Mathilda Homer - Interview and live performance

After spending the whole weekend at All Points East our journalist/photographer/Sessions producer Priya met with the wonderful Mathilda Homer backstage to talk about schooling, family ties and the future. We also have a brand new live performance video below for the new single ‘Something Sentimental’. 

So how did you find lockdown as a young musician?

I loved it, I mean that’s quite an unpopular opinion but I was just with my family who I luckily get on with really well and we were all isolating together, and it was just a bit of time that we could all hangout without our jobs and stuff. So I really liked the first one and then the one in the winter was a bit more stressful because I’m quite a sunny person and I like sun so the Winter one was  a bit more strenuous and also really difficult to find things to write music about so there was not a lot of inspiration for songwriting which was probably the most difficult part of it, the artistic process.

You mentioned your family, I read that you had quite an interesting upbringing? So you went to a Holistic Education School?

Yeah. So I went to a Steiner School, all of my siblings did as well. I went to one in London first, I was born in North London and then we moved out between London and Brighton to a school called Michael Hall which is a Steiner School. It’s basically about learning, you learn really slowly, you learn to read and write when you’re like eight or nine, you learn through play and everyone’s meant to be your equals and there’s no hierarchy. Now when I look back and hear about other people’s childhoods, I didn’t realise that mine was a bit strange compared to other people’s but we watch TV and we were allowed to watch one film per week. My parents were the least strict parents so when I say that, people are like ‘oh your parents sound so strict’ but no we just didn’t know about TV and we didn’t have WiFi and stuff like that so it was a very outdoor childhood.

Do you think that influenced your love of music, desire of music and were you pushed more towards music?

Yeah so all of my family are musicians, my Dad writes music but classical music so not in the same lane as what I do. My Mum is a clarinetist so I think that me just being around them, they used to take us on tour and stuff when we were younger so we were always surrounded by that and I’m not academic, I’m really dyslexic so there was never a way that I was going to be an academic person. I did kind of flirt with the idea of being a midwife but I needed to have scientific roles to do that. So childbirth and music were the only things that interested me. I know it’s so bizarre but I felt like there was nothing else that I would rather do than write music. When you’re surrounded by people who do that as their living, you don’t feel like it’s impossible. I think it’s really important to see your role models doing the things that you would wanna do because then you feel like you can do it.

And how would you describe your sound to anyone who hasn’t heard your music?

Now it’s gone a bit more like Indie so I would say Indie, Alt-pop, Jazzy, ‘Soul-y’. All the genres!

Any influences?

Yes! Eva Cassidy is my whole influence like she’s flawless and her vocals are amazing. And then Joni Mitchell, it’s kind of those people who influence my song writing because I write obviously the music I put out. I think it’s just those two really: Eva Cassidy and Joni Mitchell.

And who do you tend to listen to a lot? Is it the same?

It kind of varies from, I listen to most of my friends’ music; all of my friends who sing and write music. I really like them so I really like their music.

I guess you can relate it back to them.

Yeah! I listen to a lot of that but I do also like ‘Radio’ on Spotify, you know when it takes you to different things? And also recently I’ve done this thing where I've got fans ‘in brackets,’ I hate that word: people who like my music, they send in the music they like to listen to; the people that follow me I can listen to their music. There’s this playlist called ‘Your Raspberry Jams’ and I’ve got a playlist called ‘Raspberry Jams’ . It's a playlist of all of their music so I can listen to people who like my music’s music, it’s like a circle.

I love that! Are there any artists who you particularly want to work with or would love to perform with or anything like that?

Um, I would love to work with Adele. I think I actually just want to be friends with her, I'm Getting confused but like she’s just, she’s flawless, she’s brilliant. I love Adele. That’s so niche, not niche, that’s so random of me to say because probably anyone who knows me will say ‘you’ve never talked about Adele’ but like imagine meeting Adele!

She’s so funny, you just would laugh all the time.

Exactly! I just would like to be her friend but if we sang together that would be amazing, I would love that.

So obviously still being 23 you’re probably in quite an experimental stage, do you think that you see your music going any other way? Or  would you like it to go any other way?

