If there is one artist that I think could have mainstream success then that is Marie Naffah. A beautifully distinctive vocal, Marie Naffah’s music is the kind of music you’d expect to be winning awards such as The Mercury Music Prize, Brit Awards and more! Think back to the days when PJ Harvey was all over the music industry, that’s exactly where we see Marie Naffah being in the not too distant future.

Marie’s music is a work of art. Her ability to create a visual within her songs is astonishing and you feel you are getting a cinematic experience when you close your eyes and really listen to her.

Marie Naffah is set to release her debut album titled Mother of Pearl in the summer. With a superb catalogue of songs already released, Mother of Pearl is bound to be met with much critical acclaim.

From the album, Naffah has released the tracks Rust & Blue and Loving You (Tenderly). Both tracks give you a window in to what to expect from the album which is set to be a beautiful journey of human emotion over the course of a year of Naffah’s life.

We caught up with Marie to discuss the album and the meaning behind it. Marie was wonderful to speak with and very insightful. We can’t wait to travel along this journey that Naffah is taking as we think it’s going to be a very exciting ride full of wonderful possibilities and fantastic opportunities.

We hope you enjoy our chat!

How has your week been?

So far so good, been busy just preparing everything for the album launch. I find myself doing less music weeks and doing a lot of admin, pulling things together, booking shows and getting ready but it’s exciting!

It is exciting and talking of exciting, I saw that you have been listed on the Glastonbury Emerging Talent list?

Oh yeah the long list? I got listed for the Emerging Talent. I love that list, I was long listed last year as well. You get whittled down from a few thousand people who apply and then they write a few nice things about us that are in the final 90 and then I think it gets whittled down to another 8 and you have a live round. I am happy to be on the list, one day I will get to Glastonbury I hope!

I hope so! It sounds like a silly thing to say when Glastonbury has such a huge variety of music but I do think your music would go down so well there!

Thank you!

Yeah I would like to see you on those backstage sessions they film with Jo Whiley and others.

I love those too! We really want to break into the festival circuit which is quite difficult as an independent artist. The full band experience has really made us want to. A lot of people have said what you said that they can really see us at festivals.

Definitely and I hope it happens!

I want to talk about the album ‘Mother of Pearl’ – are you allowed to tell us anything about it yet?

Yeah, I can tell you a bit yeah! It’s going to be coming out early Summer. It is 12 tracks. The reason it is called ‘Mother of Pearl’ is because I phoned my mother sometime about a year and a half ago and I really remember saying to her “I’m really happy at the moment” and I thought how rare it is that you call your mum to say you’re happy as normally it’s “oh this is happening…”. In that moment when I was on the phone to her, I looked back on the whole year and I thought there are so many different textures of emotions that happen in a year and I wanted to explore all of those emotions in the album – so there are some happy/hopeful songs, there are some topics such as grief, there are some songs that talk about friendships, nostalgia. At that time I had spent some time in Sweden and I had done a lot of swimming – I was very focused on the idea that this album would be about water. I thought it would be about the qualities of water that you could relate to in real life like sinking, swimming, being reborn, feeling refreshed and all that stuff.

When you listen to the whole album, there are references to water in all of it. So I went in with that theme, went in and worked on it with my producers and then actually all the songs, they weren’t about water at all, they were all about love. It’s all about different versions of love, friendship love, family love. There is a song on there called ‘Mother of Pearl’ which was the first song I wrote for the whole album and it’s basically a love song for my mum. It’s a 360 view of the different facets of love.

The track listing order in that case, is it in a way that tells a story?

We definitely wanted to create a very immersive journey for how it carries through and I think it’s almost like waves coming in. It’s not like we save all the big songs for the end, it kind of goes up and down a bit. One thing that had been such a wonderful experience is really thinking about the outro’s and intro’s songs and how you create that. We are making a vinyl for it at the moment and that has been such a rewarding experience to try and create a holistic piece of art basically rather than just a series of singles of which I am so used to. I hope it will take people on a real journey.

I love the book ends of an album, I am always paying attention to that. Can we know anything about the closer?

The last song? I haven’t told anyone about that yet but I would like to tell you. It’s so nice that you care about that. That song I wrote, it’s just me playing guitar cross legged on the floor in the studio. It’s a song I wrote while we were recording so it didn’t exist before I went into the studio – I had no idea it was going to be in the album. I started writing it while I was recording and just mucking around on the acoustic guitar and I had a verse and a chorus and then one of my producers, as I was playing it started to mic up around me while I was literally cross legged just playing it. At the beginning, we have kept the audio where he says “can you finish that song?”. We finish it and then we record it and then the last moment of that song, of the whole album is him clicking stop! We are really pleased with it and that’s really special to me because I started as a girl on guitar with music and that’s how I kind of wrote music. I started in that folk era, there were people like Laura Marling, Ed Sheeran really ruling the runway just when I was getting into gigging and stuff so it feels special to have a full band album but there are just these moments of acoustic.

