Lighthouses, Burnout, and Gratitude: In Conversation with Orla Gartland
My first encounter with the music of Orla Gartland was roughly two years ago now, when I was in my second or third year of college. I was failing about 75% of my classes, constantly pulling several unproductive all-nighters while hyped up on Red Bull, and impulsively giving myself less-than-sanitary stick-and-poke tattoos on my dorm room floor. Needless to say, I was not doing great; but in my better moments, I’d play Orla’s “Why Am I Like This” on loop on YouTube when alone in my dorm, shut my windows as tight as they would go for soundproofing, and sing along.
Her soft, smooth vocals and skillfully mellow guitar pickings combined with her thoughtful lyricism resulted in one of the songs that defined that period of my life - one of those songs that you listen to, and are instantly transported back to a time when you were younger, and probably dumber, but filled with nostalgia. Back then, I would never have predicted that I’d be virtually interviewing the same artist I listened to for hours on end. I’m taking it as a sign from the universe that I’m on the right track.
Besides Why Am I Like This, the Dublin-born singer-songwriter has released several EPs, including Roots, Lonely People, and Freckle Season. Her YouTube channel has over 21 million views. I still listen to Orla Gartland’s music often, and with her debut LP Woman On The Internet coming out on August 20th, I’ll soon have much more to listen to.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Your debut album Woman On The Internet is set to come out in about a week. Do you ever feel nervous about releasing your music and how are you feeling now while waiting for this album to be released?
[ORLA:] Yeah, definitely nervous. I think it’s just vulnerable. I mean, it’s vulnerable to make music and then invite other people in to help you finish it but putting something out there, especially the first big body of work, does have a different feeling to it. I’ve done lots of EPs over the last couple of years and they’ve been a good little arena for me to experiment and grow into myself and figure it out a bit more. Definitely feels a little bit different, but also I’ve lived with this music for so long. I delivered all the music in January. I’ve lived with it and I know how I feel about all the songs. Once you put it out it’s everyone else’s to love or hate, or listen to once or listen to a hundred times, or not understand or really understand. That can be a bit daunting if you think too much about it but I try not to.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Could you tell us a little bit about what the title of your album Woman on the Internet means to you and why you chose it?
[ORLA:] It’s a line in two of the songs. One of the songs is called “Pretending” and the other is called “More Like You”. They were written a few months apart and I didn’t realize until I was at the studio doing all the vocals at the end that it was in both songs. It’s more fun to me as a writer to write a lot of songs and then see the threads between them after, rather than plan it in advance, because it’s a little more telling of where you're actually at when you just do a load of writing and then go back and go, oh it’s interesting that you wrote about identity here, or a breakup here, or whatever. So that was kind of an accident. And then when it came to thinking of the album name, I had a couple of options that were a little bit more boring, but I liked that Woman On The Internet was a bit of a double-take, kind of sticky. She’s a character, really. It sounds like it’s about me which is also fine, but really I think the woman on the internet is a sort of Wizard of Oz-type character, a faceless person that you turn to when you need something. Like a fairy godmother, but a bad one.
[UNPUBLISHED:] If you had to describe this album in only three words, what would they be?
[ORLA:] Quite cliche, but probably “honest.” Maybe “raucous.” There are a couple of big band-y moments that feel like that. What’s a good contrasting one to that? Maybe “aware?” I think lyrically, it’s quite self-aware. Maybe too much so.
[UNPUBLISHED:] I’m sure you’ve heard this question a lot already, but how has the pandemic affected your creative process, and has it affected what you write about?
[ORLA:] Last year it gave me a lot more time than I thought I was going to have to hyper-focus on the songs, which I really like doing. I love spending a whole day on one verse. I’m not really a writer that writes tons and tons and tons, I write a small amount but I spend a really long time on each one, so I liked the attention to detail that the time of last year gave me. It was definitely a good thing, but it made writing songs feel a bit weird because there wasn’t a lot of life happening to write about. A lot of the songs leaned heavily on imagination and pre-pandemic life. That was important to me - I really didn’t want to write a “lockdown album”. I think that’s really lame. It’s inevitable, it’s been at the front of people’s minds, but I just don’t think that lockdown songs are going to age very well. I had to push myself to remember what it felt like to be at a party or a specific situation with a friend I haven’t actually seen in months. It required a little bit of filling in the blanks to make it work.
[UNPUBLISHED:]Do you find that certain feelings or experiences are easier to write about than others?
[ORLA:] I like writing about sad things but putting them in not-sad songs. I like the juxtaposition of a heavy topic with quite a fun musical package. Less so on this album, but more as a writer overall, I’ve realized the things that I find most sad are not the big dramatic moments of life, but more the still kinds of things. It inspires me less to write a song about the drama of a breakup. What I find easier to write about is two years later, when you pass them in the street. To me that’s much sadder; the drifting over time, missing small details of someone. It makes you think about different feelings and how you react to them in a way you might not have if you didn’t write.
[UNPUBLISHED:] There haven’t been many shows this past year because of COVID-19. What do you miss most about performing?
[ORLA:] The UK is slowly starting to come back but it’s been slow. I’ve had one or two festivals, and it’s just so nice. Music is made to be played live. Our experience of listening to it online is such a solitary one. The idea of coming together with loads of people who like the same thing and singing all the lyrics together is so simple but it’s so beautiful to me, that collective energy that comes from being at a show. Especially when you have a headline act, you know that everyone’s there to see you, and you see the common threads between people. My audience is super diverse, but sometimes what is shared is a sense of humor, or a bunch of overthinkers, or just people who like guitars. It feels like there’s a similarity between people in the room, and I can feel that when I meet people after shows. I’m excited to hear the songs that didn’t get played in the last year come to life a bit more, and just be in rooms with people again.
