INTERVIEW: Hayley Marsten on her new album 'Girlhood': "I hope that other young women like me hear this record and can learn the lessons that I wish I had learned sooner.'

Interview: Jett Tattersall

Alt-country singer-songwriter Hayley Marsten wanted her second album Girlhood, released last Friday, to be the collection of music her younger self needed to hear. Brought up to be a ‘nice’ girl, polite and never complaining, alongside a mentality that the only things a teenage girl needed to do was to be cool, likeable and attractive to boys, left her with a sense she was never allowed to show her real self.

“There was too much fear or shame around it,” she says. “I wanted this record to be all of those things that I wished that I could’ve been back then, but felt too scared to be.”

Girlhood has a powerful message behind it, but was conceived in moments of darkness. After the release in mid-2019 of her debut album Spectacular Heartbreak, she was feted by the industry with nominations at multiple music awards and half a million streams. When covid hit, Marsten’s whole livelihood, as well as joy, was taken away from her overnight. “A lot of my self-worth was tied to being able to work and achieve,” she says. “When I couldn’t do that, it was really hard for me to get out of bed.”

Marsten entered therapy, which she says allowed her to reflect on who she was, and how she treats herself, and ultimately informed much of the album. Maintaining ‘songwriting dates’ with longtime collaborator Kieran Stevenson gave Marsten something to look forward to, and together they created four tracks for the album.

In creating the album, Marsten threw out her usual method of recording - travelling out of her home state Queensland and booking a studio for two weeks - and decided to record the album in Brisbane over a longer period of time, recording in bits and pieces and taking her time. It is a process that has paid off in droves. Marsten sounds more confident and assured than ever before, and there is a new strength and nuance to her voice. It has also allowed her to authentically inhabit a broader range of sounds, with rock and synthesisers sitting alongside her core alt-country.

The album kicks off with ‘Getting Better’, which opens with moody strings before moving into guitar-country-pop territory and lyrically sets the scene for the album. “Some days I barely feel it / Some times I think I’m cured / And I can be the girl I was at 25, so brave and self assured / But I never can get all the way back to her.”

‘Drowning Myself’ has a delicious, 1980s-synth soundscape and sees Marsten looks at how past mistakes can hold us back as we wallow in the pain and regret associated with them. ‘Teen Movie’ is a beautifully tender guitar ballad with soft angelic backing vocals that looks at how so much of our understanding of, and reaction to, love, romance and relationships can be influenced by the films and media we consume.

Fourth single ‘I Am A Rich Man’ - inspired by Cher’s iconic quote ‘I don’t need to marry a rich man mum, I am a rich man’ - is a rocky, empowering anthem that celebrates and encourages the right of all women to choose to do whatever they want with their life.

‘Feel It All’ veers again into electronic pop territory, with a quietly shimmering beat as a foundation and gorgeous melodies, it is quite possibly the highlight on the album. Marsten sings of having multiple, conflicting emotions, and sometimes none at all, and challenges the cliche that having strong, emotional feelings are a sign of weakness. ‘Write it off and say that I’m too emotional / But why is it here at the same time / If I’m not meant to feel it all?’

Latest single ‘I Knew The Pain’ opens with an electric guitar and morphs into a country-rock track and explores how depression can sometimes become a security blanket, and tricks us into thinking it is easier to live with it then face the fear of the unknown of tackling life successfully without it. ‘Good Writer’ brings in the classic country music banjo twang, while ‘My Body Was Not My Own’ is a delicate, heart rending ballad that relives a traumatic experience from Marsten’s younger years.

Title track ‘Girlhood’ was the last song written for the album. A warm, pop-rock song, it is a bittersweet farewell to youth - celebrating, reminiscing before embracing adulthood. “Goodbye to girlhood / So long to who I thought I would…I’ll do things you thought I never could / Only now at 29, leaving girlhood behind.”

The album ends with a live track, ‘Last Transmission’. Written at a time when Marsten thought she may give up music entirely, it was recorded in front of an audience of fans who contributed to the crowdfund Marsten set up to fund the recording of Girlhood.

