Sharing secrets from city neighbourhoods
Singer-songwriter Laura Mvula isn’t one for staying in one place too long. “In patois, my family’s dialect, my nan calls me, ‘The girl that don’t like she own home’,” says Mvula in her deep, buttery voice. “This means I always love to be in another place, and I think that has to do with storytelling.”
The 33-year-old Birmingham native made a name for herself releasing powerful, soulful music, with her 2013 album Sing To The Moon and 2016 follow-up, The Dreaming Room both garnering Mercury Prize nominations.
“Every place, wherever you are on the planet, has its own story or stories, plural – and songwriting is just that,” says Mvula. “So for me, in order to access new stories – or at least stories that are new to me – I need to be in literally another place from what I’m used to. I need to keep moving.”
The travel bug hit Mvula at a young age. “Back in the Nineties we didn’t have loads of money, we didn’t have extravagant holidays,” she says. “So we had to be creative with the places we did visit, whether that was Abergele in Wales, Plymouth or Cornwall. I got used to my parents finding ways to make places we visited a hundred times more exciting, and I’ve got that exploring nature.”
Touring and recording have since taken Mvula all over the world. These are some of the places that have particularly helped her creativity...
Los Angeles
Mvula recently spent a month and a half in LA working on her third album. “I’d visited LA when touring, but it’s very different,” she says. “Before having this opportunity I had very closed, stereotypical ideas about LA not having the grit of New York or London – just having people who only enjoy yoga and smoothies.”
However, spending a bit more time there showed Mvula how much LA has to offer, from the local arts scene to the surroundings. “LA is a place where you can pretty much have access to everything,” she says. “The landscape is beautiful because it’s so flat – you can see everything, you can see so much sky. You can hike if you want, you can go to the beach a few miles away, you can go to the Hollywood Hills – where I was staying, so I had this beautiful view of the city to wake up to every morning.”
Crucially, “I had forgotten what sunshine was,” she adds with a chuckle.
New York
New York is where Mvula created The Dreaming Room. “That was an amazing experience because I was in the heart of the East Village, where Jimi Hendrix built his Electric Lady Studio,” she says. “So I was working in an iconic New York space for three weeks, which was special, and they’ve kept so many of the features of the studio since the late Seventies.”
It also helped that the city has everything going for it: “Whether it’s shopping, food, places to stay or studios – it’s all there.”
Stratford-upon-avon
You might expect a musician to be inspired by New York or LA, but what about Stratford-upon-avon? This historic English town is close to Mvula’s heart, as it’s where she composed the music for Antony & Cleopatra for the RSC.
As a Midlands girl, Mvula had been to the city before on school trips, but returning as an adult was different. “The first thing that struck me is how, as a kid, I had ignored so many beautiful things,” she says.
“Environment is so important while I’m making music – not just my immediate space, but what’s happening when I open the front door, what my eyes see, the vibe of the people of the town, what’s the history, what’s the story like?” Luckily, Stratford isn’t short of history.
“I enjoyed the cobbled streets, waking up every morning and going for a run alongside the lake,” says Mvula. “There were so many swans in the lake, and that took me back to childhood, because park life was so regular for me growing up.” ■
Prudence Wade
Laura Mvula is working with Hotel Indigo on Clues to the Neighbourhood, a curated collection of artefacts which lets guests and visitors discover offthe-beaten path experiences.