Lauren Mayberry on Musicals, Hideo Kojima, and the Importance of Good Banter

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I can credibly count myself as a day-1 CHVRCHES guy; I wrote the BNM for The Bones of What You Believe, for Christ's sake. Frontwoman Lauren Mayberry's solo record Vicious Creature comes out this week, and since I saw her perform much of it during a Brooklyn underplay last year, I'd been interested in speaking to her more about the change in pace that this record represents, as well as various facets of her career thus far. As expected, there was plenty to get into, and it was a great conversation. Check it out:

Tell me about the sonic touchstones in terms of your songwriting on this record. You're doing something quite different here than what people have previously heard from you.
Going into it, I wasn't taking an anti-synth stance necessarily, but I didn't want it to just feel like a shitty knockoff CHVRCHES album without the guys there. We all love and respect the band so much that we wouldn't want to do that—but, also, there are many reasons for somebody wanting a break from a project, and the biggest one is a creative change. We've been so lucky that the band has lasted for as long as it has, and hopefully we'll continue to do so. But if you're only making one thing in the same way for like going on 12 years, on bad days it can feel quite claustrophobic.

I joined CHVRCHES when I was 23, and because the guys were a bit older than me and they'd been in other projects than me, they already had an idea of what they wanted the band to be. Initially, there was a lot of me fitting into that universe, and obviously, over time I was able to take more ownership of that space lyrically, but it was always the lyrics that I thought about as the last thing when it came to the songwriting. That's great when it works, it's an amazing challenge, and hopefully the proof is in the pudding, but for me personally that's not the most natural way to write sometimes. I'm always stories-first. I can hear a song that a serious producer would be horrified by—"This production!," "These plug-ins!, blah blah blah—but for me it's all about the story and emotion of the thing. I'd rather have a song with potent emotion and shit production then a really well-produced song that doesn't make me feel anything.

I saw the underplay you did at Music Hall of Williamsburg last summer—it seemed like you already had a decent idea of how you were presenting these songs live. Tell me more about what you're thinking there.
Things feel a bit more playful or joyful—less rigid, almost. We're so lucky, in [CHVRCHES], that it's built to the point, at but it does mean that we get quite stuck in our ways of thinking. I feel like we write a set list and then we tour that set
list for two years—we don't touch it, we don't learn any new songs, we really don't change any of it. One part of that is the conscious choice of wanting to make sure that people who come to the shows get a consistent experience, but after a while I feel like I'm losing my connectivity to certain parts of performance, and I wanted to feel a bit more present in the room—not that I'm not present in the room when we play CHVRCHES shows, because I am.

But it's all about trying to connect with other people and feel like you're on the same page as them, and I think it just felt like we were maybe on different wavelengths sometimes in terms of what we were wanting to do. For these shows, I was very conscious of what I wanted, and with the record as well. Yes, there's some sadder content on some of the album, but for a lot of it, I was just really conscious about wanting it to feel more joyful, and for the live shows to feel more vulnerable and genuine.

It's been fun, because I feel like I occupy a very specific persona, and my movement [in the underplay shows] was so dictated by the fact that, on the first album, I didn't move around at all because I was fucking terrified, and the guys couldn't move around at all because they were tied to synth rigs. So the way I learned to occupy the space was because of that setup, not because I thought it was part of the storytelling. So it was important for me to play shows early in this solo project, to try and figure out what is the persona—what's real, and what does that look like in this context.

It's interesting to hear you talk about being looser for the solo shows, because I've seen CHVRCHES live a few times now and your ability to do casual stage banter in between songs is pretty impressive. It's not always required from live performers!
So much of that was just because what happened with CHVRCHES had happened so quickly. The guys in the band went to music school. They had, in my opinion, more of a grounding in what we were doing than I did, so I always felt a bit less experienced or out of my depth. But when we've talked about it in recent years, they feel like even the stuff they'd experienced was surpassed really quickly, so everybody was out at sea. We'd be like, "What are we doing? Oh my God."

We were just really bad at knowing that we should have backup plans for technical problems early on—and there wasn't that much fucking money either, so we couldn't have a backup computer and a playback guy. We were doing it all ourselves, and there were loads of technical problems, so I'd just have to talk. I wonder if there's something in that in terms of Scottishness or something. You just have to make jokes to get through things.

