Mabel: “What do I want? What’s the music I want to make? And what does my voice sound like?”

Mabel: For sure. I think it shows confidence in my identity. With this chapter, I really wanted to not reinvent but reintroduce myself to give people a real sense of who I am. Who my partner knows me as, who my friends know me as, and who my mum knows me as. I wanted to bring that person into the music and into the workspace. There was always a distance between the real me and the artist version of me. That felt really important on this tape, and ultimately that’s why it ended up being self-titled. This is really just being me!

A hundred percent! I started very young. A way for me to make sense of all of it was by playing a character and separating the onstage and the offstage me. Getting to this project now was making music again in the way I was making it in the beginning. Free of inhibitions. Free of what people might want me to make, and free of anyone’s opinions other than my own. I could have done that only at this point in my career. It was only possible now to find that confidence and peace of knowing that you can’t please everyone. I’m turning 30 next year; I’ve been doing this since I was 18. In the later part of my twenties I started asking myself, “What do I want? What’s the music that I want to make? And what does my voice sound like?“ If I want to carry on doing this, I have to make a decision to do this just for myself.

It’s actually easier for me anyway to please other people. I’ve always found that quite easy. When you have done years and years of pleasing other people, you almost don’t know your own opinion on stuff. It took time from my last album to now. A lot of it was experimenting and putting together a tapestry of who I am. It was like getting to know myself. The actual writing process of the mixtape was pretty quick. I wanted to put together a project quickly and imperfectly of where I’m at right now.

I was always like, “I have to achieve certain things by the time I’m 25 or whatever.” A lot of expectations that I have put on myself. I think I could only write the music that I’m writing now because of my life experience and because of the things I have been through. It takes the time that it needs to take. It’s also about redefining what success means for me. When I was at my ‘most successful’ time, when I was having big streaming numbers or performing on TV shows, I don’t think that I felt very successful, because I wasn’t totally confident in what I was doing. I am really grateful for everything that’s happened up to this point, and the most successful I ever felt is right now.

Absolutely. It’s a sort of brain dumping. I’m letting out a lot of emotions that I think up until this point I wasn’t even able to verbalize. My disappointment in the music industry and other things that I have experienced. Anger, gratitude, a lot of mixed emotions. With this mixtape, I’m showing people something that isn’t necessarily perfect. Normally I’d spend a lot of time redoing my vocals. Everything that’s on the mixtape is as it was as I was writing it in my living room. I left that sometimes imperfect vocal take because the emotion was in there. Coming from a glossy pop background, that was very different for me.

Definitely. It was all made at home with my closest people. I wanted people to get to know the at-home me. I think where you are affects what you’re creating. For me, it felt important to show that side. For my next performances, we built a living room setup. We bring a sofa on stage, and I’ll have my laptop… Showing people the imperfect process of creating music. You don’t just open your mouth and sing things exactly as they end up being. It’s all the little bits in-between and making the mistakes that make the show what it should be.

My phone (laughs). I wrote all of my lyrics on my laptop this time around, with all my notifications silenced. I think the distraction sometimes is booking studios and being creative in a certain timeframe, whereas creativity happens when it happens. I was inviting people to the recording sessions, asking them if they want to make some music. Sometimes my friend Oscar would stay over in our guest bedroom. So if we wanted to make music at 1 a.m. or 2 a.m., we could do that. By putting my studio at home, I wanted to create this collective space of freedom and creation. Even if you came to my house at 1 or 2 in the morning and stuff wasn’t happening, we would just sit on the sofa for a while and watch TV, or we would go out into the garden. If inspiration strikes us at 6, then we can start at 6. If it doesn’t, just come back tomorrow or another time.

I love having life and art happening at the same time. My husband, he goes to the office during the day. There’s something really interesting about him coming home at 6, the door opening and closing, and him making his dinner in the kitchen and me being like, “Babe, we’re doing a vocal take. Can you please shut up for five minutes and turn the kitchen fan off?” Also, my dogs bark every time the doorbell goes. There are times we literally have to stop recording until all of the noise has gone. But all of these things make it so beautiful. For me, the real distraction is getting out of my pajamas, putting a mask on, and going outside into the world to be the artist, instead of just being me at home.

I`m specifically talking about the male gaze. I felt a lot that I’ve been defined by the way that I look. That’s been a main point of conversation for people as opposed to my music or the statements that I make. That’s a shame because the way that I look is the least interesting thing about me. But it somehow always seems to end up in the center of everything. With “Look At My Body,” I wanted to tell that story, and Shygirl obviously is a good friend of mine. It’s a conversation we just had woman to woman, artist to artist. It made sense to her to be on that track.

I remember burning CDs when I was younger. Today I write songs for my husband all the time, and then I send them to him. I feel that is pretty romantic. We’ve been together for five years and have been living together for a long time. We got engaged last year, so we planned our wedding in just six months… He’s not interested in all the glossy stuff and all the bullshit but wanted to get to know the real me. That inspired me as well making the mixtape. Also having the affirmation that the person I really love loves the imperfect person that I am. He was really uninterested in all the things that I thought I needed to be: attractive as a person and attractive as an artist. That’s not what he loves about me. He made me feel good enough just being who I really am. My parents both obviously work in music. I would say they are very collaborative. Same with my husband and me. We don’t necessarily work together, but there’s an exchange at home of my opinions on what he’s doing and vice versa.

It’s not that we sat down and ever had a big talk about it. My parents pretty much live their art, and I think just being around them has been the best advice. They’ve never made a conscious decision to be rebellious, but they’ve always danced to their own drum, and they have always done what they felt was spiritually correct and what made my mum happy. Same with my dad. People always say his productions were so revolutionary. I don’t think they ever sat down to think about how to revolutionise the sound of this or that. It’s just them being like, ‘This is what we want to make, and we don’t care what anybody thinks.’ For me, that’s been the best advice, and the best inspiration is watching them do what they do. My mum’s never let genres or people’s opinions box her in. We are very similar in that sense. We are from these different places, we’ve lived all around the world, and there are lots of different cultures at play. The reason why we are who we are is because of these beautiful things. I’ve been calling my mixtape a beautiful chaos. And I’ll always say, that’s what I am, too.

I’ve started experimenting now; it’s all in preparation. It was really important for me on this tour to be super intimate and deliver that living room experience. I will take pieces of home with me on stage; I just want people to leave the show feeling like they’ve got to know me a little bit better.