‘Artists are in financial ruin’

As singer Billie Marten releases her latest album ‘Dog Eared’, she talks to Helen Coffey about her sound, mourning a lost childhood, and why musicians all end up paying Taylor Swift

- Billie Marten, 26, has been in the music industry since the age of 14 (Frances Carter)

“Never meet your heroes is quite accurate, actually,” says the woman sitting opposite me. “Unfortunately, all our heroes are bastards.” Oh dear. It’s pretty ironic that contemporary folk artist Billie Marten is saying this to me, of all people. She’s one of my heroes, but if she is a bastard, she’s hiding it incredibly well thus far.

Truth be told, this isn’t our first meeting. A few years ago, I found myself chatting with a slight young woman at a friend’s party and idly asked what she did for a living. “I make music,” came the reply. Something stirred in my memory at that moment, and I peered more closely at the ethereal face before me: blue-green eyes like wave-softened chips of palest sea glass; creamy skin flanked by curtains of flaxen hair. I remembered with a jolt that she’d introduced herself as “Billie”.

“Wait - you’re BILLIE MARTEN!” I all-but-screamed in the poor woman’s face. “I LOVE YOU!! I’ve been listening to you on repeat while lying in parks and getting over my ex-boyfriend!!!” I'd become mildly addicted to Marten’s voice that summer - so hauntingly pure that it would crack open my ribs and pluck at my heartstrings whenever it caught just-so on certain notes, like a prism bending light.

I wasn’t the only one, it seemed - originally from Ripon, Yorkshire, the now 26-year-old was first “discovered” at the tender age of 14, having started her own YouTube channel five years prior and garnered viral acclaim for her cover of Lucy Rose’s “Middle of the Bed”. By 15, she’d already signed to Chess Club Records, a subsidiary of Sony Music, with whom she recorded two albums: Writing of Blues and Yellows and Feeding Seahorses by Hand. Her 2016 single, “La Lune”, has racked up more than 88 million streams on Spotify.