Having finished making her debut solo album Vicious Creature, Lauren Mayberry takes Adam England through the pivotal songs in her life, and how they’ve influenced both her work with CHVRCHES and her solo career.
“Finally, the album is finished, so I can officially say it's going well!” Lauren Mayberry tells me when I ask how she’s finding life as a solo artist.
Having spent over a decade as the lead vocalist of CHVRCHES, last year Mayberry shared that the trio would be going on hiatus. While the “CHVRCHES story has many more pages yet to be written,” as she said at the time, her focus is firmly on her solo career right now, and there’s plenty to look forward to.
“For a minute there, I was like, ‘I don't know how it's going’ - I was being quite hard on myself about that for a while, because CHVRCHES has a kind of blueprint that we do every album by almost, and when that wasn't happening it was quite stressful.”
“I'm glad that I took a beat to make sure the record's what I want it to be, and now it's exciting, because we have an actual timeline for when the record's going to come out, I have these shows with other people and some plans for next year, so it feels good.”
The record, Vicious Creature, is due to be released later this year and is preceded this week by “Something In The Air”
We talk a couple of days before Mayberry supports Bleachers in San Francisco. She’s known Jack Antonoff and co. since they met around a decade ago and describes them as “super kind and generous. Jack’s always been really encouraging and getting to play a show with them is the closest you get these days to playing a show with pals like you did back in the day” before adding, “but a bit shinier, I guess.”
Mayberry is supporting London Grammar on their UK and Europe tour and explains that they’ve been long-time friends too, with London Grammar and CHVRCHES releasing their debut albums around the same time and often crossing paths.
“It’s nice to have been around long enough that you can have long-term relationships with people - especially since I've never done any solo music before, it's nice to be able to share that with friends and they were really very generous to get me on that support.
Whilst Mayberry’s Nine Songs deep dive into discovering music as she grew up, she tells me that at the moment she’s enjoying London indie trio Honeyglaze, and waxes lyrical about English Teacher and how exciting it was to see them win this year’s Mercury Prize.
“I saw that it was the first time in 10 years that it wasn’t a London-based project that won,” she muses, with the last being her fellow Scots Young Fathers.
“Stuff like that, to me, is very exciting,” she explains. “I always hate it when people do interviews with CHVRCHES and they talk about ‘regional accents’ and they're like, ‘Why did you decide to use your accent?’ and all that. Well, all accents are accents … it never really occurred to me to change mine.”
Mayberry’s Nine Songs selections reveal a love of artists and songs that tell stories, and she brings her eye for detail to each song that she brought to her time as a writer for Best Fit.
Taking in a rich tapestry of artists have influenced her, both in her work with CHVRCHES and her solo material over the years, from those she discovered through her parents’ record collection to those she stumbled upon at house parties in the early 2000s.
“My Name Is Not Susan” by Whitney Houston
LAUREN MAYBERRY: When I was growing up, there was a lot of Whitney played in the house – because of The Bodyguard, maybe, she was always a big presence in the family home.
BEST FIT: I also grew up with a lot of Whitney in the house – my mum loves her!
The mums are mad for Whitney. I remember seeing the CD for I'm Your Baby Tonight, it's the one where she's sitting on the motorbike on the front, and just being mesmerized by that imagery.
With songs like this, it was all about the storytelling. As an eight-year-old, I don't know what infidelity is at this point, but I was like ‘Oh that's rude, he's called her by somebody else's name, her name is quite literally not Susan’. And the way that she delivered it, I feel like it got the emotion of what she was saying across, even though I didn't know what ‘cheating bastards’ were at that age.
I thought the story was so fantastic and dramatic, so maybe that's it. I've always been drawn to drama, and I like ‘bad girl’ Whitney as well. She's obviously amazing at the super emotional, slow jam ballads where she can really show her voice off in that way, but she's also a really good storyteller when it comes to the emotional side of it. So yes, here for the drama. Came for the song, stayed for the drama, I guess.
You said a few years ago that you wanted to be Whitney’s assistant as a child…
Yes! I think specifically I wrote down in a school notebook that I wanted to be the person who got Whitney’s shopping for her, like her groceries – I don't know why. But maybe I was like, ‘I just want her to have all the things she needs.’ So I would’ve liked to do that, and now I'm like, ‘Oh, you wanted to be a PA, essentially.’ But that’s fine, nothing wrong with that.”