I love that you said that and I love those moments on an album. The way you described the song kind of reminds me of those albums that had secret songs, ones not on the track list. When I would put a CD on in bed and it was a new album, I would often fall asleep as it ended and then be woken up ten minutes later jumping out of bed as a random song came on and scared the life out of me like on Green Day’s ‘Dookie’ and Alanis Morrisettes ‘Jagged Little Pill’.

That’s so true! I love that! We wanted to make a classic album, a timeless album and one thing that I am constantly trying to do is balance contemporary music with this classic music that I grew up on and loved and really cherished in the albums. I often go to the last song on the albun because it’s normally quiet and quite a raw moment.

Who are some of the artists that you grew up on?

I grew up with a lot of The Beatles. The Beatles really sort of informed my work and actually even the production, there were lots of things that both my producers Robin and Adam really liked and sort of really took from that in the mix and various things. I am a big (Bob) Dylan fan. Lyrically I care a lot about the story tellers. I love Joni (Mitchell), Tracey Chapman! I listen to a lot of Tom Waits, Elvis, just lots of classic people. To me, very pure artists that focus on formants which I think is really really important especially when you’re in the recording studio and not relying on the audience to give you energy but also then the quality of words and story telling and how you pull that listener in and how you simultaneously create those quiet whispers of moments between you and the listener and then also these epic moments where the whole strings come in and is slightly bigger

And you say the album has a mix of emotions. It’s interesting because I was talking to an artist recently on how music is a healer for the listener and as listeners, if we get the opportunity to tell an artist their music has helped us through something then we will and I often wonder if the artist gets tired of hearing that but then it never occurred to me that the artist hearing that helps them too as they realise that through their music, they also aren’t alone in those experiences and feelings

I completely agree and one thing that I really try to be quite clear about recently whether it’s social media or in my mailing list is how much audiences give, especially to independent artists where we have small but mighty fan bases who want to join you on your journey. The amount of energy I get from that means of connection where someone says they have had the same experience or this song got them through something.

I live for two moments in music and one is the intense privacy I have of being able to write and doing that on my own and doing all the techniques to form something out of nothing but then the second element is the sharing part of it which is why I love playing live so much but that’s also why I love individuals coming up and sharing those moments. I think that audience members can often feel quite invisible to artists and I think it’s one of my missions to make every individual feel seen in my fanbase because it makes me feel good and makes me remember why I do what I do.

Lovely! When you do a co-write, is it easy to open up in the writers room or do you tend to work with people that you feel comfortable around, sharing your stories with?

Yeah that’s a great question and one that is very relevant to me at this time because it’s really the first formal co-writing relationship I’ve had. I have co-written with people in the past but never on this full bodied project sort of way and actually most of the music I have released I have only written myself and it requires so much familiarity and trust and for me. I think I would struggle with having conviction in my own opinions if someone else was there potentially questioning it so you have to allow room for each other to be able to say yes or no. Then if the other person says no, you have to, if you really believe it, you have to actually go “I really want to continue moving forward with this”.

Robin Breeze who I wrote the album with is also the bass player and kind of manages my band as well. He is also a dear friend of mine so we really were comfortable in each others presence and I think I learned so much about co-writing then and I do think it’s like finding a good partner or therapist. I don’t think it means that once you have co-written with someone, you can co-write with anyone. I think it’s a very very personal relationship and I am so grateful that both working with him and Adam Bowers who produced the record, we knew each other all before and when we recorded the album, we recorded it over a month in June last year In Suffolk. We were lost in this amazing celebration of music creativity, writing and also friendship and it was this very exiting way of getting to know people.

Do you get involved in the production process?

I would say, I am not a producer myself but I had some ideas of that I know vaguely what I want and we put together a reference playlist and I was pulling things from contemporary artists like The Artic Monkeys but then I was saying “I love this guitar from the Rolling Stones Track” and so on. The thing I love about working with Adam and Robin is they are incredibly creative producers and that’s why I really wanted to work with them. They could transform abstract feedback of me saying to them of how I wanted it to make it feel more like a hug. I used to say a lot that I want to make it sore. The way that they could pull together instruments or write parts or edit the mix to make it that emotional feeling is something that I will really cherish and remember. It’s not me delivering lots of technical notes, it’s saying a feeling which often is what the listener is going to experience as well. There’s a real dedication and a real attention to detail that I was very moved by.

Do any of the songs sound completely different from the writers room to full production where you were like “woah, I didn’t know it could sound like that?”

Definitely! One of the songs that is one of the singles that is coming out next is a song called ‘Gloria’. I wrote it about my best friend and so it is sort of a love song, an ode to female friendship. I wrote that and performed it at London’s Oslo in Hackney a couple of years ago. I just played half of it, I had a verse and a chorus and it was just on the piano and we thought it was going to be a piano ballad and then sort of a few months later, Rob and I were working on it and Rob said “I’ve got this idea, I think we can really push it to something massive”. I remember saying to him “I am quite scared of this song now and where it is going. I hope we can pull it off?”. And I am very grateful to say that we did because it pushed me completely to a whole other space. That’s really exciting because I love the level of spontaneity that can happen in the studio.

