INTERVIEW: girl in red on her new album and tour: “I feel like there’s something more fun about just being playful”
Interview & words: Emma Driver
Image: Heather Hazzan
Published: 26 April 2024
Norway’s girl in red (Marie Ulven) has packed in a lot of music making in the last few years. Right now a new album, I’m Doing It Again Baby! and a current worldwide tour have firmly cemented her place in the pop-music skyline – and she’s only twenty-five, with a lot more music in her yet. It’s all thanks to her skills in writing and producing a diverse array of pop gems that range from upbeat and chatty to emotionally intense and chaotic, freighted with all the feelings a person can feel, sometimes all at once.
Starting out in the Norwegian pop scene in the mid-2010s, singing guitar-based pop songs in her native language, Ulven soon shifted into English-language pop – and then things began to take off. Two viral tracks from 2018, ‘i wanna be your girlfriend’ and ‘we fell in love in october’, propelled her into the mainstream, where she found more and more fans who hooked into her fresh perspectives and voice. In Ulven’s case, that voice is authentic and open about her queerness, and keenly observes her own emotional shifts and tilts, in all their turbulence and sudden moments of clarity.
Ulven played her first international shows in 2018–19, and by 2020 her TikTok presence had attracted followers in their thousands and then millions. Her debut album, If I Could Make It Go Quiet, came in 2021, bringing with it positive reviews from across the music press (“Ulven proves that she’s more than capable of rabble-rousing indie-rock and slow-burning yearning alike,” said NME’s review). By 2022 she’d made it big: signed to Columbia Records, she performed at the iconic Glastonbury Festival, and last year supported Taylor Swift on eight American dates on her mega-selling Eras tour. (“I learned so much from watching Taylor’s shows and seeing how hard she works. My new thing is I’ll ask myself, ‘What would Taylor do?’,” she told Billboard earlier this year.)
Now her second album, I’m Doing It Again Baby!, has arrived, and again it’s an emotional road trip, from upbeat percussive jams (the attitude-soaked ‘You Need Me Now?’ featuring Sabrina Carpenter is a highlight) to piano ballads that show off Ulven’s vocal strength (‘Pick Me’). There’s a gorgeous rock swagger on ‘Doing It Again Baby’, witty music-biz commentary on ‘Five Stars’, and a journey from sweet romance to brain-filling obsession in ‘Phantom Pain’. Ulven’s swagger came to life on her recent performance of ‘Too Much’ on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show, her growing confidence making her ever-more exciting to watch.
Ulven generously took time out just before the first show of her international Doing It Again tour to talk to Women In Pop about the album and her biggest tour yet.
Thanks so much for talking to us, Marie – right before your first show of the tour! You’re in Boston, is that right?
This is the first night so I’m really nervous. But hopefully, it’s gonna be good!
Of course! Have you performed any of the new songs from the new album yet?
I haven’t actually performed it – this is the first night of the tour. So I haven’t performed any new songs – that’s why I’m a little nervous for it.
Are there new songs that you’ve been rehearsing that you think are going to be especially fun to play live?
I like the song ‘New Love’. That’s like a very “classic girl in red” song off the record. I feel like that’s a cool song. And then I also really like ‘I’m Doing It Again Baby!’ because it has a very ’60s, ’70s rock-and-roll vibe to it.
Both are great songs on I’m Doing It Again Baby!, and the album is fantastic. I’d love to hear your thoughts on putting the album together. It feels like an internal map of all the feelings that our brains are capable of, but shaped in a really beautiful way. Did you map it out like that?
I think it was just a lot of trying different things. Definitely, you can try as much as you want to map things out. But really, songs just occur when magic sort of happens in the room, I think, or [when] you don’t really know what’s going on – when things sort of happen. But it was definitely a very careful sort of process of picking everything for the production, and then the words – trying to shape them for the sound, so that they sound good in the mix. I’ve been working in a very detailed way on things – almost maybe a tad too much! So I want to maybe try to be a little bit more free with my next project, whatever it might be.
Your production on the album has such a great range of sounds and subgenres – if you feel that you were maybe too involved, I think it’s really worked well! What’s your process like, of mapping those sounds onto the feelings of the songs?
I think it’s definitely [a process of], ‘What’s this? What’s the song? What’s the feeling?’ You know, if it’s a slower song, maybe having really sharp drums doesn’t make sense – maybe it should be something a little bit more emotional or muffled. Definitely production and feeling go very hand-in-hand. I think so. But I definitely always want to be hands-on because I think that’s when the music sounds like me. You know what I mean?