[UNPUBLISHED:] If you could perform with any artist in all of history, who would you perform with, and why?
[ORLA:] Probably Joni Mitchell, but I would just want to harmonize with her. I wouldn’t want to take over, I would just love to witness her playing a couple of songs. I would want to sing, but I’d want to be a background character, add a couple of embellishments. I just think she’s so iconic.
[UNPUBLISHED:] If you weren’t a musician, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
[ORLA:] I wanted to be a graphic designer. I love art. You can imagine my parents were delighted. Art or music? Let’s just strike that daughter off with nothing, there’s no good options there. What’s fun about doing music as an independent musician is I end up wearing a lot of hats and doing a lot of roles that would otherwise be done on a bigger team, and all the time I’ll get to design a tour poster. I get to dip into that world every now and then or do something visual with music videos and stuff.
[UNPUBLISHED:] What is your favorite part of being a musician? And least favorite?
[ORLA:] The idea of being a soundtrack to other people’s moments in life is really pure to me. If someone writes to me and says, I had a breakup and listened to this song over and over, that to me is so special. Songs I wrote from my experience find a home with other people. They are having different experiences but they see themselves in them. That’s just so pure to me so that’s the best bit. The worst bit is social media. It’s so far from the skill set of writing songs but as an artist, it’s required of you now to have a presence. I go back and forth about how I feel about it. You can’t do this job without it but it’s damaging to be on your phone that much.
[UNPUBLISHED:] How do you deal with that kind of social burnout?
[ORLA:] Not well, is the answer. I don’t know. I get it all the time and I think it’s easy, especially at this time when I want to give the album a big push, to spend my whole day on my phone. But it’s so bad for my brain to do that. When I truly, truly burnout, which has only happened once or twice, I try to keep everything quite childlike. I’ll go swimming or I’ll make some nice food, take things slow. I’ll distill my day into very simple elements. I’ll get as far away from technology as I can. I find it to be such a sensory overload, especially something like TikTok. So I think just trying to switch that off and make your days about going for a walk or something is a good thing.
[UNPUBLISHED:] When you’re not busy being a super talented famous musician, what kind of things do you like to do?
[ORLA:] Oh, thank you. I’m definitely not super famous but I’ll take it. I’ve been thinking about this lately. I really need more hobbies. I swim a little bit and I run a little bit, but I really need something like knitting. I need a good, meaty hobby. This is the funny thing about when your hobby becomes your job. It’s a really good thing but it means that there’s not much separation. There’s a lot of musical things that I do that aren’t just my projects. I play guitar for another artist called Dodie, so I do a lot of touring with her. I write for other people sometimes too. But I don’t have a good hobby. There’s an Olympic diver in the UK called Tom Daly. Watching him in the background of the other races furiously knitting, I was like, yeah I need to get into that.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Wikipedia says you uploaded your first video to YouTube when you were 13, looking for feedback on singing and playing. If you had the opportunity to comment on that video so that your 13-year-old self could see it, what would you tell her?
[ORLA:] I had so much unearned confidence at that point in my life. I was putting up videos when I had been playing guitar for a couple of weeks because I was like, “Everyone needs to hear this,” whereas now, I’m this micromanaging perfectionist and nothing is ever good enough. I miss that purity of the younger me and I like how little I thought about the stuff I uploaded even though it left me with a load of pretty cringe videos. If I was commenting now I would just say take your time with it. I don’t think I actually thought I was going to do music as a job when I was that young, but when I got to 18 or 19 I did think that I wanted to, and I thought that I had to get my album together in the first couple months. I would just say take your time, enjoy it as you go, don’t be racing for the finish line all the time.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Where do you hope to be in the next five to ten years?
[ORLA:] I wish I had a good plan for that. When you do music you can only plan so far ahead. It’s a really volatile industry and I don’t know where it will all go. If I got to decide, I would love to have a big house with a studio in it. It doesn’t need to be fancy. Do you know Imogen Heap? Imogen Heap lives in a converted lighthouse, and she has a studio in the basement. If I had to pick a life, it would basically be Imogen Heaps. Maybe the lighthouse thing is taken but I could convert something else like a barn. But the lighthouse wins, there’s nothing better than that.
[UNPUBLISHED:] This one might be a little bit out of the blue, but what are you most grateful for?
[ORLA:] That’s such a nice question. I feel like this is something American people think about a lot with Thanksgiving, which is not really a thing here, so I like that. I’m grateful for my audience, to be honest. I know that sounds a little bit corporate, but it’s more the community of it. You don’t get to pick your fans. You’re lucky to have any when you do music. It’s so hard to fight for people’s attention and it’s even harder to keep it. The people who come to my shows, especially the people that come, again and again, I find them so funny. They’re so creative. They’re all making posters about the album themselves. Someone set up a Woman On The Internet Twitter game. They’re all speaking to each other, making things together, doing covers together. To be the reason that really sweet people like that know each other - not that every conversation about me with them - but to be the reason people meet and then go and form friendships and a community, that is what’s so great about music. It’s such a precious thing.
Make sure to stream Orla on Spotify now!