7 minute read
ORLA GARTLAND
Orla Gartland’s debut, Woman on The Internet, is a reassuring lesson in knowing we’re not unique in our worries. But despite the Irish songwriter’s insistence we’re all the same, her gift for wry storytelling proves she really is quite special.
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“I remember feeling like, 'Musicians cannot catch a break,’” Orla Gartland says, exasperatedly against the backdrop of what looks like a Swedish plywood sauna but is in fact her studio room. The Irish songwriter deserves the respite really. She’s spent the last two weeks on the road finally performing her long-awaited debut across the UK. But heading back out on the live circuit hasn’t exactly been plain sailing. Gigs have been shuffled after original venues closed (some even burnt down!) There are watertight COVID rules to adhere to and, as Gartland is recollecting, the drama of the full band’s gear being stolen from outside their Travelodge in Wembley.
“I got a message from the band Keane saying, 'Do you want to borrow any of our backline?' and I was like 'Why has this post reached more than my album?' This is not the post I needed Keane to see!” she says with a baffled laugh. After the last couple of years the music industry has had, it’s a welcome gesture of solidarity. Not to mention a rare demonstration of how social media can bring us together rather than leaving us riddled with anxiety.
The online world has always been a welcoming one for Gartland who posted her first guitar-based originals on YouTube in the final years of school, after a childhood set against the soundtrack of traditional Irish folk. But when she uprooted to London post-graduating and became aware of her peers’ trajectories, the platform’s sheen began to wane. “You pour all your time into making videos and doing covers but there came a point where I was like, ‘I want to be good.’ I would rather be good with less people around than a huge audience and no substance to my project.”
It’s unsurprising to hear then that since moving to British shores seven years ago, Gartland remains an entirely independent artist, wearing every hat from social media manager to label boss setting up her own distribution company, New Friends Music. Her early intentions of seeking the paved gold streets of the Big Smoke and signing a deal because that was “what most people were doing” were dashed though when confronted with a peek behind the curtain. “Until that point, I'd never even seen a record deal. I didn't know what the inner workings of it were. I was shocked at how not artist-friendly that piece of paper was. The idea of handing over these years and years and years of building people and relationships to For Gartland, it’s a fullscale outfit with a firm handle on the production, press, and visual aspects of the project. The latter is an element she’s been tapping into during the run-up to the release and in the absence of gigs, faced with a schedule repeatedly in flux. Rather than riffing Reels on Instagram, the songwriter poured herself into art direction - from the pastel-hued press shots to a recent string of meticulously crafted mini-films for singles ‘Zombie’ (Wes Anderson meets The War of The Worlds) and ‘You’re Not Special, Babe’ (synced dance routines with a traditional mime troupe).
But even multi-talented musicians are susceptible to comparison syndrome as she remembers her reservations around focusing on heartbreak in last year’s fivetrack EP, Freckle Season. “I shied away from writing about this stuff for so long. I felt like ‘Jesus, what can I add to this that Adele hasn't already said?’” So, when it finally came to pulling together the album, there was no way that Gartland was sharing the limelight. “I didn't want to give anyone else that airtime. It was such a big moment for me that I'd waited for and worked towards for close to a decade that I was like, ‘I don't want to sing all these songs and they remind me of some random person.’”
"Woman On The Internet" then, instead, is part internal
journaling exercise and part social commentary urging us to face the (perhaps, difficult) realisation that we’re not unique. Something that should only bring us closer together, Gartland reasons. “Not in a bad way, in a way that's meant to make you feel less alone. The reckoning of the patterns and chaos of your life is a universal thing. You are anyone on the internet.”
Intimate indie number ‘Pretending’ explicitly references the record’s muse as Gartland enters a relatable, and uncomfortable, social situation falsely complimenting a person’s outfit and professing to “knowing that band”. “Smoky brown eye shadow / I learnt it from a woman on the internet / All the people over there / I'm so fucking self-aware / It’s exhausting”. Ironically given her emphasis on the fact we’re all the same, Gartland’s gift for wry storytelling proves she really is quite special (babe).
Through the record, we find our songwriter dancing around this faceless Wizard of Oz character. Someone to turn to when you can't turn to someone in your own life for whatever reason. The one profile that you find yourself gravitating towards even though you know it’s not particularly healthy. Gartland considers this in former single ‘More Like You’ as she questions “Where'd you get that confidence from? / 'Cause you wear it like a coat / All this feeling second best / It's got me by the throat / That I've been obsessing in the worst way”.
She insists there is an interesting duality in there too that can help us figure out what really counts as we continue to grapple with our love/hate relationship with cyberspace. The virtual self we curate into a carefully grafted grid. The real self that longs to break free of its online trappings. “Obviously, I need to tap into [the internet] for my job. It's not as easy as me flinging my phone in the sea. I also accept that I don't have the energy to keep on top of it to the point that I'm not spending time on music.”
After nearly two years of being forced to create connections online, this pull from the online portal has only heightened for those in the creative industry, as Gartland reflects. “There is an unbelievable pressure as an artist to churn out content constantly. It moves so fast. I released this album in August. It's two months later and I already feel pressure to be putting more music out. It is totally, relentlessly endless,” she says, with an air of sadness. “We're so used to bags and bags of content from But then if the last decade has taught Gartland anything, it’s that you shouldn’t be distracted by others around you and instead set out to forge your own path. The very nature of the digital realm means that programmes and platforms are constantly being optimised and adapted (hello, Meta rebrand) so the songwriter is sticking to what feels authentic to her right now. As she sings on album opener and aptly titled, ‘Things That I’ve Learned’: “Don't compare your face to the other faces, it's not worth it / Take up all the space, even when you think you don't deserve it.”
And so, two days after her band’s van was broken into, Gartland is back on stage in Brighton with borrowed gear, a broken voice from the super flu doing the rounds, and not even a bra to her name (cheers, robbers). Because whilst we might all spend far too much time seeking out a dopamine hit from those likes, nothing beats the sweaty-faced intimacy of real human connections. “[It's] such a simple thing to hear your songs back,” she beams. “I had to make them in such a test tube and all usual road testing was gone. Thank God, they work live. It's too late now!”
