On the Rise
Lilla Vargen

Singer/songwriter Lilla Vargen grew up in the countryside of Northern Ireland, close to the town of Ballymena, with her parents and siblings. Music has been a part of her life for as long as she can remember - whether that be her grandfather's impressive collection of tin whistles, the rest of her family’s surprisingly melodic vocal abilities or her older siblings blasting out everything from The Strokes to Spice Girls while Vargen was still a child in ‘90s.

“Being the youngest, I did have my own opinions and my own identity, but I just kind of stole bits from everybody,” she says describing her own music taste growing up. While the pop and rock heroes of her brothers and sisters certainly struck a chord she found that, “sometimes the oldies are the best” spending a lot of her youth with the timeless classics of Roy Orbison, Dusty Springfield, Carole King, Bob Dylan and The Beatles. And that timeless nature has carried through to the music she’s making today.

Having only spent a year or so having piano lessons, Vargen jokes she was far too young to concentrate properly. She vividly remembers getting home one day, throwing her satchel down and announcing to her parents she was not going back. This was obviously not where her journey ended: luckily her grandmother's old piano took up residence in the family home. “I’d hear a song on the radio and I’d run into the house and I’d have to play it then and there," she tells me. "As much as I am annoyed with myself for not sticking to my lessons, sometimes learning so much about something can hold you back from being creative.” She laughs about how when her friends would come over; she’d tell them: “I made a masterpiece, but it would literally just be me bashing the piano!”

Comfortable singing her heart out at home in her room, she’d stay late for choir rehearsals or just to spend time in the practice rooms on the piano. Through her experiences in choir. Vargen learnt more than just what it was like to belong and work as one multi-pronged musical body, she started to understand what it meant to listen to herself, understand her range and learn how her voice was functioning as just part of this larger entity.

“I would have never told anybody about writing songs or really loving to sing,” she explains, before revealing her first major breakthrough: “I remember one day thinking there was nobody in the girls’ toilets and I was singing away because you know there’s such a nice echo in those toilets, then to my dismay when I came out of the toilet my music teacher was standing there.”

Impressed, her teacher then pestered Vargen to enter a singing competition, which kick-started a love/hate relationship with performing live. The nervous excitement that eventually turns into relief and glee is something Vargen still experiences to this day; “it still terrifies me, but then you feel amazing when you get up there.”

As for her own material, she found inspiration in her friends at school and snowy days sitting and staring out from the window seats which offered a view of her blanketed wintery surroundings. The turning point came, as she puts it, “whenever real things happened. I think there’s a point in your life where things are normal, nothing’s going wrong, and then I must have been fourteen at the time and my dad was diagnosed with cancer and it was awful. That made me feel something I hadn’t felt before.”

It was the biggest bout of sadness and fear Vargen had ever felt and it hit her hard: “That changed me and I wrote a song about that. I’ve never realised it, but I always remember that song, because that’s the one that changed everything.” It was also the first time she felt compelled to show someone a song, opting for her brother’s ear - his positive reaction gave her the extra confidence she needed to keep going.

Vargen's writing is wrapped in themes of love and loss, but there are underlying messages of empowerment too: “I don’t want everything to be like ‘oh no, they love me anymore, so [I’m saying] you know what that’s okay, it’s time to move on.”

When she wasn’t deep in her music, Vargen found herself working at a hotel where she would often be daydreaming and singing to herself. Overhead this time by a co-worker – who happened to be in a band – he asked Vargen to record a cover of one of their songs at his friend’s place where there was a mini studio. In the process she gained another fan who encouraged her to come back and record her own music, free of charge. “It was a big kick-up the backside. I went to his house a few weeks later and we recorded seven songs in one day, all live and it was an amazing experience.”

Returning to Belfast, where she was based at the time, she played the recordings to her boyfriend at the time and was greeted with a lukewarm reception. Annoyed by his lack of encouragement - or even constructive feedback - she was surprised when he called to tell her he'd to uploaded them to Bandcamp. “I didn’t even know it was a thing and he didn’t even ask, but a few days later a guy contacted me who wanted to talk about where I wanted to take this. I thought it had to be a joke, someone taking the mick out of me, but it did work.” With blogs talking about her music and Hype Machine chart-toppers this really felt like a starting point. “It was the moment that I understand how things work and that I really could do this," she tells me.

Another breakthrough came thanks to Spotify, off the back of an eventful meeting at Dublin showcase festival Hard Working Class Heroes – which offers homegrown talent a chance to perform to industry guests, tastemakers and prospective fans – back in 2017. “It was called a 'listening session',” she explains. “He told me to bring along my guitar, so we got into this room and it’s a tiny box with speakers set up so you can plug your phone in and listen to the songs. We didn’t understand that, so I just whipped out my guitar and started playing 'Hold On' and he really liked it. He said, ‘in all of my time, that’s the first time somebody’s just sang a song just one metre away from me.’ The next day I was on New Music Friday UK, US, Sweden, France, everywhere...”

We talk about the lack of representation of Irish artists outside of the island itself which Vargen puts it down to a certain level of clique-y-ness in local areas - once you’re indoctrinated into a scene of sorts it’s hard to rise above that and find your own personal identity. “Within that, you have loads of people who are friends, loads of people who encourage each other which is great," she explains, "but I think in order to get away from that you have to distance yourself from wherever you’re from.

"Whenever people start to focus in on that it becomes more about where you’re from, what you’re writing about or who you are.”

Nevertheless, Vargen is still in love with where she grew up but knew that to gain momentum she had to think bigger. That perspective led her to London, where she’s now based. If you need proof that she hasn’t forgotten her roots, this month she’s one of a handful of talented Irish women who have come together to record a cover of The Cranberries’ “Dreams” in aid of Safe Ireland.

Her relationship with her home hasn't always been as straightforward as it is today: “Where I’m from you grow up in this culture where you’re taught to not have any mad ideas about yourself, you should do the normal thing, get the normal job and just be quiet, which is fine, but I wasn’t ready to do that yet, I needed to do this.” She admits that “it was hard to always have faith in yourself because music is not straightforward, there are days that you feel like ‘why am I doing this’ or ‘how did I write that song, I can’t write any songs today.’

"There’s so much doubting yourself all the time, I found it hard to constantly reassure myself.”

Relying on her vocals with sparse instrumentation from either an acoustic guitar or piano, Vargen’s heartfelt melancholia permeates through her songwriting. Now she’s looking for more and experimenting with creating bigger, fuller soundscapes as she leads herself through this year with tracks like her latest single “Love You Twice”. Her new music is building on the foundations she set out with on her first EP Hold On and listening to last year’s We Were Thunder, you can clearly hear the progression a year made through her melodies of “The Shore”, the intricate vocal production of “Trouble”, but moreover the soaring crashes of “Why Wait”.

“The songs and the honesty have stayed the same, which is the important stuff, but the sound has progressed in a way that it allows me to have less limitations," she tells me. "It’s a much bigger sound and it’s much more ambitious than when I first set out.”

For Vargen this cannot be clearer than when she’s performing live, a feat that may still be scary, but with bolder, more purposeful production behind her, she can feel the difference and the momentum of performing something which is massive with a band as opposed to being alone and acoustic. Proud of herself and of this growth, Vargen is ready to see how far she can expand this world and the extent to which her sound can become, to a certain degree, limitless.

She reminds me: “If you have a good song, you can make it into anything.”