Gabrielle Aplin

Gabrielle Aplin logs into our Zoom chat two years after she last featured in HATC Magazine. “That was my first big outing after lockdown” she tells me “that photoshoot we did in Camden, was my first time back in London after it all went down.” At that point the singer-songwriter had just released and toured her third album Dear Happy, her first independent release after leaving Parlophone the year before. Back then we spoke about her journey starting her own label, her new life away from London and her recent ADHD diagnosis.

Sitting down on either side of a screen it doesn’t seem like much has changed – we’re in a zoom interview for one, Gabrielle is still sticking it out as an independent artist and is still living out in the sticks. But in those past two years she has worked tirelessly on a new collection of tracks, that she started sprinkling out throughout the second half of last year. ‘Call Me’ which was released back in June marked the starting point of this new era and saw Aplin newly revitalised and evolving in confidence as an artist as well as a push back to a more organic form of music making, inspired by her new back to basics lifestyle.

“So, I’m still in Somerset, I’ve started working down on a farm as a volunteer one day a week. It’s the best thing in the world and I really prioritise it right now. It started quite strangely; I wanted a lamb for a bunch of press shoots, and I found the farm while looking for the lamb and the owners were really nice and let us shoot down there too. I thought that they would be with me all day, you know making sure I was holding them correctly and whatever, but they just put me in a barn with three lambs and some bottles of milk and said, ‘let us know when you’re done’. So, I spent the day with these lambs, and they just asked me to pay them in volunteer time, so I did, going once a week and I just haven’t stopped.

I end up doing all sorts of jobs, from building things from recycled materials for the schoolhouse they have there where they teach city kids about life on the farm. But they are still a working farm, so lots of looking after the animals, collecting the fruit and veg that is grown and selling it in their market. It was just bailing season too, so I got to go on the tractor in the evening. At the minute it’s a lot of upkeep jobs, which is nice because I get to hang out with the Alpacas. I don’t even mind mucking out the horses – no one else will do it so I do – I mean, I would much rather deal with animal poo than human poo.”

Stripping life back to its most natural form and starting again has been a huge theme throughout Aplins music since she left big city living. Second single ‘Don’t Know What I Want’ and ‘Never Be The Same’ both tackle the topics of personal growth and change, the rediscovery of self once everything you thought made you who you are, has been stripped away. I asked if this metamorphous had been influenced by her move?

“The pandemic really brought to the front for me the realisation that I had no reason to be where I was. Life feels so normal here, I love that. When you live in the southeast and work in music or any other creative industry, because they are so centred around that area, you feel like you are in it all the time. To remove myself from it has been really rewarding. I’m so lucky that something I enjoyed as a passion and a hobby became my job, but I made it my life entirely, everything was about how this was my job, and it became not fun anymore.

I love that here I don’t walk into people I work with when I’m in the supermarket. I’m able to go to work, come home and have everything separated. That has impacted my writing and the stuff I create in a really wholesome way, where a creative decision is now priority based on how it makes me feel as an artist, not on commercial viability or radio suitability. I think I’m doing better work having been allowed that space. My team have also mirrored that, you know, they have allowed me to separate and don’t hassle me to hear things before they are ready in order to influence or change them. I feel very trusted as an artist, which in turn has helped me trust myself and my creative decisions and gut instincts more. I think that needs to be afforded to more artists because otherwise you end up just making the same shit as everyone else.”

After teasing fans with a third single ‘Don’t Say’ and a fourth prepped as an early Christmas present, Aplins fourth studio album Phosphorescent is set to be released in the New Year. The album took shape over those months isolated in Somerset, an experience she looks back on with intense fondness, and one that has fundamentally changed her song writing style moving forward.

“It was a really wonderful time, and wonderful way to make an album. I wanted to make sure it had a sense of modernity, and it was a really forward-thinking record, but the process of making it was so traditional. It came to in a way that I felt like, just didn’t happen anymore. You know, you hear all those old stories of singer songwriters disappearing into Laurel Canyon, not speaking to anyone at the label for a year and just emerging with a finished body of work, and you think ‘yeah there’s no way that happens anymore, labels won’t allow that’

I didn’t really have to write anything for ages also. A lot of other artists, at the start of lockdown, got caught a bit unlucky being at the start of a new project or about to start or in the middle of promoting one, but I was quite lucky that I had just finished my tour weeks before everything stopped. It must have been really hard for those artists to suddenly have to change how they were doing everything when I didn’t have too, but at the same time I was seeing everyone use lockdown to be creative, cracking on with stuff and I did feel a bit of pressure to keep up with that even though I didn’t have to – I had nothing I needed to create, so when that first lockdown ended I did leave it feeling like I had nothing to show for myself compared to everyone else.

It was in the Winter lockdown when I started writing again. I was in the middle of nowhere and it was quiet, and dark and foggy for months – it felt quite bleak but in a beautiful way – and because I had basically completed Netflix, I ended up sitting down and writing songs. Not because I had to, but because I had nothing else to do. You know, it wasn’t in the diary to write, I hadn’t scheduled any sessions I was just naturally writing songs. Then Mike Spencer contacted me saying he would like to make an album – and Mike does a lot of singles but not many records, but he had a few ideas and I had a few songs so it just fell together in that really traditional way of making music. No one asked me for samples before it was ready, no one was pushing me for a date, I just handed in an album after having been left alone and completely trusted to make one. I didn’t set out with any intention to make one, or to make one in this way, it just happened out of circumstance, but I’m 100% going to carry this method forward because it was amazing to just be able to immerse myself into the project for a whole year.

Dear Happy was written with a bunch of different people who didn’t know each other, in different cities all over the world and I came back from all these countries and tried to make all these different songs sound like an album. I did it that way because I was trying to push myself, but it did make a very dispersed album. That was a very strange feeling as a singer-songwriter too, because I would come from writing this song with a bunch of producers and realise, I couldn’t play it – I couldn’t just sit down and do an acoustic performance of this song right now, I must teach myself it. That was quite strange. Whereas this new record all fits together and sounds very grounded in the same feeling in a sense. I liked being able to sit down and write it on piano or guitar, and regardless of how they initially came out sounding I could still tell myself ‘I can play this album front to back, back to front there and then’. Again, that wasn’t something I planned but reflecting upon it, I realise its something incredibly important to me as an artist, as a singer songwriter, to be able to play my songs from the bare bones up.