It is terrible when you're playing a festival and everyone's like, "Who's this band I've read about on these blogs?" and stuff's going wrong and both the guys are really planning to try to fix it. So I kind of have to do a tight 10. But I like that, and I like that that's become part of my performance persona, because it is a genuine part of my personality. There were so many people at the time that had so many opinions on how I should look, how I should perform, how I should be in interviews. I'm glad that I didn't listen to that necessarily, because it was very much that era of so many bands that felt very self-serious to me in a way that didn't feel genuine to us. Because we're an electro band with a witch house-y name, I think people maybe expected us to be more po-faced. But when I go to shows, I like when you can see the humanity in a thing. Even when it's a massive, slick pop production, I like to know there's still people inside of there behind the costumes and lights. There's still a human being making this stuff.

You've mentioned the notion of being perceived a few times while we've been talking here. I'm really curious to hear you reflect on that.
Around the third CHVRCHES album, I learned to disengage from it as much as possible. I don't think that human brains are not designed to know that much about what people think about us all the time. There were definitely times where what was being written about the band, or the way people would address us in interviews, made it clear what people thought about me or the band. It felt so misaligned with who I felt like I was as a person.

For a long time, the narrative was either, "She's this cutesy, diminutive person who doesn't do anything right," or "She's a heinous bitch who hates men." And I was like, neither of these things feel correct to me! It's bad enough if you hear that somebody you know thinks you're a bit of a dick—then, you're gonna feel bad, because you don't want somebody to think you're a dick, and you want to fix or correct that. I've learned that you can't do that. It's not my business to know, and people are entitled to have all their opinions.

Sometimes, when I think about the groups of men who have hated me so much over the years, I'm like, "I'm a pretty nice guy!" I'm probably just in my house, talking to my cat, muttering to myself about some TV show I'm watching. But because of the way it's positioned in the media—the way you perceive it, and the way that interacts with your life experiences—you're going to take it as read. So I tried to have a pretty zen, empathetic approach to it and just not engage with it as much as possible. I'm pretty good at leaving that outside the studio now.

There was an era where we were quite conscious of what we thought people wanted from us, and once you start trying to make that in a lab, it doesn't go well. The title of this record is partly to do with that. It's from a lyric, which is, "Nostalgia is such a vicious creature," as I love to romanticize the past. I'll hold on to this shit with a white-knuckle grip and then I'll be like, "Wait, maybe that's not actually a good thing." I think nostalgia is good when it's applied in the right way, but it's bad when it's not. I also like that, when you take the phrase out, it's like, "Lauren may be a vicious creature," because that's what it's felt like sometimes from a public perspective—but also, even internally within the business.

Sometimes, I don't understand why people don't like me or trust me. I don't think I'm that bad. I've never understood why what I represent scares some people so much.

I realize it's literally what we're talking about in this interview right now, but I do also think it's unfortunate when somebody, especially a woman, is being subjected to hate online and then that becomes wedded to their creative narrative. I have to imagine you'd rather focus on the work a little more rather than talking about what people think about you.
Yeah, and in the band, that did cause issues for us behind the scenes, because everybody wanted the focus to be on the records. I found that quite upsetting, because nobody wants to focus on the records more than me. I would love if we could just talk about the records—if somebody would ask me about my lyrics, or about something that's not "rape culture." But I do think it's just baked into the essence of what it is.

You will never know, culturally, where the band sits would've been the same if we hadn't done those things—because I do think it wasn't the most "outspoken" era. When I look at peers of ours who now talk much more about those things, they weren't really talking about that at that time. There were a lot of DMs and texts behind closed doors, but there weren't people publicly backing you up or using their own voice about those things. I've been talking about it to one friend about it—a musician who's probably slightly bigger than CHVRCHES—and she was like, "That was crazy to see, because I get that too. But there was something specific about what you said—your face, or your band—at that time that really just fucking pissed them off." I don't know what it was.

A lot of the time, I was very conscious of putting on the PR face—answering the questions and redirecting the conversation—and it did feel like people were engaging with it on a surface level. I remember doing a radio interview where an interviewer was like, "So what's your experience with Me Too? Are there any stories you would like to share about assault?" I was like, "Jesus fucking Christ." That stuff really makes my blood boil. As an apparently well-intentioned male radio interviewer, you are not engaging with this in the correct manner.

Yeah, that's pretty ghastly.
Like, if this was in a bar, I would've fucking eviscerated him. But because we were on the radio, I had to be like, "Well, I think how we approach this conversation
really needs a lot of work, because I know that there are women in this room who've experienced things—women in your life, too. You don't have any idea what my experiences with any of those things are. Culture's shifting in inverted commas, but we're really not there yet with how we talk about it.

