The first time I saw British indie-folk wunderkind Billie Marten in the flesh, she was, ostensibly, being laughed at. By the midpoint of her set opening for Tennis at NYC’s Pier 17 last month, the audience had devolved into giggles. She made a valiant effort to ignore the bizarre reaction, but when she got a few lines into her quietly devastating song “Vanilla Baby” and could hardly hear herself over the laughter, she had to stop playing entirely. She looked out, baffled, at the crowd: “Why is everyone laughing?” A beat, as something terrible occurred to her. She smiled sheepishly, eyes crinkling even as the horror set in: “Oh God, is there something on my face?”
There was not. Rather, the anonymous Jumbotron operator had, for some inexplicable reason, decided to use Marten’s set as a testing ground for his Kiss Cam chops, and had spent the past ten minutes training the camera at various audience members, slowly zooming in closer and closer on their increasingly strained, confused smiles. (Writing now, I do wonder if there’s a larger conspiracy at play, and this was actually the trial run for the Coldplay Jumbotron shot heard ‘round the world—if it’s all one cameraman, scheming to overshadow concerts one Jumbotron at a time). But Marten, as the person on the stage and thus unable to see the screens in front of it, was the only individual on that rooftop not in on the joke.
Performing a deeply vulnerable song in front of hundreds of people only for them to break into laughter for no apparent reason is, quite literally, every musician’s—every human’s, really—worst nightmare. But even at only 26, Billie Marten handled it with more grace and charm than most people would at twice her age. Eventually, an audience member (who may or may not have been me) took pity on her and yelled out an explanation. It would have been understandable for Marten to seethe, or shrink into herself, or even dress down the cameraman for his attempt at hijacking the show—I can think of no small number of celebrities who would not hesitate to do so. But Marten, for her part, just laughed and cracked some jokes (“Really? During “Vanilla Baby”?). Then: She kept on playing, and the jumbotron interruptions finally ceased, leaving the audience rapt, rightfully mesmerized by Marten’s voice.
When I speak to her a few weeks later, one of the first things I do is apologize on behalf of the audience (and the cameraman, for that matter) at that Pier 17 show. She just laughs, a bright, tinkling thing, the genuine mirth on her face visible even through the lags on my laptop screen: “That was absolutely insane.” She shakes her head, remembering. “He was certainly trying… something!” I joke that maybe he was attempting to prove his mettle as a basketball jumbotron operator, as if this were the technical portion of a job interview where he had to prove he had the skills to maximize a Kiss Cam’s entertainment value. She grins, picking up the thread where I left off: “Yeah, maybe it was his trial shift. The bosses were there, secretly lurking in the audience, and they just wanted to check that he could do it. Just my luck he chose ‘Vanilla Baby’ to do it, but I hope he impressed them and got the job.”
(One thing about Billie Marten, I learn quickly, is that the woman knows her way around a bit. Later in our conversation, we embark on an extended riff about the latest, hippest equestrian activity: horse-neck riding. In the end, I apologize deeply for my failure to properly research horse riding techniques prior to our interview, and she just nods firmly and says, voice dry with disappointment, “Yeah. Do better.” Then we both crack up).
There’s some message I could draw out here—some pithy little affirmation à la “If anything, this proves that if there’s one thing you need to survive in the music industry, it’s a sense of good humor.” But as nice as it sounds, I don’t think it’s quite true. Frankly, you need a lot more than that to stay afloat in the vast ocean of industry. And Billie Marten, who was thrown into the deep end at the ripe age of 12 and had to try not to drown before she could even teach herself how to swim, knows that more than most. In her words, she spent years “deeply underwater in respect to control,” a feeling that reached its peak around the time of her sophomore record, Feeding Seahorses By Hand. Since then, she’s worked to claw her way back up to the surface, her third and fourth albums seeing her finally burst out of the depths and take her first gulps of air, kicking rapidly to stay above the current. But it’s her fifth that shows her finally able to simply float. Released last Friday, Dog Eared is a testament to both the control it takes to let go and the realization that letting go is, itself, a necessary prerequisite to feeling in control of your own life.
WHEN MARTEN BEGAN WORKING on Dog Eared, she had one firm rule: Whatever it became, it couldn’t be another “singer-songwriter” record. That label, she explains, has grown so broad it means almost nothing—and yet she’d been pinned under it since childhood. “I was aware that the entire genre of singer-songwriter had become so large that it was encompassing basically all genres of music,” she says. “As long as I had a guitar, then it was folk, and I’m a singer-songwriter. Even if you’re not writing your own songs, you’re a singer-songwriter.” It wasn’t that she looked down on the genre (“I’ve very much based my entirety on people of the past doing exactly that”) but rather that, under its weight, she’d spent too many years associating music with isolation.
Feeding Seahorses by Hand bore the scars of that confusion. By the time Sony dropped her in 2019, she felt nothing but relief. “There’s a lot of kind of visceral feelings around that time, and confusion,” she says now. “I didn’t know the system. I felt… mostly just very confused.” That experience taught her something she’s still learning to navigate: “In some ways I do think happiness is control—but it’s also letting go of everything at the same time.” Her subsequent records saw her slowly regaining that balance, but Dog Eared marks the first time she’s felt free to make something not just hers, but whole—something that refuses to leave a flattened stage-friendly version of her boxed into a corner, strumming alone under a spotlight.