Marsten has created an album of immense beauty with Girlhood. It has a soundscape that never follows a standard path - country, pop, rock, synthpop and more all weave seamlessly together - and has something for everyone. As beautiful as the music is, where it really excels is lyrically. The stories told in the song are raw, honest, vulnerable and empowering, as well as universal and relatable. Marsten has a real talent to write songs that hit you right in the soul and Girlhood is sure to quickly become your new favourite album. We recently sat down with her to chat more about its creation.

Hi Hayley, so lovely to meet you. First of all, congratulations on Girlhood, however, before I get into that, can we just do a little shout out to your delicious cover art? It is beautiful!
Thank you! We have a vinyl shelf in our lounge room and very egotistically I have put it up, because I'm up myself, obviously! But thank you, I really put a lot of time and effort into planning that

But that’s really good, because album art needs to be displayed.
Yes, this is the first time I've had a vinyl release as well so I feel like it's such a bigger canvas to play with. I spent a lot of time on it, because it's called Girlhood and I wanted it to be very girly and have that not be a bad things. It's always been seen as really derogatory, to be girly. We think it's cool to be girly and to like girly things!

It is incredibly cool, but we don't often as women appreciate how cool that is until we're past it and we've missed out on appreciating it.
Exactly, that's exactly how I feel. I feel like I was not truly allowed by the people I was growing up around, but also myself, to actually just embrace the things I really liked when I was a teenager, because it was lame to care. It's always weird, like, if you care too much, then that's embarrassing.

If you care too much, it's embarrassing. If you're a girl, it's embarrassing. If you just hang out with girlfriends, it's embarrassing. I imagine if you listen to female musicians, it was embarrassing.
In high school, I got so much shit for being a massive Taylor Swift fan. I was like, ‘she's great and I like her’. That was probably the only things I didn’t back down from. The fact that I was such a staunch Taylor Swift fan in the 2010s, now as a grown up woman I get to experience her re-recording her albums. I was a fan originally, so I get to experience my favourite records twice because I actually just stuck to my guns and liked the things I liked. I think that was very well done by past me!

I think that’s incredibly well done by past you. Is part of that hope that this album does that for another generation of you, to go ‘you know what? I like the pink record that's got a country vibe sung by a woman. I'm gonna own it all through high school.’
Yes, I kind of hope that other young women like me hear this record and can maybe learn the lessons that I wish that I had learned sooner. I wrote this record as kind of sending it back in time to my teenage self and just thinking about all this stuff that I wish I had known, but also understanding that I did the best with what I had. It's not like I was silly and naive. I was just doing what I could do. Also, sometimes country music gets a bad rap that it's all about like trucks and drinking, and I feel like my favourite songwriters in country music are women speaking about the female experience. I am such a big Taylor Swift fan and she was really the first artist in such a long time to speak directly to young women, that's why I loved her so much. I wasn't a country fan at the time, I really was like ‘country music, bleurgh’ because all I had heard of it was country music made for older people. I'm just hoping that I could be the kind of artist that Taylor Swift was for me, for other young women.

I think so, and you've bridged that straight up on the opener, like the dramatic strings that open ‘Getting Better’. It is a classic country song, however, it just catapults it into a modern day track, which I think is beautiful. Talk to me about the creation of this track, because it really sets the tone for the rest of the album.
Thank you. I actually wrote it just because we needed one more update song! I'd been knocking around with this idea for ages, and originally when we were recording this album, I thought it was going to be called I'm Fine, Thanks. I thought in my twisted brain, it would be really funny to have an album called I'm Fine, Thanks all about my deteriorating mental health. It's not funny, but it's funny to me. I wrote that song and I wanted it to be kind of like if Haim made a country song, that kind of a vibe. As we were recording it, I was like, ‘this is kooky, but what if we had this big orchestral strings opening, and it was really dramatic?’ I love some dramatic shit happening in music, it's so fun and unexpected. I'm very lucky that I got to make this record with so many people who know me really very well. My co executive producer Cody McWaters, we met in preschool so I have known him for most of my life. Because of that I have a lot more confidence to bring some weird and wacky ideas to the table. The direction I gave was ‘I want this big strings part, and then I want the drums to come in and like stomp on the strings. Like when in The Sims, your sim gets angry and stomps on a dollhouse.’ It's really lucky that I had some of my best friends in the studio to give that production note, because that is insane when I say it out loud! I wanted the song to feel as dramatic as the frustrations sometimes feels when you're doing the work and you feel like you're making headway but then all of a sudden, it's not this linear healing journey. You're like back to square one. It became the obvious opener after we put that strings intro on as well. It's just a perfect way to be like, ‘welcome! This is dramatic, and so am I.’

