It’s significant that Billie Marten’s fourth album ends on the words “Now I know what I’m here for.” From her debut EP, 2014’s Ribbon, through her first two albums, Writing of Blues and Yellows (2016) and Feeding Seahorses By Hand (2019), the Yorkshire-born singer-songwriter’s lyrics have often portrayed a struggle with sense of self and purpose. More assurance began to unfurl on 2021’s intrepid Flora Fauna, and it’s become boldly pronounced on Drop Cherries. “If I think about past songs that lean into the sadness and lack of self that I was feeling, I really wanted to bat that out of the park and go, ‘Now I have the answer. I’ve landed,’” she tells Apple Music. “I don’t know where it’s going to take me; I’ve not reached the peak of all wisdom. It’s just that I’m more of a human being than I was before. I’m ready to tackle living now.” Across Drop Cherries, Marten’s journey of self-discovery is tied to reflections on a relationship. Within her warm folk songs, the tugging melodies and visceral details—a sense of awakening portrayed by jolting chord changes, comfort and certainty rendered in unerring rhythms—help tell a story of new love blossoming. “I wanted to depict all forms of a relationship,” she says. “So the beginning, the new idea, and then going through the mundane and the colloquial, just living together as two. Very pure messages of love. It is so very precious and unique to me, but I didn’t want to make it so people couldn’t relate to it. I was trying to find messages that were as universal as they were private.” Learn more as she takes us through Drop Cherries, track by track. “New Idea” “This is actually the demo, a brief moment in a windowless room in Tottenham, the sound of me messing around in the studio. ‘New Idea’ was just a quick title that I had after a very unsuccessful day of writing—words never came. I realized that they didn’t really need to be there. There’s a sort of gravel sound in there; that was made through a broken button on a JUNO [synthesizer]—I just looped it and looped it and looped it. It was like a lovely bed to start adding things to.” “God Above” “I wanted this to be a kind of Shakespearean love—this obvious stealing in there—but it was supposed to depict a celestial, heavenly sort of feeling, whether it be a relationship or your relationship with yourself. I had the female deity thing in there for a while, and the original lyric was ‘I know God above… And she’s everywhere/And she’s everywhere/But I go nowhere.’ That [last line] was something that came very quickly to me because I’m very good at bringing things back down. Then I thought, ‘No, she’s everywhere. There is this thing and it’s a conscience and you must trust that.’” “Just Us” “I had a horrible bout of COVID in July 2021 and had to cancel a couple of festival slots. I was messing around on the guitar outside and there was nothing coming to me—I was playing the same old chords and everything was sounding the same. I turned the tuning pegs, put the guitar down, and physically ran away from it. I then ran back to it, played that chord backwards, so it was going up. And I was like, ‘Oh cool, we’re in.’ Then I just wanted a pounding rhythm that would be really fun to play live, because that was all I wanted to do at the time. The lyrics are extremely literal: Two flies were our only companions as we sat there with COVID. It’s about appreciating the simplicity of life and how lovely it can be, despite not very lovely things happening to you. The last line, ‘I do believe in miracles,’ is a realization that I’m coming onto something good.” “I Can’t Get My Head Around You” “Just getting to grips with a new form of living and existing with someone, and sort of dipping your toes into the ride. I wanted it to be a really great stable rhythm, something that represented comfort. And with a bit of unease at the very beginning, because I just love that drum fill so much from Casper [Miles], the drummer. I said, ‘Can you do this: Do-do-do-do, dush-dush-dush?’ I’ve said it’s a cruiser because I really feel that it’s sinking into something natural.” “Willow” “It’s about the sheer joy of knowing someone that is so spectacular, it’s like a gift to yourself—and also dealing with not being with them. I was in Seattle, the first day of a tour that was going to run for six weeks. I was getting used to the climate and the jet lag. You’re stuck in your hotel room. It’s daylight, but you don’t want to go outside because there’s nothing to do and no one’s there and you’re just waiting for the gig. It was almost like a medicinal aid to myself, a tool that I could use to play every night to feel close to said person.” “Acid Tooth” “Self-sabotage is a real beast that we need to learn to curtail because there’s no sense in it. I was writing this around Christmastime, which is usually when the thought-bubble-process songs come out of me because I haven’t got my release or sense of a new beginning yet. I’m coming to the end of the year and my brain’s really tired. So it was a great exercise for me to document that and then consequently be worrying myself back into trust. I love the string drone. It’s a constant, cyclical machine, like a train running—there’s a line in the middle, ‘Trains of thought like ticking clocks.’ The guitar part is very repetitive until you get to that release of the middle eight, which depicts the moments of clarity that you get. But every chord change is slightly wrong, so you are almost jutting yourself out of this rut.” “Devil Swim” “This is just the demo. There’s two strings that are detuned to make a sort of mellower, folkier sound. I wanted to go through the seasons because I was feeling the passing of time quite heavily. So it starts with ‘Does the sun shine on your back in autumn?’ and then goes through spring and ‘Do you let the chill return?’ It’s about looking from the outside in at people that had seemingly reached a state of acceptance, and I hadn’t quite got there yet. I had this image of shaking myself and ‘I wish you could be better. I wish you got rid of all that darkness that you don’t need anymore.’” “I Bend to Him” “‘I Bend to Him’ started out on guitar in a picky way. I wanted to write a little classic ditty, and the lyrics just flew out. Eventually we changed it to doing it very quickly on this Casio SK-5 [sampling keyboard], and that sound is a sample of my friend’s voice. I purposefully didn’t want to put anything on that song, it would’ve distracted from the message. It’s incredibly vulnerable. You’re two trees swinging together, and this song is like, ‘Just bend and relax and let him in. Allow yourself to be vulnerable.’” “Nothing But Mine” “No one knew what we were playing! We went out for dinner, [after] working on, ‘Arrows’ or ‘Willow,’ something that was quite linear and small. And I felt like I needed to make some noise. I sat down on this honky-tonk, Casper was already on the kit, Nick [Hill] picked up bass, and it’s an easy bass song—you can tell where the chord changes are going to be. And then my friend Will [Taylor] picked up the guitar and it started to be normal playing. And then we said, ‘Pick up the slide.’ And then the slide parts came into play. I think there’s a sense of anger in that song. It’s hard-hitting, because I feel like I spent my life lightly playing. A definite release for me. Incredibly fun live.” “Arrows” “This really does describe the true message of it all. I wrote it with just lyrics, which I never really do, on the train home from the first few pre-production days. I was still dealing with a sense of, ‘Uh, am I going to do this again? I’m going to make another album and it’s not going to be good enough.’ That’s my whole spiral-of-thought thing. The verse is ‘Climb the whole tower without ringing the bell/I’m at war with my shadow/Roads dark and narrow/But I am the arrow.’ I bring it back up again, reminding myself to stop talking to myself that way. And originally it was going to be ‘I am the arrow that shoots,’ but that brought a different image to me and it was more of a bow and arrow rather than an arrow that’s shooting through the heart, the Cupid cloud. And it was like, no matter how vague and aloof things are, I know what I’m doing.” “Tongue” “That was done in Wales. We had a couple of days where we needed to drive somewhere else, and Dom [Monks, who co-produced the album with Marten] knew of this incredible pure ’70s gentleman with a great mustache, [producer/engineer] Owain Fleetwood Jenkins. He has this studio in a converted church. There was a piano next to the table as he’d come and deliver these homemade meals. It’s a very, very pure and simple song. ‘I’d put you in my shoe’—that adolescent feeling of ‘I really like you actually, and I would like to take you with me.’” “This Is How We Move” “Just the day-to-day nature of sharing a space with someone, especially when you’re both needing that space for creativity, and navigating that. It was supposed to be a dance between two people and moves on a chessboard. I had those ideas of moving as one, but separately. It was going to be the album opener, but I like it towards the end. I like it reminding the listener of where they came from in the beginning, and curtailing the record to the core.” “Drop Cherries” “It was written in France. My guitar got lost via the airport system. So I used a friend’s classical and tuned the Es to Ds, which is something I didn’t usually do, and out came the lyrics. It was a story I heard from a friend, talking about his experience of really profound love, wanting to do anything for this person. Something that she said to him was ‘I just want to stamp blood-red cherries onto a cream carpet.’ The next day he goes and buys a carpet and cherries. Then she says, ‘I want to bathe in a silvery bath.’ And then he runs the bath and fills it with silver glitter. The image that I wanted to portray was very much that type of love.”