“I think that, if you’re a solo artist, you want to throw the least amount of attention onto yourself as possible,” she explains, laughing a little. “We have attention all day long. All the live-long day. The last thing we want is more.” I suspect this claim to be somewhat less universal than she thinks. In all honesty, I can think of few solo artists who seem less enamored with the spotlight than Marten—but maybe that says less about the degree to which her peers crave attention than it does the sincerity of her own reluctance (though, as someone who’s seen her live, she couldn’t do a better job at hiding it). “I had become tired with myself,” she says, plainly. “I was surrounded by this vacuousness that slowly ripped away at me. So to be plunked into a room that was exactly the opposite of that [vacuousness] was precisely what I needed.”
It was for that reason she insisted Dog Eared be built not around herself, but around a band, recorded live with a roomful of other musicians whose fingerprints are all over the finished album. “It was the perfect dose of interplay—it was so deeply inspiring and made me work harder,” she says. “I got to perform for the right people, all internal musicians themselves and with no larger judgment. There is no other word that accurately depicts what I was feeling: I was just so inspired. It was exhilarating.”
That exhilaration is palpable in the recordings. The team—producer Phil Weinrobe, Vishal Nayak and Joshua Crumbly on rhythm, pianist Michael Coleman, and three whole guitarists (Michael Haldeman, Sam Evian, Adam Brisbin), plus guest appearances from singer/guitarist Núria Graham, percussionist Mauro Refosco, Sam Amidon’s fiddle, and Shahzad Ismaily on, well, everything—recorded together over just six days in Brooklyn, their chemistry immediate. Marten describes the sessions as almost democratic, the songs often taking shape in real time. “All we had were voice notes from me of immediately having written the song. So with that, you can kind of take them anywhere,” she recalls. There were no preordained arrangements or rigid templates, just a shared language of rhythm and instinct. “We honestly just sat down and put our phones into a bowl outside and then we came in and sat down for eight hours a day. And whatever you’re hearing on the record is literally exactly what all those guys did.”
The sound of Dog Eared is somewhat hard to pin down, and that’s exactly the point. Marten herself struggles to name it, describing it as a “lava lamp” of rhythms and textures, filled with little “bleepy bloopies.” She immediately cringes: “Oh, God, I just said ‘bleepy bloopies.’ We don’t have to put that in print,” she laughs, self-effacing—but it fits. The record shimmers and swirls, full of odd little angles that feel accidental at first but deliberate on closer listen. Where her earlier work prized polish and restraint, this one feels looser, stranger, more alive; less about holding the line than about seeing where it might bend. Her own parents hated the record when they first heard it: “They did not like the dissonance. They did not like how my voice sounded. They did not like the songs. They just fucking hated it.” But, for Marten, that was a sign that she was doing something right (and her parents came around in the end, too).
“Something I realized on this record was, ‘How much of what I’m known for do I want to perpetuate?’ And how much do we change and evolve?” Marten says. “A lot of it is about identity and change and what we choose to bring with us and what we choose to leave behind. It’s kind of an awesome thing to look back on.”
Those sentiments animate nearly every song. Dog Eared opens with “Feeling,” a kind of quiet exhale and reset, built around a loose, tumbling rhythm and lyrics that picture a younger Marten slipping into a future she doesn’t yet understand: “I am on my way / I am in between.” It’s a fitting prologue, full of childlike wonder and unease, and it establishes the record’s preoccupation with change: gentle, inevitable, and often beyond one’s grasp. “We are oh so lightly here,” Marten sings, “Softer than a rabbit ear.” From there, the record blooms into stranger, sharper colors. “Crown” takes what began as an acoustic sketch and turns it into a slinky, sinewy groove, her voice curling around lines like “She drinks my blood / And I wear her crown,” its mix of menace and intimacy both seductive and uneasy. Later, on the beautifully dissonant “Clover,” oxymorons pile up like stray petals—“act naturally,” “old news,” “loving hate”—as she wrestles with the burden of appearing strong while feeling small. “No Sudden Changes” cools into a slow, jazzy lockstep in time to reiterate the equally comforting and terrifying truth that change, even as gradual and minute as it might seem on the day-to-day, is the only real constant: “No sudden changes / No sudden moves / Nothing stays in place.”
One particularly notable change on Dog Eared is that it holds Marten’s first-ever non-autobiographical song: “Leap Year,” which tells of lovers who meet only once every four years. She calls the track “incredibly liberating,” and it’s easy to hear why: For once, she wasn’t writing to explain herself or square the gap between how she feels and how people see her. “It feels like I can perform more, because I am not being seen, or I’m being seen less,” she explains. “You know, there are certain songs that you play for so long that you stop hearing them. But ‘Leap Year,’ for me, was just… Oh, so fun.” She pauses, grins. “I’m having a lot of fun singing these songs.”
Even so, some things stay the same: Marten’s voice remains ethereal as ever, and her penchant for threading in mundane bits and pieces of everyday life (particularly references to animals and the natural world) can be seen in nearly every track. “I’ve realized that I’m just a deeply simple human being who likes very simple things—like, four or five essentials—and then I’m good,” Marten laughs. “Essentials like the things I talk about in the album; very exact, sane minutiae. Plants and animals, water and food, meaningful connections. That’s enough for me.”
Marten is no longer trying to sand herself down into something tidier, nor contort herself into a silhouette more befitting the cliché of the tortured artist. “I’ve always struggled with existentialism—you know, it’s really made me quite mentally unwell sometimes—and I have a natural cynicism. I think that’s the case for most of us, though,” she says. “So I’m not saying we need to get rid of our darkness; I think it’s such a beautiful part of us. But I am actively, as I age, becoming more and more aware of how much darkness I let out, and how helpful or hindering that is to other people.”