As you got older, did you still have Whitney as a constant presence in your music?
I think so – because she was one of the first singers I was really obsessed with. Obviously, I know that I will never be able to sing like Whitney, because she is completely one of a kind. My voice does not work like that and I’m at peace with that. I think I've found it harder since she died to listen to her as much. Every so often, don't get me wrong, I will slap on the classics, but I think the whole story of it is actually really harrowing and sad.
On top of being one of the most phenomenal singers of all time, I just think she has that thing. Some people may slag off Whitney's acting, but I'm not here for that, because she has that indescribable thing, the thing you can't teach, you know? Like, if that woman walked into a room, you would be like, ‘Who the fuck is that?’ And then she would open her mouth and you'd be like, ‘Oh, I see.’
I watched the biopic last Christmas when it came out and it made me very depressed, but also there were so many iconic moments that exist outside of the music as well, like the imagery. I feel like I put Whitney in the category of Elton John or Prince – you see the image, you hear the song… She had me on all the levels.
“Walking on Broken Glass” by Annie Lennox
LAUREN MAYBERRY: Annie is another one I discovered at that age, and she also has the indescribable thing.
I feel like as much as people talk about Annie Lennox the writer and Annie Lennox the icon, they don't really talk about how amazing a singer Annie Lennox is. When you try and sing those songs at home, it's bad! That's probably why there are very few good covers of Annie Lennox or Eurythmics songs, because her range is actually ridiculous.
And I remember every person in the UK in the '90s had Diva on CD. It was like government-mandated, you had to have it! [laughs]. I remember always being like, ‘I want to hear the piano song, I want to hear the piano song.’ It's got to be one of the most iconic piano hooks of all time.
I always love the way that she uses her voice as an instrument within the arrangement, when she does all those wordless backing vocals and things as well as being the lead vocal. I guess it's blues; she's got good bluesy chops.
BEST FIT: With Annie Lennox, is it more the music or the lyrics that speak to you, or is it a bit of both?
I think it's both, the solo era especially. Obviously Eurythmics are untouchable. CHVRCHES would not be a band without bands like Eurythmics or Depeche Mode – we understand who the icons are and who the imitators are in this scenario!
But I feel in this song especially in Diva, the lyrics felt a lot more personal than they did with Eurythmics. Maybe it's a different lens that makes it feels like it's a more immediately personal thing? Maybe it's because you're writing for yourself, rather than writing for a band and you're more comfortable saying different things.
When I've come back to that album time and again, I feel like I hear different things in it as I progress through different stages of my own experience, she was writing a lot about womanhood in it.
When I was a kid, I didn't really think about that that much but when I listen to it now, I'm like, ‘Oh, certain songs are clearly about her having had children, or her wanting to move on from certain things in her life and get to a different place.’ And I think “The Gift” is one of the most beautiful, saddest, saddest songs out there.
There's so much banger on Diva, but it's slow and it's sad as well. She slam-dunked it; she nailed it with that.
“Losing My Religion” by R.E.M.
LAUREN MAYBERRY: Michael Stipe is one of the best lyricists in the game, in my opinion. And again, this is a record I found in my parents' collection when I was a kid.
Now when I listen to music, I listen to lyrics first, and then other things. But when I was a kid, I wasn't sitting down and being like, ‘What is the commentary that Michael Stipe is bringing to the table about religion? Is it about religion? What does this mean? What is this postmodernist blah, blah, blah?’ It was just the music and the feeling of it. And is that a mandolin?
I always love it when a song gets massive, and if you'd taken that to an A&R on paper, they would have been, ‘Absolutely not.’ I was listening to “Bitter Sweet Symphony” the other day, and there's a full minute of that song before any vocal comes in. If you said to an A&R, ‘So, we're going to do this one-minute-long intro,’ they would be screaming and crying, and they would hate it.
It just goes to show that when something works, it's not because of the formula. If R.E.M. had been, ‘Alright, there's going to be a mandolin hook and it's going to be quite heavy conceptual stuff, but it's kind of sing-alongy,’ you'd be like, ‘Where is the chorus?’
