How Laura Mvula Beat Anxiety, Teamed With ‘Legends’ for New LP
In the age of the bedroom producer, Laura Mvula operates with the sensibility of a Sixties pop composer, using the whole weight of an orchestra to create unusually delicate tracks. “Everybody’s trying to make music to get to Number One or be the hippest thing – it’s a trendsetting culture,” she tells Rolling Stone. “I consider it my curse that I neither care about that, nor am I able to do it.”
But there’s a blessing there too: Mvula’s 2013 debut, Sing to the Moon, earned her a slew of award nominations and attracted a public endorsement from Prince. “She was something different than everybody out there,” veteran guitarist Nile Rodgers, who appears on Mvula’s new sophomore album, explained to Rolling Stone. “Even though we’re all governed by similar rules in Western music, she was treating things differently, blending her voice with orchestral instruments to come up with timbres that you normally don’t hear.”
The Dreaming Room, out now, maintains the idiosyncrasies of Mvula’s debut while also daring to incorporate the strut of more conventional pop forms like disco. Though the album is incisive and graceful, it did not come easily. Following the release of Sing to the Moon, Mvula found herself creatively spent. “I really had no idea how I was gonna write any more music,” she tells Rolling Stone. “Anything I tried, it didn’t work.”
This artistic obstruction was exacerbated by personal crises. Mvula was experiencing debilitating panic attacks stemming from anxiety. “It can be such an isolating illness,” she says. “You’re often convinced that it’s yourself against the rest of the world.” “My marriage was now publicly over,” she adds. “Before The Dreaming Room, I went to my lowest place. It was like I had to face everything that I’d been running from for many years. Now all of a sudden I couldn’t run, and I had an album to write.”
“I really had no idea how I was gonna write any more music.”
A trip to New York City helped end the stalemate. “Maybe it was the winter of New York that was so harsh?” she muses. “We were indoors for so long. You have to keep yourself entertained.” “To change it up, I started to make little videos on my phone,” she continues. “They were just me filming a falling leaf, or turning the pages of a book, and I would put music to it. It was refreshing to do it that way rather than just sit at the piano and wait for something to fall out of the sky. Writing 20 or 30 seconds of music didn’t seem as taxing.”
Though Mvula’s debut was dense with instrumentation, it was rarely forceful; this time, she hoped to add some zing. “I knew when I was doing the demos – rhythmically, sonically, I wanted the power and the range the guitar brings.” On The Dreaming Room, that instrument appears in the hands of formidable players: Lionel Loueke, a virtuoso from Benin, John Scofield, who contributed to several Miles Davis records, and Rodgers, whose licks have ignited dance floors for nearly four decades. (Co-producer Troy Miller is no slouch at the instrument either – he does an impressive Rodgers impersonation on “Phenomenal Woman.”)