Future Sound: Orla Noble
Our column celebrating new music to watch continues with Orla Noble. With her debut album Unfurl out soon, the singer-songwriter chats to Fiona Shepherd about the transformative effect of writing her first song and her jack-of-all-trades approach to the creative process
‘I’m a big appreciator of instruments,’ understates Glasgow-based singer-songwriter Orla Noble. So much so that she had piano, guitar and drums in her armoury by the time she started secondary school, galloping ahead of any formal tuition with her own efforts. ‘I used to carry this mini keyboard around with me and try to play everything by ear. My parents got me piano lessons but I was basically pretending to read the music.’ Her latest instrumental project is fiddle. ‘It’s really good for the inner child,’ she says. ‘I wonder if there is a level of defiance in trying to play as many as I can.’
Until recently however, this one-woman band had never written a song. ‘There was no musical explanation for not being able to write,’ she says. ‘It was purely mental. I just couldn’t let myself; that came from years of suppressing any kind of expression and keeping myself very small.’ The lifelong dam broke as Noble was emerging from a ‘rock bottom’ period. Off work with her thoughts and instruments for company, she wrote ‘See Me Free’. ‘The song is about the beginning of being able to write, that feeling of being seen and understood in quite a vulnerable way for the first time. It just felt like a purging of everything. It was a really intense and transformative time.’
The songs came faster and faster and by the time she arrived on Mull to record with celebrated local musician and engineer Gordon Maclean, her demos were sounding more and more like a fully formed album. Unfurl features the 11 songs she had written up to that time. ‘Working with Gordon was the best possible first recording experience I could have had. We agreed I would have the producer credit but I do feel like I couldn’t have made it without him.’
As well as writing, playing and producing the album herself, Noble has also designed the artwork and is making use of her day job skills to do her own marketing. ‘I’m proud of the fact that I’ve managed to do a lot of it myself. There was an element of wanting to prove to myself that I could and there is still a certain level of stubbornness or self-sufficiency or feeling ownership.’
As a music PR for Edinburgh International Festival among other clients, Noble absorbs everything from classical to jazz but reserves a particular love for trad music and singer-songwriters such as Nick Drake, Laura Marling and Rachel Sermanni. Her own music has a delicacy, tenderness and assurance which belies her inexperience as a songwriter. ‘I’m so conscious I’m doing this in such an odd way,’ she admits. ‘Normally when people come to releasing their album, they’ve spent years gigging and building an audience. But I’m still getting used to the idea of being an artist. I don’t take it for granted that I would be able to make another album. I’ve been an audience for so long and I know it’s really special to find music that you can connect with.’
Unfurl is self-released on Friday 15 May and launched at The Caves, Edinburgh, Sunday 17 May.