It's such an odd-structured song, but I think that's what's so great about R.E.M. If you were to ask, ‘What genre is R.E.M.? Who are R.E.M.'s peers?’ I really, really have no idea. Because I feel like they always just run their own race. I just love it.
I've never seen them live and that's a big regret of mine. Again, it’s like an iconic image. If somebody says, ‘Michael Stipe makeup’, you know exactly what they're talking about.
“Nothing Compares 2 U” by Sinéad O'Connor
LAUREN MAYBERRY: Like a lot of people, I'm sure this was the first Sinéad O'Connor song that I heard. And that then led me back to the album it’s on. Sinéad O'Connor is one of the best storytellers, one of my favourite singers.
The way she uses her voice is so different from a Whitney Houston or whoever, but there's such power and such emotion to it. I once had an argument on a tour bus about this song specifically, because some well-intentioned – we think some well-intentioned – men were saying that the Prince version of “Nothing Compares 2 U” is better. [BEST FIT makes a bemused face].
And yes, that face is what I made. Because I was like, ‘Well, I'm not disrespecting the writer, because we're very grateful for the song. Thank you, Prince. But you can't say it’s better, because it's just not. It's not at all.’
It led into an argument where they were saying if somebody hasn't written the song - whether it's a cover or they were a massive pop artist who were taking songs from writers and singing them - that makes the song worse somehow, or it makes it have less value. To me, that's just elevated music snobbery. When I'm walking down the street and I hear a song that affects me emotionally, I don't think about how involved this person was in the actual creative origin of the song.
It seems really silly to say, ‘Well, because Sinéad O'Connor decided to cover “Nothing Compares 2 U” and she didn't write it, that somehow makes that song less important to people.’ I think it's such a lesson for singers when you listen to this song, because she finds a way to connect into those lyrics and what they mean to her.
“All the flowers that you planted mama, in the backyard,” that line, when you know how she connected that personally to her experience with her mother, that's fucking heartbreaking. And that does not come across in the Prince version, in my opinion. He's written these incredible lyrics, but it doesn't get me, it doesn't shift me. I feel like Sinéad could have sung a page out of the phone book and I would have been weeping.
BEST FIT: Like with Whitney, is it a different kind of experience to listen to the song since she died?
I think so, and definitely with other songs in her catalogue as well. I think the world was really fucking cruel to Sinéad O'Connor. I think we as a society, the media, all of us, were really fucking cruel to her. And you forget how young she was. I feel like we're in a moment in time where a lot of women from 20-ish years ago, or longer, are being reappraised by society.
We're all talking about how awful it was that we let Paris Hilton be treated this way, or Britney be treated this way. But we're still doing it. I'm not comparing Jojo Siwa to Britney Spears, but when I was seeing people taking the piss out of “Karma” on the internet, I was like, ‘Guys, is she not, like, 20?’ Why are we so hardcore shitting on a 20-year-old? Being a bit cringe is not a crime.
When I look at things like that, or when you look at Sinéad O'Connor or Amy Winehouse, after the fact, everyone's obsessed with female trauma. And after the fact, everyone talks about how awful it was. I'm like, ‘Well, we were all complicit in that.’
It would be pretty awesome if we could find that empathy for people whilst they're going through it – and I have to hold myself to that as well – rather than when it's a bit too late.
“Never Ever” by All Saints
LAUREN MAYBERRY: It's a real mixed bag, this list.
BEST FIT: There was that massive girl group scene in the late ‘90s with Spice Girls, All Saints – Destiny's Child in the US – you'd have been a tween at that time?
I was seven when the Spice Girls came out! [laughs] It was very important to me, and then All Saints were presented as the edgy alternative, almost, to the Spice Girls. And I tell you, the chokehold that the All Saints fashion had on me was really quite something.
I'm pretty sure I teary-eyed begged my mother to take me out to get khaki combat trousers and she was, ‘No, those are disgusting. You're not going to wear those.’ I really, really wanted to go to Tammy Girl and get a belly-cropped tank top or baby tee with the bottoms. I remember thinking, ‘Shaznay is the coolest, most beautiful person I've ever seen.’ And then when Mel sang, I was, ‘Oh, there’s no better singer than Melanie Blatt.’