I think that the way I want my trajectory to be is to write songs that create images when people listen to them, so like you know the song ‘Fields Of Gold’ that EVA CASSIDY sings’, I think Sting wrote it, it creates a picture and I think we’ve kind of lost that in modern songwriting like we talk a lot about our feelings and how we feel in our head and what we say and things like that but there’s not a lot of picture painting and I think that is what I want to incorporate and as I get more established in my own art, to carry one writing about images and setting scenes when people listen to songs. That’s one of my favorite things when I listen to a song is when the scene is set and I can imagine it in a picture. So I think that’s what I would like to do as I progress.

I’m a big fan of ‘Ready When You Are’

You said ‘ready when you are’ at the start!

I was wondering whether you had an all time favorite lyric or most meaningful lyric that you’d ever written, or any lyric that is particularly important to you or your sound.

Yeah okay, that’s such a good question! I always have that of my favorite artists but actually, the song I would probably go back to is my song called ‘Too Much’. I released it like two years ago and I wrote it in one take; I went up to the mic and just wrote the whole song while I was singing. So it was like a really random song and all of the lyrics I didn’t write any of them before I started singing. I think it really resonates with me now because I wrote it before the Pandemic and it’s literally about a pandemic! Which is bizarre because I had no idea, I wrote it a year before the pandemic happened. It kind of sums up all of my worries of everything in the world like climate change and the horrible leaders and all of those kind of issues that feel so massive that I don’t know how to put into words how I feel about it but I feel like the lyric ‘Yes I understand I can’t feel happy everyday but I try to understand you’re gonna get sad on the way’. People are like ‘you’ve got to try and cheer up but sometimes you feel like it’s all so huge that you don’t even know how you could be chirpy about it because it’s so gigantic, the problems. I feel like that song, I don’t know if one lyric is like the favorite lyric that I’ve ever written, it probably isn’t but that concept is my favorite concept and I think it’s really important in this climate where we’re living in complete injustice, to have a song that says honestly sometimes it is just way too overwhelming to feel all of the stress that we have going on and when that song was released that was exactly how I was feeling. I’d read a really horrible news article before I wrote it and I think that was my reaction to the article.

That kind of concept of writing about mental health, to an extent, is that important to your music? Are there any other social issues that are important to you?

Yeah! Now more than ever, I remember when I first started in the music industry and someone, not who I work with now, it was a random person that I met once but they were in the music industry, and they said to me to be careful not to be political on my platforms and in my songs and stuff like that and it bugged me. It fully annoyed me because I don’t mind if a really horrid person doesn’t want to listen to my music because they don’t believe what I believe. It’s not that I want to push my opinions on the people that listen to my music but it is important that everyone talks about what they find unjust and what they find infuriating about our current climate. It is so important that artists take on that role as well, I mean some people aren’t political, which drives me up the wall but fair enough, it is quite intense when you read loads of stuff and take it on, I’m such an empathetic person and I take on lots of feelings if something’s happening to someone which is annoying and a good part of my personality. I’ve got a song coming out on the 9th of September on my EP called ‘If You Were On Fire’, I wrote it just after those people were storming the White House and nothing bad was happening to them and all Summer there had been peaceful Black Lives Matter protests and the brutality and everything that happened at those peaceful protests, and then all of these Trump supporters were in the White House and that was honestly the most annoying thing of my life, so I wrote a song called ‘If You Were On Fire’ and it’s a massive ‘F you’ to all of those kind of leaders and those assholes. It’s really really horrid and it’s a really rude song and it's not something I would actually like to do, it’s a bit horrible but I was really really furious and I just needed to write something about it and that’s how the song manifested. That EP is also coming out on the 9th of September.

Photo at All Points East by Priya Oades

Have you got another release coming up?

So ‘Something Sentimental’ came out two weeks ago, maybe two and a half weeks ago and that was the first kind of laid back, guitar-genre of music that I've been going into. I can play it live as well, I can play guitar now, and that came out two weeks ago and that’s being followed up by an EP on the 9th September.

Cool! I love that, and if people want to see you perform, they can in November?

Yep! I’m doing a show at Lafayette in November, I think that’s Bonfire Night?

Remember, Remember the 5th November, yep!

It is Bonfire Night! Oh My Gosh and my EP is called ‘If You Were On Fire!’ Wow, almost as if my team had planned it! That’s so funny, I did not realise that.

Is there anything you wanted to say to the audience or readers? Any words of wisdom?

Just do what you wanna do, you do you!

You do you! Perfect thank you and I can’t wait to see you perform!

Oh god, I forgot about that! 

Interview by Priya Oades