Spin To Win #39: An Interview With Lauren Mayberry About Going Solo
I caught up with the CHVRCHES vocalist to talk about her debut solo album, 'Vicious Creature'.
A special edition of the newsletter today, so keeping this intro very brief — I spoke with CHVRCHES lead singer Lauren Mayberry about her debut solo album, Vicious Creature, putting together a live band for her solo shows, and Christmas plans. It was a fun chat, and a bit of a milestone for me — my first proper feature for the newsletter. Read on to check that out.
If you’d like to read the full transcript of my chat with Lauren, then scroll to the bottom — I’ve made this available for paid subscribers! You can also activate a free trial, if you want to give it a read — we chat about tour life, a Hairy Bikers pie, and when she realised she was pushing herself to release Vicious Creature. I’ll be doing the same thing with my upcoming Sidney Phillips interview for the newsletter and for any features for the newsletter going forward.
Need to get a Christmas gift for the music lover in your life? In the festive spirit, I’m running a Christmas special. Yes, this might be the same offer as my Halloween one — sue me — where both monthly and annual subscriptions are 20% off for 12 months. A subscription to Spin To Win is the best $4/month gift you can get yourself*, especially as I ramp up the features/exclusive paid content. I’m still working out the logistics of how you can submit questions, but I’m going to launch a monthly Q&A column exclusively for paid subscribers. It’ll be like the editions where I pop together a few different thoughts on things, but guided by you.
*According to me
Scottish musician and CHVRCHES lead singer Lauren Mayberry has a lot on her mind when we sit down to chat about her debut album, Vicious Creature — including Christmas dinner options. She’s marking the release of Vicious Creature in a fitting festive spirit. “Because it's almost Christmas time, there are a lot of tasty dinner options. My friends organised a kind of fake Christmas dinner thing for a bunch of us to go hang out, which sounds very nice, two things happening at once. I can pretend it's not about me and that it's about Christmas food, and it'll be great,” she says. She’s particularly excited about the dill salmon that’s on the menu. “I'm going to be getting that salmon right in my face,” she adds.
Crafted over the last two years and fuelled by a decade’s worth of experiences in the music industry, Vicious Creature began life as a cathartic exercise. Writing and performing music from the album has given her the chance to be her most authentic self, which she readily admits hasn’t always been possible. “It felt nice to write something and not think about what anybody else is going to think about it, or how they're going to feel about it.”
Inspired by her love of artists like the late Sinead O’Connor, Fiona Apple, and Tori Amos, Vicious Creature won’t sound unfamiliar to CHVRCHES fans, albeit with some changes. Synths abound across the record, and flecks of disco and piano balladry give the record depth. The biggest shift is the heightened lyrical candour. The negative space within the slow-burning ‘Oh, Mother’ gives it emotional potency, as Lauren dissects her shifting relationship with a parent. On bouncy album centrepiece ‘Change Shapes, meanwhile, she reflects on contorting to fit into boxes people have tried to place her in since first entering the spotlight: “It's exhausting trying so hard all the time/Performative hypocrisy took over my mind.”
Having faced a decade of online abuse, and constant assumptions about who she is beyond the music, Vicious Creature has given her a platform to unpack and respond. On the frenetic ‘Sorry, Etc’ she laments, “I killed myself to be one of the boys/I lost my head to be one of the boys/I bit my tongue to be one of the boys/I sold my soul to be one of the boys,” and looking back at her time in music, Lauren is pensive. She explains, “It felt sometimes like I was performing a role, not just to the public necessarily, but as the only woman in a project, as the youngest in a project.
“I kind of feel like when I look back on starting the band, I was 23 and the guys were already in their 30s, or turning 30, and they’re quite different places to be in your life. And I feel like I was always trying to fit into a world that wasn't really designed for me sometimes. When I think about when people have thought things about me, I feel like it's a lot of projecting on you because of what they think that you might be doing or what they think. When I think about times that people have said that I'm being vindictive, or I'm being manipulative, or I'm being any of these things, I'm like, 'I don't identify as that as a person,' but it is interesting to see the things that are projected onto you just because of the differences and the misunderstandings.”
Vicious Creature is peppered with the self-insight that comes after an intense period of reflection, which she says took place over the last couple of years. “I have spent a lot of time, not people pleasing necessarily, but trying to figure out, 'Why does everybody feel the way they feel? And what can I do to make you not feel like that? And maybe if I tidy this up, and maybe if I pretzel contort myself like this, then that will make everything better, and that will make everybody happy, right, right? Is everybody happy?' And I think that's probably an innately female thing to a degree, and also just a personality thing,” she says. “And that was one of my main scoldings to myself a couple of years ago. I was like, 'You need to stop trying to be so in control or the fixer of so much of this, and you just have to take your hands off the wheel of certain parts of this and just see what happens.'”
Live performance has been a key part of the journey towards releasing Vicious Creature, with her debut solo performances taking place across the US and Europe. “Partly why I knew I wanted to play live quite early in the process was because I wanted to figure out what's my performance style. How do I feel on stage when I'm not in CHVRCHES? Because the muscle memory of that is going to be very apparent, because we've been lucky enough to do it for over 10 years.
“But I wanted to feel a bit more connected and present in what I was doing on stage and take that research back, and almost funnel it into the record. And I knew with the live band that I wanted it to be more women and non-binary people, just because there are a lot more vocals on the record. But also some of these songs, I don't think I would feel comfortable playing on stage with a project like CHVRCHES, and I wanted the whole thing to feel a bit more like a community or safer for me.”
Writing and recording Vicious Creature has given Lauren the space to pull from the past (as she wryly recounts, she’s now pulling from her “little bag of baggage”). The lack of accountability in the music industry makes it unlike nearly any other career. She explains, “I've been lucky to have worked with people who, for the most part, the people I've worked with have been very kind and very conscious, and I've always had good relationship with managers. When I talk to other female friends who work in music, sometimes I'm like, 'Oh, right, you didn't even have that. The bad manager stories that I hear are quite scary. And for me, I never had that. At least there was always a safety net of people wanting to make things as safe as possible outside of that.
“There are things I look back on and I'm like, 'Oh, right, in another job, I would have fucking quit that years and years and years ago, or I would have been able to go to HR and be like, can we sort this out?’ There is no structure for how to deal with any of those things.” She’s taken it upon herself to be a source of wisdom for the next generation, though. “it's nice to be at this age and stage in my career, because when we meet other artists, or there are other bands opening for us, or I connect with younger artists through different channels. I feel like that's a thing I can do that's useful, just validate for them.
“Know if it feels weird, it is weird, if it makes you feel uncomfortable, then you're within your rights to do something about that.”
Lauren Mayberry’s debut album Vicious Creature is out now.
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If you’re a paid subscriber, you can check out the full transcript from the Lauren Mayberry interview below — otherwise, I’ll chat with you in the next edition!
Ben Madden: Firstly, congratulations on the upcoming release of Vicious Creature! We're a couple of days out from the album's release — how are you planning on marking the occasion?
Lauren Mayberry: I'm going to be traveling a little bit in the morning, and then I'm going to the studio with my friend Dan, who wrote a bunch of the songs in the record with me, and then we're all going for a little dinner, which would be nice. And because it's almost Christmas time, there are a lot of tasty dinner options. So my friends organised a kind of fake Christmas dinner thing for a bunch of us to go hang out, which sounds very nice, two things happening at once. I can pretend it's not about me and that it's about Christmas food, and it'll be great.
BM: What's your go-to Christmas dish?
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