When I put this song on now – I listened to my list before we did this – I thought, ‘You know what? If somebody released this now, it would still fucking hit’. It would still be good, because it's such a unique, odd song. Again, if you said to an A&R, ‘She's written a Dear John letter, but we're just going to read it and then the song's going to start and then we'll come back to that every so often.’ They'd be like, ‘Why? It’s so silly.’ But Shaznay, man, the brains behind the operation – she knew what was up!
BEST FIT: Were All Saints one of the first bands you discovered on your own as opposed to getting into them from your parents?
I think so. Everything else we've talked about so far has been from an album that I heard in the car or I’d be allowed to go down into the little room with the record player every so often. And my parents would say, ‘Okay, you can choose one album, we'll supervise you putting it on, and then we'll leave you to it.’
I was definitely absolutely mad for all the girl band/boy band stuff that was coming out in the UK at that time. 911 – I was very into them; in hindsight, I don't know if a child should have been listening to “Bodyshakin’”! I feel like there was an era of very good or very bad British boy bands and girl bands, but I was totally the right age for that.
That's why I went to see Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo this year, and seeing little girls be so fucking excited at those things makes me all teary-eyed and emotional in a way that my boyfriend who I went with does not get. He doesn't understand why I'm so moved by it. And I'm like, ‘Oh, because it's so exciting. It's so fun.’
A lot of the things that little girls like are shit on by society, by people. So to see stuff like that be so massive, so celebratory and so celebrated, I think it's a really nice thing. When I was listening to Spice Girls, Steps, All Saints and Will Young, people at school would take the absolute piss out of you. But now in hindsight, when I look at all these songs together, it is part of the DNA of how I like to write, or what I like to listen to in music. Because I was never a pop snob.
I went through 18 months of being a pop snob when I was in alternative bands when I was 19. But that's only because by that point, the boys at school who took the piss out of girl bands have grown up and they do it differently. I like Sugababes, they’re probably one of the best bands ever, so what a time we were living through. And I will not have any slander thrown towards any of these bands.
BEST FIT: I can relate – I’ve rediscovered bands like Girls Aloud, McFly and S Club Juniors as I’ve got older.
Oh man, I had to have it explained to me that S Club 7 didn’t actually meet at a hotel in Miami. I didn't think it was a documentary, but that it was a dramatized version of how they met. And then somebody at school said, ‘Listen, I've got to explain this to you. That's completely made up.’
But I like that I was just taking it. I hadn’t learned yet, about marketing and the cynical nature of the music industry.
“Get Ur Freak On” by Missy Elliott
LAUREN MAYBERRY: I remember seeing the video for this at my friend's house on TV and being absolutely flabbergasted. I felt Missy Elliot was this otherworldly being – and I suppose a lot of the imagery was so futuristic and sci-fi – and was like, ‘Where has she come from? She's landed on Earth, and she's changed music. She has taken music, and she has made it do what Missy wants it to do.’
To this day, I think that she's such a good producer. I don't know whether she ever got the credit for that necessarily, because she was working so closely with other people, but she's so singular. There is nothing that sounds like Missy, even when she did produce for other people.
She's got her personality in there. When it's her writing, her lyrics, her productions, I was like, ‘She's untouchable’. When you look at the back-to-back releases she was doing during that time, you're like, ‘Holy shit!’ That it all came out of one artist is crazy to me, and I think she's amazing.
BEST FIT: Looking back, the song was so different from what was in the charts at the time, like with the Bhangra influence. Are you a fan of rap more generally, or are you more just a Missy fan?
During that time there was Missy, and then The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill – in this moment in time, there are so many female voices in that space that are really exciting, but I do feel like they owe a certain hat to artists like Missy. There weren’t female artists talking about the things she was talking about. Even to this day, I'm like, ‘Who else is like Missy Elliot?’
I think she is amazing. I wanted to go and see the tour, but I haven't been able to. But we wish Missy happiness and health, because I know that she was having a tough time for a minute there. So yes, we shall be grateful that Missy is still here, and we can still celebrate her.
“Rid Of Me” by PJ Harvey
BEST FIT: You've covered another PJ Harvey song with Lo Moon before.
LAUREN MAYBERRY: Yes, we did “Down By the Water” – I guess I’m quite into spooky PJ apparently, because “Down By the Water” has lyrics where people were like, ‘Wait a minute, does she actually drown her kid?’