I can’t wait to hear that song and in fact the whole album. I love Rust & Blue at the moment, that’s a song that I found instantly unique. What can you tell us about that song?

I had so much fun writing that. That was one of the songs that, I think we had got to a stage where we had written lots of songs and I was quite keen to have a happy song, some more happy songs, more upbeat ones, some light songs. I find happy songs are quite difficult to write, they’re sort of the harder ones to not sound too cheesy. There’s a phrase “Happiness writes white” I wanted to challenge myself to come at a different angle. How do you write a love song? I have a background in Art History and so the visual world is always a jumping off point for me. The song is about two lovers running around galleries and for me it was a way to kind of mix all these kind of real feelings with surrealist imagery which is something that I love doing in writing. Something where anything can happen in a song. That’s what I love about it that something can suddenly grow wings. It’s not like theatre where it’s going to take loads of money and production to make these things happen, I think you can just write something down differently and suddenly paintings can move. I really enjoyed that process!

You mentioned Art History, so the artwork for the album must of been really important to you and specific?

It is very specific yes. I worked with an incredible designer who is a friend of mine whose name is Studio Boz and she has done all my photography and all of the design elements to the album. I wanted it to be a very visual experience for the listener because that’s kind of where I write from. I can see all the songs in front of me before they are even written and I think it’s not just an auditory experience and so we wanted the vinyl to really take people through that personal journey of how I felt like making my first album, I think that’s how I ended up really feeling really strongly about.

As a songwriter you ask yourself so much when you’re marketing yourself. One of the questions you come back to is how do you get people to care? I think one thing that I want to demonstrate is how much we care about this album and how much I cared making this album and that the making of it didn’t come overnight and it was a really long time. The more that we can do that in whether it’s in the vinyl or in the storytelling or what we say online, I think listeners really get it if you are genuine. I found that with my fanbase at the moment is they really celebrate who I am as I am and I really like.

Oh I can tell when an album is rushed. There’s obvious fillers that have been added last minute.

Loving You (Tenderly) is the current single..

Yes! That is one of the first songs Robin and I co-wrote together. I had been thinking a lot about the subject of grief because a few years ago I lost a friend of mine and more apparently it was a very close friend of my partners. I wanted to explore how you experience grief sort of secondary grief basically. The song is, all the versus are intended to be minutes into looking into someone else’s grief and I didn’t just touch on that experience alone. My characters are often composites of experiences of other people so I touched on people I know who have lost parents and this idea of people have often been exposed to or will be exposed to grief in their lifetime. The thing I love about the track is that I was quite determined to be simultaneously uplifting as well having a depth of subject matter that felt important to express at the time and so it’s about the idea of being out the other side when that felt impossible in grief. It’s the idea of being able to love someone through a very hard time and coming out the other end and celebrating that which is why there’s this sort of euphoric feeling to it. That was a really fun challenge and the response to that song has been really moving actually.

There aren’t a lot of songs like that really are there?

No! It’s a big part of writing this album. For me, it was challenging myself with subject matter and really taking things that moved me very profoundly in the year and working out how to express it and again not trying to just bulldozer over these feelings and say “everything’s happy all the time” or “everything’s sad all the time”. It’s sort of trying to pay attention to the nuance of you can hold two feelings at once. It’s been wonderful writing that actually.

You have pretty much answered this question throughout but what else did you learn professionally and personally during the year that you took off to reflect?

Yeah, one of the things that was one of the greatest privileges for me was learning how I worked as a songwriter and I think it’s always something that I vaguely knew but I paid so much attention to my process and that was just the most wonderful feeling because you sort of learn how to actively seek out inspiration and how do you keep showing up to the page on days where you’re like “I actually have nothing”. Ed Sheeran talks about that, running a dirty tap when you’re writing and the idea of you can write lots of bad songs to then get to the clean water to get to the good songs. We over wrote songs to then select 12 that we thought were really strong. That was really good and there’d be some days where I would show up and say “I can’t do it, it’s too difficult” but again that’s the beauty of a co-writing relationship, you have got someone else saying “keep going” or “what about this?” and you bounce off someone. Personally it was a huge testament to that I could write that many songs, it’s not really something that I have ever really done in a year. I normally only write four or five songs a year, so the idea of saying go from nothing to something was amazing.

Will we ever hear those other songs?

I am hoping so yes! I think as a listener it must be interesting to hear what songs done make the album.

Definitely!

Can you tell us about Little Gigs?

Yes! Little Gigs is a night that I started in collaboration with a venue called Mezzanine in Tooting and I started it last year basically in the hope to bring back the simplicity in curated music nights and for artists I love to be able to connect with audiences. It’s all about the celebration of high quality artists and also high quality audiences. So it’s a night that I invite two artists that I love to come and play a few songs and I play a few songs at the end. I host the whole evening and it’s on a Tuesday night every month and the response has been amazing! I really started it feeling it would just be a music night and who knows if it will land but there’s something in it’s simplicity that people just want to go out and hear some music for the evening.

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