{"id":268284,"date":"2024-10-04T15:12:02","date_gmt":"2024-10-04T19:12:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/?p=268284"},"modified":"2024-10-04T15:12:09","modified_gmt":"2024-10-04T19:12:09","slug":"orla-gartland-everybody-needs-a-hero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/culture\/orla-gartland-everybody-needs-a-hero-268284","title":{"rendered":"On her new album, Orla Gartland is her own hero"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The singer-songwriter talks writing nuanced pop songs, intense female friendships, and her new album “Everybody Needs A Hero”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before a listening party at Heaven Can Wait, a tiny NYC venue, Orla Gartland performs with an exuberant, almost Muppet-like energy on her acoustic guitar. With a mix of older songs and unreleased material from her new record Everybody Needs a Hero, <\/em>the 29-year-old songwriter takes the audience for a ride. Upbeat, tongue-in-cheek songs like \u201cCodependency\u201d from her debut record Woman on the Internet<\/em> rub shoulders with the devastating new track \u201cMine.\u201d Gartland herself is in mischievous form, making deliberately over-the-top \u201cbass faces\u201d<\/a> during Internet <\/em>track \u201cMadison.\u201d To Gartland\u2019s delight, the audience (a mix of industry, press and longtime Gartland fans from her mailing list) is totally on board with the unpredictable set list. The crowd vocalizes every countermelody and guitar line; they\u2019ve waited almost a decade for Gartland to come to New York, though Gartland did visit with her friend Dodie\u2019s <\/a>band in 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The stripped-back performance is something of a full-circle moment for Gartland, who started out in Dublin uploading covers and originals onto YouTube in the early 2010s. Her early music was rooted in an obsession with Laura Marling, even going to the locales mentioned in her music (like the bench on Shepherd\u2019s Bush Green<\/a>) upon her first trip to London. As time went on, Gartland found herself increasingly alienated from the waifish expectations of the \u201cfemale singer-songwriter\u201d archetype. Gartland tells Xtra <\/em>that the idea of a singer-songwriter conjures \u201csuch an indulgent sad thing \u2026 but I contain many more multitudes than that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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For the first several years of releasing music, she tried on several different styles: after the early Marling-indebted Roots EP <\/em>(currently only purchasable on Gartland\u2019s Patreon)<\/a>, there was the electro-pop of \u201cLonely People\u201d and the nu-disco of \u201cI Go Crazy.\u201d Exploring different genres ultimately helped her define her sound: \u201cI think knowing what you don\u2019t want is sometimes just as helpful as knowing what you do want. Because if you knew what you did want, everyone would just make one album and then give up.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It wasn\u2019t until her debut proper, 2021\u2019s Woman on the Internet<\/em> when she settled on something to match her boisterous personality: distorted guitars, dry drums and bright vocal melodies. That album depicts a search for identity; she\u2019s yearning to swap bodies with an influencer<\/a>, trying not to turn into her mother<\/a> and, most absurdly, wishing to become someone\u2019s houseplant<\/a>. On her follow-up, Everybody Needs a Hero<\/em>, <\/em>she fully takes the reins, producing the album with longtime collaborators Peter Miles and Tom Stafford (and an assist on one song from Ellie Goulding\u2019s early producer, Starsmith). Whether she\u2019s fretting about guilt on the feisty \u201cBackseat Driver\u201d or ditching a toxic relationship on the Feist-y \u201cSound of Letting Go,\u201d Gartland is now letting us into her brain instead of trying to escape it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Between her first two albums, two major events happened: one, a needle drop on Netflix\u2019s queer hit Heartstopper<\/em><\/a>, and two, a maximalist, almost prog-rock side project with Dodie, Gartland\u2019s creative director Greta Isaac, and Martin Luke Brown called FIZZ. For the first season of Heartstopper, <\/em>writer and show creator Alice Oseman penned the closing scene of Episode 2 with Gartland\u2019s song \u201cWhy Am I Like This?\u201d in mind when the character Nick types the question <\/a>\u201cam I gay?\u201d into the search bar. It was a perfectly appropriate breakthrough moment for Gartland, who, like the character, is bisexual. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for FIZZ, the quartet spent two weeks at rural residential studio Middle Farm, throwing every single idea they had at the wall with Middle Farm owner Miles at the helm. The result was The<\/em> Secret To Life, <\/em>a maximalist homage to \u201960s and \u201970s psychedelic rock. Gartland reflects fondly on that experience, particularly the relief at a project \u201cthat wasn\u2019t this heavy diary entry, and just goofy for the fun of it.\u201d Gartland would later return to Middle Farm for Everybody Needs a Hero, <\/em>with Miles on co-production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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