This is your second album. I've never made one, but I imagine the pressure is on particularly when it comes on the back of some pretty big shout outs because 2019’s Spectacular Heartbreak did incredibly well and catapulted you into a lot of people's minds and radars. It's a very different album we have now, but how did you approach that, that fear of the follow up?
When we were making the record, I was still writing some of the songs, I didn't write the title track until January of this year. But once we were in the studio, I had the mindset that I have already made a great record that sounds like Spectacular Heartbreak. I think I did that album really well, and I think there's nothing on there that I wish I had done better, or I wish I had written in a different way or that the production was different. I think it was a perfect record for what it was. Spectacular Heartbreak, if you're gonna categorise it, is a breakup album, or about heartbreak and loss in some way, and I was like, ‘Well, I've done that really well now, and I don't want to do the same thing again.’ So I felt a little bit of creative freedom because I could burn the house down and start again. I don't want to give people the same thing over and over and over again, and that's boring for me as well.

When I first started writing this album, I didn't know I was writing this album, I was just killing time. A lot of the songs that ended up being on the record were written in 2020 and I was just doing it so I had a reason to get out of bed. I thought they were good songs, and I really liked them, but I didn't know if I wanted to come back to music - I didn't know if I could do it anymore. I also felt like I was old news at that point, because Spectacular Heartbreak had come out and it had been really great, and when the pandemic hit, I felt there were all these other people doing incredible things and I just sort of stagnated because I just did not have the will to keep on yee ha-ing. Even if there hadn't been a global pandemic, I was so intensely burnt out that there's just no way I could have even continued at the same pace. So at the beginning, I was just writing songs for the sake of it, but it all happened the way it was absolutely supposed to happen in the end.

I love that, it all happened the way it was supposed to see. People tell us that all the time, but it's really hard to believe it.
It really is. I wanted to have this album finished, signed, sealed, delivered in September last year. Having four co-producers is great, but trying to coordinate our schedules is very difficult, so that's why it did push out. That also led to me having more time to think about the release. I signed with [record label] Cheatin’ Hearts in that time and had it been finished maybe I would have been rushing it out in a different way. Because we still had time, I had time to rethink the album title, there's just no way I would ever have called it I'm Fine, Thanks because I just I knew it wasn't the name. I say ‘girlhood’ in another song, but I was like ‘I don't want the only mention of girlhood to be one one word in one song’. Because I had the time, I got to slide in one extra song onto the record that is the title track. It's funny looking back on it now, that everything was right on time, as it turns out.

Isn't it amazing how it's very hard to see the forest through the trees. And then of course, the whole album, the concept that you didn't know was a concept, the theme that runs through the whole thing, and then your gorgeous album art, you're like, ‘well, it could never have been anything but.’
Yeah, it's so weird because even while I was writing this record, I had to go home to Gladstone at the start of last year, and I had a lot of time just to look at all the stuff in my childhood room. I found my teenage diary, which just was a very sad handwritten book! I just felt very connected to my past self. But again, I wasn't thinking that I was calling this record Girlhood, but I was thinking, ‘I want to make this record something that my teenage self would have listened to and loved’. It would have had all the many different genre influences that I loved and it wouldn't have to fit in this one box, and just be this one kind of artist. I'm a multifaceted person, so of course I'm a multifaceted artist and songwriter.

It's a teenage girl bedroom album.
Yes, that's my dream!

Girlhood is out now via Cheatin’ Hearts. You can buy and stream here.
To keep up with all things Hayley Marsten you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.