Yes! I wanted to ask you about the album track ‘Phantom Pain’, because it covers a whole lot of different sounds that run with the feelings you’re singing about. Can you talk a little bit about that song? It’s a great one.
Thank you. That song is like is like trying to capture the craziness of being infatuated with someone and being in love with someone – basically just being head over heels and crazy about someone – and very much embracing the entire spectrum of being crazy about someone. So there’s the bridge with the orchestra, and the whistling, and the birds, and everything. It’s more that ‘I think we’re meant to be!’ nice type of moment. But then also just being totally crazy, being like ‘I love you I love you I love you!’ I’m trying to have a little bit of a sense of humour about it.
And I think you can definitely write a sad song about being crazy in love with someone, but I wanted to make it feel as chaotic as being interested in someone can feel, you know? Like when you are just crazy in love with someone immediately. And you just really want to be with them, but they don’t want to be with you. That sort of thing.
It’s interesting that you mention that humour. We don’t often get your kind of humour in songs about these intense feelings, and your sense of humour pops up all over the album. What role does that play for you when you’re songwriting and expressing these things?
I think before, [my music] hasn’t had that much humour. But I think on this record, I just wanted to have more fun. And it’s because I was having a lot of fun in my real life, and I was embracing jokes and humour in a much more profound way than I had before. Because before, I was viewing [the idea of] “entertainment” in a way that I was kind of looking down on it. But then I started realising that it takes a lot of intellect to have a good sense of humour. I think it’s fascinating how that works. You know, some people don’t get a joke, and there’s many different reasons why not everyone picks up on social things. That’s totally fine. But also I feel like there’s something more fun about just being playful.
It sounds like it reflects how you were feeling. And it helps that your lyrics are very conversational – it’s really satisfying to listen to. Are you interested in the way people talk? Do you bring that into your writing?
I don’t know. I feel like for me, a lot of it is a mystery, and a lot of it happens in my subconscious. And maybe I should sit down and reflect more about it. But also, I think it’s fascinating to kind of leave it as a mystery. I don’t know exactly why it is the way it is. But I’m going to say it’s something about my subconscious that I don’t know. But maybe that might change, you know?
Speaking of verbal dexterity, can we talk about the song ‘Five Stars’ as the closer on the album? I read that you said it was about artistic doubt, and it’s such an interesting song to end the album on. What did you want to leave your listeners with?
That song is like this chaotic little thing that’s tapping into a lot of different energies. I’ve made some artworks for this album that are on the vinyl sleeve, and those are called “Amazingly bad, magnificent trash”. And I’m kind of referencing those lyrics in that song. And so I feel like, in a way, it’s a sort of a sort of a summary song. I just wanted to tap into different feelings and vibes that I’ve had that I haven’t been able to get out in any other way. With “The Factory”, there’s Andy Warhol, and then there’s the Chelsea Hotel – this romanticised image of New York City. And it has this upbeat vibe to it, that sounds almost a little bit jazzy. And then it’s very chaotic. So I think it’s probably going to divide some [people]. It’s just a fun song but also reflecting, “Is what I’m making good?” And I definitely need to be more delusional to continue to make music, because I think it’s very easy to be broken down by the world.
And it has your humour in it too. So … the tour kicks off tonight for you. This is your biggest headline tour so far?
Yes, definitely. These are the biggest rooms I’ve played so far. I have done headlining shows before and had tours but it’s the biggest tour so far, the biggest production. So hopefully, it’s going to be all good!
The fans will love it – guaranteed. We’re really grateful that you could talk to us right before your opening show and we’re excited to see what happens next for you.
Thanks!
I’m Doing It Again, Baby! is out now. You can download and stream here.
Follow girl in red on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, and at www.worldinred.com
See girl in red live on her Doing It Again tour:
2024 North America and Europe tour dates
See https://laylo.com/girlinred/m/gir-tour
2024 Australia/NZ tour dates
See secretsounds.com/tour/girl-in-red-tickets-2024/
11 July 2024 - Centenary, Perth (18+)
14 July 2024 - Hordern Pavilion, Sydney (all ages)
17 July 2024 - Margaret Court Arena, Melbourne (all ages)
21 July 2024 - Fortitude Music Hall, Brisbane (all ages)
23 July 2024 - Spark Arena, Auckland (all ages)
