'I want listeners to feel they are understood - and seen'

Singer-songwriter Marie Naffah speaks to Roisin O'Connor about storytelling, producers, and escaping labels' clutches

Ennui is the currency of many a great songwriter. Bob Dylan wanted to "bid farewell in the night and be gone". Iggy Pop was sick "of all the stiffs" and "all the dips". Harry Nilsson was preoccupied by visions of "sailing on a summer breeze and skipping over the ocean like a stone". Tracy Chapman dreamt of fast cars and "getting out of here". West London artist Marie Naffah encapsulates that same, intrinsic need to escape the suffocating city and explore the unknown.

She was 14 when she wrote her first song, about an imagined heartbreak (she hadn't experienced the real thing). Before that, it was poetry. "It was only when I started writing that I found a means of self-expression," Naffah says, sitting in a sun-soaked pub garden in Folkestone, Kent. Now 29, she's mastered the kind of evocative lyrical style that puts you in her shoes then tells you to run with them.

"Life can be bigger than this," she urges on "I Want More", the opener of her latest EP, Trains. Percussion kicks in, counting down the seconds as a guitar line pushes insistently, like the tide against the shore. On "Run Away With Me", she frets over the days "we waste inside on a grey-cloud night", suggesting instead: "We could be care-free or we do the Bonnie and Clyde thing."