The Irish songwriter Orla Gartland refuses to oversimplify romance on her new album, “Everybody Needs a Hero.”
“Pop music for me can be a little too black-and-white sometimes,” she said in a video interview from her home studio in London. “Lyrically, a love song or a breakup song can be really straightforward. But that’s not my experience. The line is never that straight. You know, it’s sticky and meandering. It’s a lot of, like, ‘I love you … but.’”
Gartland, 29, has been her own pop cottage industry for most of her life. Raised in Dublin, she started playing Irish traditional music on fiddle when she was 5 and moved on to learn guitar, keyboard and drums. She has also mastered the crucial 21st-century skill of video self-branding, creating a constant stream of content.
Gartland started posting songs to YouTube — covers and then originals — in 2009, and she released her first official single in 2012. “There’s something so naïve in my early videos,” she said. “I get very nostalgic about that era of the internet, because I do think that no one had really made a career on the internet yet.”
She called that moment “really pure and good-natured, like people were putting up things because they were so alive to a community. I remember putting songs up and being absolutely fascinated by the fact that I could play a song and upload it from my bedroom in Dublin, and then someone from the Philippines could comment five minutes later.”
At 18, she moved to London to launch a full-time career in music instead of going to college. In England, she made connections with other musical YouTubers, including Lauren Aquilina, who has collaborated on some of her new songs, and Dodie, with whom she has toured as an opening act and band member.
A steadily expanding audience — including paid Patreon subscribers to her “Secret Demo Club” — watched Gartland’s songwriting evolve from solo guitar strumming to multilayered pop constructions. Alongside touring steadily, she built her online fandom by delivering her subscribers early demos and “rambling blog posts,” she said in a 2018 video. When her song “Why Am I Like This?” was used in “Heartstopper,” a Netflix series about gay teenage boys falling in love, she released a detailed tutorial about its guitar parts.
As her online presence documented, Gartland started out recording in her bedroom. Now, as she showed on video from London, she has a studio stocked with guitars, keyboards, a drum kit, an upright piano and even an isolated vocal room: “Everything a girl could want.” Gartland has amassed more than 292,000 followers on YouTube and more than 172,000 followers on Instagram, reflecting enough of a fandom to turn out full houses for club and theater tours in Britain, Europe and North America.
After nearly a decade of putting out singles and EPs, Gartland made her debut album, “Woman on the Internet.” She had plenty of time on her own during pandemic lockdowns to work on songs in her home studio; many dealt with insecurities, betrayals and standing up for herself. Then she took her demos to a professional studio, Middle Farm in Devon, England, to flesh them out with her touring band members and other musicians.
Although Gartland had been recording and arranging her songs from the beginning, with “Woman on the Internet,” released in 2021, she finally claimed credit as a producer or co-producer on her songs. “A lot of women that I know, in lots of areas of music, struggle to own a title,” she said. “The more I observe people who make music, the more I fear that’s a deeply female affliction. For whatever reason, they talk themselves out of owning that till the end. When I’m working with other girls, I am always trying to gas them up if I feel that they’re producing. I’m just, like, ‘Make sure that you are credited on your song.’”
Gartland’s new album took shape over two years, with breaks for gigs and other projects. One was Fizz, a group Gartland formed with Dodie and two other songwriters, which made an album of breezily twisted vocal-harmony pop, “The Secret to Life,” and went on tour.
She returned to Middle Farm to complete “Everybody Needs a Hero,” with many of her previous collaborators but a more improvisational, noisier approach. Some songs were built on studio jam sessions, giving them a more organic core. Gartland was also eager to use newly untamed instrumental sounds.
“Orla was really down to explore just what kind of different worlds we could go to,” said Tom Stafford, who was a musician, songwriting collaborator and co-producer on both albums, in an interview from London. “With this album she was like, ‘I really want to push even further than the previous album, to go even bolder.’
“The adjective for the album was that she wanted it a bit ‘squonky.’ That was initially one of the words used to describe it. To just have everything be a little brash, a little bit ugly.”
“Everybody Needs a Hero” uses a full-spectrum pop and rock vocabulary to chronicle the bumpy dynamics of a long-term relationship. “This whole album, it’s all about one relationship and viewing it all from different sides,” she said. “I’m trying to celebrate all the different ways you can feel about one person. It’s just trying to see the same thing from different angles, on different days.”
The album opens with a piano-and-voice ballad, “Both Can Be True,” about being “four years in” to a relationship where “You make me feel high, you make me feel blue/I’m stuck in between froze and feeling everything.” But then it jettisons decorum. There’s raucous new wave as Gartland confronts self-doubt in “Backseat Driver,” chunky rock as she boasts about being someone’s “Little Chaos,” and a sardonic strut in “Late to the Party,” which shifts gears multiple times as she overthinks her partner’s ex-lovers: “I gave you your favorite T-shirt,” she sings. “She gave you trust issues.”
But the album isn’t all bravado. In June, Gartland released “Mine,” a stark waltz about coming to grips with deep trauma. Gartland sings about the lasting damage from a boy who “said it seemed like I wanted it,” and about how difficult it could be to find trust again. Over a pizzicato string arrangement, she sings, “I still remember the time you looked me dead in the eyes/and I realized that my body was mine.”
Writing it was “a toughie,” she said. “I thought about writing the exact song for maybe more than five years, and I never quite had the words or the courage. And when I did sit down and actually write it, the song just, like, wrote itself. I’ve never had that experience before.”
At times, Gartland has misgivings. “My job sometimes can feel like commercializing your feelings,” she said. “But any time I’ve had something that’s just hard to navigate, songs gave me somewhere to put it. Particularly like after something hard happens: a breakup, grief, anything like that. When I think of people that don’t have that as an outlet, I really feel for them.”
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