I think I first heard PJ around the time she put out Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, and apparently, she doesn’t like that album, so I feel bad that I loved it so much. But Rid of Me was the record I bought after that.
I remember putting it on and turning it up really loudly, as everybody does, because the start of the song is so quiet and because I really wanted to hear what she was saying. And then when the chorus comes in, naturally, everybody shits their pants, if you don't know that part's coming.
But I really love how much she always seems to play with characters. And again, with every era of PJ, you could see an image of it, and you would know what record she was touring. I feel like there are different ways for a performer to hold your attention and with PJ, the most arresting moments sometimes are the quietest and the strangest ones. She doesn't need to be screaming and clamouring to get your eyes on her or your ears on her. Sometimes that level of stillness is really arresting.
So yes, this is a very spooky, weird song, and I love the production of it. It feels like the production was really right for getting the point of the song across. And sometimes that's not the case.
“Date With the Night” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs
LAUREN MAYBERRY: I think this was the first Yeah Yeah Yeahs song I heard. I don't know if it was the first single off the first record, but it was definitely early. I remember being at a house party at high school, hearing this song, not knowing what it was and walking from the other room to go to the CD player to see what it was, because it was a CD player at the time.
I love when you hear vocalists - especially female - who are doing something that you've not heard before. I was like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ And I remember a lot of boys who were in bands at high school finding Karen O really disturbing. Now I feel as an adult woman, as soon as a straight man finds something that you're doing is disturbing, you're probably onto a winner creatively.
There were so many guys I know who loved Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but I feel like with where music was - what was in the magazines, what was getting played on MTV and what was getting played on the radio - there weren’t a lot of female voices in that space, and especially not female voices like this.
I think Karen O, to this day is one of the absolute GOATs in terms of performance. She can have a song like “Maps”, which is completely heartbreaking and so vulnerable, and a song like this, or like “Pin” and “Black Tongue” on the same record. I think she's a lot more diverse than people give her credit for, and she's fucking cool as fuck.
BEST FIT: Do you think Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Karen O particularly have had a big influence on your own career?
I mean, I wish I was half the performer that Karen O is! But I feel, yes, around that age, seeing people like her, Shirley Manson and Skunk Anansie, the way these women carried themselves and the way they walked through the world in their performances was so different to what we were seeing at the end of Britpop, and then that year of the Americanised NME stuff.
I remember all the stuff that was on the radio – it was the beginning of Kings of Leon – there were a lot of very good, but very blokey bands around. Somebody like Karen O just cut through that immediately. I went and got that record and got TV On the Radio’s. When all the boys were obsessing over The Strokes, I was obsessing over Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and TV On the Radio.
“Pitseleh” by Elliott Smith
BEST FIT: So, we’ve got “Pitseleh” by Elliott Smith – I’m not sure how you pronounce it?
LAUREN MAYBERRY: I think we’ll go with that, because he sings it really quietly, as he did like to do.
I guess I did these chronologically. When I was at university, I had a boyfriend who was a certain amount older than me and one of the few things I can thank him for is Elliott Smith, because he was a big Elliott Smith fan, and I didn't really know very much about Elliott Smith at that point.
This is on the album XO which is one of my favourite records. There a lot of people operating in the current alternative folky space who definitely, definitely love Elliott Smith. I think the way he writes lyrics and creates each song feels like a little narrative, a little world.
There's a lot of really loud, bombastic, performance stuff in my Nine Songs, but sometimes now I feel like people think singing quietly automatically means that it's more emotional or it's more vulnerable, but I think that it depends on what you're saying as well. With somebody like Sinéad or Elliott, they draw you in to listen to what they're saying. It's not the veneer of intimacy; it’s intimate because it feels like a little window into that person's internal being.
And sometimes now I sound like an old bastard. Sometimes when I'm listening to New Music Friday, I'm like, ‘Sing up, guys, I can't hear what you're saying!’. But I think that now there's a certain part of that that's like an affectation, or an affected way of presenting intimacy, if that makes sense.
When you listen to the originators of this kind of thing, then you're like, ‘Oh, right, you're singing that way because it enhances what you're saying.’ It's not just an aesthetic kind of thing.
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