So, with the last CHRVCHES album, I was like, "If we're going to have to have this conversation, at least I can point you back to the work and be like, this is what it does to your brain if you live in that experience for so long." It was really nice to talk to so many women and a lot of queer and trans people in the fanbase about that record—about their experience of fear, and the omnipresent threat of violence in their lives— and that, to me, was much more valuable as a conversation than any of the prior conversations in the eight years.

You mentioned nostalgia before, which I'm always talking about—to other people, to myself even—in regards to its function as a generational ill. Tell me more about your relationship to nostalgia.
I've never thought about it as our generation's problem, but maybe it is. Maybe I'm also conscious of it because I'm in a band that people of a certain era associate with certain things. It's weird to feel like I'm part of a time capsule of some people's lives, and that's kind of a time capsule of my life, too. Obviously, I remember huge amounts of that experience, but it was also kind of mad. I woke up and I was like, "Where the fuck did my 20s go?" I did it in two-and-a-half year album cycles, and now I'm like, Oh fuck, all my friends are fucking married and they have houses and kids, and they're adults in a way that I'm like, "Oh Jesus, I'm not talking about that."

It's probably a mental health thing, but I used feel homesick all the time—not for a place, but a certain place at a certain time. When I get a wee bit sad and wistful, I think that's just coming to terms with the passage of time and the human condition. I do think that it's what makes me a good friend and family member. I'm always the person that remembers your birthday, I'm always the person that will make you the little book of photos on your wedding. Hopefully that makes me an empathetic person, and I do think it's important to dwell on those things, because what is fucking living if you're not doing those things?

I've definitely rushed through a lot of stuff in life that I wish I hadn't—but, also, sometimes it's made it harder for me to move forward or leave things behind that definitely do need to be left behind. I hold on to things that I shouldn't sometimes: "If I can just tough it out a bit more, then surely we can get back to that." It makes me assume that everybody is like that—then, I get a kickin', and I didn't expect to get a kickin'.

I saw musicals were mentioned in the bio as an influence on this record. Are you historically a musicals person?
I enjoy a little dark musical, yes. Cheery ones are a little harder, maybe just because of the goth nature of my existence. But especially in the writing sense, I love the escapist storytelling. And I am shitting my pants for Wicked, as I'm sure that everybody is. But I definitely loved them a lot when I was a kid, and then I went through the phase of pretending I thought musicals were lame because I was in indie bands. But then I did that with so many things. I was like, "All I listen to are Trail of Dead B-sides." Which, sure! But you can enjoy the Albini demos of In on the Kill Taker and also think that "Cell Block Tango" is the finest song that's ever been written.

When I started the record, I wanted it to feel more theatrical and dramatic. I was thinking about it, not sonically necessarily, but in the feeling of Grace Jones, PJ Harvey, or Annie Lennox—very feminine and theatrical in the storytelling. Half the record ended up being that. and then real life happened, so the other half of it is a bit more of who I actually am, which is quite nice. You get what I think I'd like to tell people about me and the things I end up having to tell people.

One of my favorite CHVRCHES songs is "Warning Call," from the Mirror's Edge Catalyst soundtrack. It seems like video games is a space that the band has always pretty capably occupied. Are you a gamer personally?
See, I'm the the secret bastard in this scenario, because I'm not. Everybody else in the band is. But what's been cool about it is that we get so many people being like, "I heard about you guys from FIFA '15!" and shit like that. Those things are massive in terms of helping the band find our people.

When we got offered to work with Hideo Kojima, obviously the guys in the band knew the significance of that and were so overwhelmed by it—but for me, it was just really cool to meet this person who had such an incredible vision for storytelling and let me fit into somebody else's world in that way.

I feel like I've come to be a game appreciator in terms of worldbuilding, but I don't know, man...I'm a basic Mario Kart bitch. I played Diablo for a minute.

I play Diablo constantly. It's funny you mention Kojima, though. People adore him for what he's done, but he also really loves art and shows that love, which I find very endearing. When he works with people, he's clearly coming at it from a deep love of culture, which is great.
Yeah, it's really rare to find. Honestly, Kojima's done more promotion for my solo material than anybody else in the CHVRCHES multiverse. He's always retweeting it. When you go to his office, it's just full of art and music, and to be that successful and that far into your career and so revered and still be a fan of things and like that probably is a huge part of why he makes things as significant as he does. I was like, "I gotta take notes on this."