“When people listen to your upcoming album Dogeared, where should they imagine you writing the songs?”
Musician Billie Marten, on the other end of the Zoom call, looks around the room in which she is sitting. “The Glass was written right here…Most of them were written here actually. Yellow makes me want to create. So they should imagine me in a yellow room.”
In her house in Hackney, Billie was sitting in a yellow room and the contrast of her blonde hair with the yellow wall made her look like she was glowing. Born in Ripon in North Yorkshire, she first started singing and picked up the guitar when she was eight, but her career started when she was twelve. There was a YouTube channel in North Yorkshire that was for local artists to sit down and get recorded. Billie went and got recorded and, when she was done, the two guys helping to record looked at each other and said “Well, what do we do this now?” They asked to manage her, but they were not really managers. Soon afterwards, Billie says, “people from London caught me”, and ever since she has “flourished” at making music in a serious professional capacity. Now she is twenty-five, with over 500 million downloads, four albums, and an upcoming fifth (Dogeared to be released on July 18th 2025). It’s hard to not be in awe of Billie.
People like Billie, who achieve such fame at a young age – a similar age to that of most Cherwell readers – always feel like distant idols. Billie is an idol of mine, because of her ‘grown-into-herself-ness’ which she portrays and if you listen to her music it is not hard to hear that come through. One of my favorite songs ‘This is How we Move’ off of her 2023 album Drop Cherries has this refrain which is full of tenderness:
“I got what I was asking for
And I dug myself right up
The earth was pouring on my brow
And I knew I was enough”
This kind of lyricism, steeped in life and softness, defines Billie’s sound not only as a musician but as a person.
“When was the first time you took yourself seriously as an artist?” i asked
Billie smiled softly, “Oh, ah, that’s still a work in progress. Identity is such a tricky subject, and I’m working on not taking myself as seriously as I have in the past. But with that comes more vulnerability and, you know, self deprecation and things that aren’t necessarily helpful or attractive for an artist. I think everybody needs to take themselves a little bit seriously, otherwise, you know, who’s going to believe in them? You have to believe in yourself. But it is pretty much my whole career I have written about this specific issue.”
Drop Cherries she describes as “always the album I wanted to make from the beginning. I [just needed] enough experience and heart in order to make it.” The new album, Dogeared, is in many ways an ode to this kind of aging process, examining how exhausting it is to develop a heart and a sense of self. The title itself is in reference to the dogearing of books, but also “to age and experience and how I feel sometimes, like I am so tired, and yet, I am 25 years old, you know, that’s bonkers. And when something is dogeared, it’s thumbed through, and it’s worn, and it’s, you know, it’s lived a life. Sometimes I feel that way.”
This is a feeling that is resonant for the way in which the pace of life often moves. I feel a kind of relief when she says that she, too, feels tired. It makes me feel less isolated in the process of what it means to grow up. However, there is some disconnect between Billie’s ‘worn-ness’ and my own. Billie is thirteen years into her music career; I am approaching the final year of my university career which feels like it will uproot of all the things I find comforting. Part of the awe of someone whose music career started when they were younger is that they seem to be on this fast track through all the unknown facets of growing up. What would a life feel like if you started your career young?
“Do you ever feel like you either had to or got to skip the phase where you figure out like what you’re doing with your life, like that kind of, you know, 21-year-old life crisis. Or do you feel like you had that in a totally different way?”
“Definitely had some crises,” Billie says, “but there’s lots of things that I will have to return to later in life, like I didn’t study. I would love to do that, and I really wanted to, but I couldn’t, because I had a job.”
Taking a brief pause she looks down at her lap, then back into the camera of her computer.
“Live in a different country. I mean, there’s nothing stopping me doing that, except I love London. But yeah, I imagine there’d be a sort of, maybe late 30s, early 40s, teenage regression to just to just go back to being unsure.”
She feels no shame in saying that she may not do music for her whole life: “It’s my passion, and it is an important thing to me within my very soul. But I don’t know if I need to make it.”
When I ask what is on the list of things for her teenage regression, Billie smiles. “Be in some community that we have all signed up for at the same time, because I never did that. It’s very isolating. I was lonely at that time because I wasn’t going to uni and I didn’t have my own age to figure things out with. So I wonder if there’s an undergraduate degree for 38 to 45 year olds. Mmm…Have some reckless love affairs. Definitely, definitely necessary. Gonna need to get my heart broken.”
“How many times would you say it has been broken so far?”
“Zero.”
“Zero?!”
“I’ve had people that have that have left, but my heart wasn’t theirs, so never broken in the clinical sense”
When I finished the interview and spoke with a friend who is also a devoted fan, I told her that Billie said she never had her heart broken. Astounded, my friend said: “But I’ve used all her music through all my breakups! There is no way she hasn’t gotten her heart broken.” True, the melancholic tenderness of Billie’s music make it feel like a shelter for aching hearts; and yet, she is writing not from her own broken heart, but from the same emotional genre, which makes her words real and rooted in her own worn-ness of growing.
“I think a lot of fans have felt a lot of pain from themselves,” she says. “I’ve listened to people talk about that quite a lot, or how they find the music in a dark spot. There’s quite a lot of darkness that people hold when they come to see a show and my job is to make sure that they are held and seen, and to make sure that, like [the song] came from me, so this feeling, I have been there.” Pausing a moment, Billie settles on that thought. “I wonder how they’re going to react to Dogeared, since maybe that’d be less, but it’s important. It’s important to share both sides. You know, I’ve got to show them light.”
Dogeared, while it’s an ode to aging and developing heart, is imaginative. Most of the songs, though written in her home, are not about her home, are not even about places she fully knows. “Which is just so freeing for me, because I don’t have to sing again and again about something quite dramatic or me being mean to myself.” In this way, Dogeared is the ultimate ode to the worn-ness of aging because she embodies her aging as the potential to see things she could not have previously imagined.
Billie holds up a white CD disk to the camera with the words ‘As Long As’ written on the front in sharpie. This was one of her first EP’s. “I listened to this the other day, and I thought I sounded like a little blueberry.” She laughs lightly. “I thought I was so grown, but that’s just the thing about growing, it’s like trying on a pair of your dad’s jeans. One day you get into your dad’s jeans as a child [and they are huge], and one day they fit perfectly. When you’re a child, your dad’s jeans, you imagine they are the end, but there will always be a bigger pair of jeans somewhere.”
So Billie is not done growing. Feeling worn does not stop trying to find bigger jeans, it just makes you appreciate the search.
