to have such…
AN incredible talent.