Why I love The Dreaming Room by Laura Mvula

Hi! I'm new to steemit & excited by the possibilities of decentralised social media. I'm hoping to use this platform to write about the music I love and hopefully help other people discover new music. My taste is pretty eclectic but this week I want to write about an album called the Dreaming Room by Laura Mvula, a soul singer from Birmingham who simply sounds like no one else.

The Dreaming Room is groundbreaking pop music. Political but personal, wacky but insanely beautiful. As if the flowing gospel of her debut, Sing to the Moon (2013), has been smashed, fragmented and transfigured into something with a hundred times the bite, Mvula’s new material is dense with contrasts and conflicting colours.

The longest track on the album, Show Me Love, flowers from ambling piano chords with honeyed vocals into a thick orchestral soundscape with an almost military tympani beat driving the music to an awesome climax. Phenomenal Woman, meanwhile, is an echoing racket of distorted sounds with gripping pace and an explosive chorus. In Angel, Mvula’s trademark A cappella returns in force.

The structure of the music is always unpredictable, the tracks (extremely short) interspersed with a quotation from her first song ever written and an endearing phone call with her nan. It is no surprise that Mvula has a degree in classical composition - the music has no regard for the rules of pop music and its integrity originates in her inventiveness.

However, what makes this work such an achievement is not just the quality of the music, but the personal story that is inseparable from the album. In 2013, Mvula admitted in a podcast for the Daily Telegraph to suffering from ‘crippling stage fright’. But the extent of her mental health issues only became clear to the public in an interview with Tom Lamont from the Guardian earlier this year. Thrown by the separation of her parents in her mid-twenties and her instant transformation into celebrity following the release of her debut with Sony in 2013, Laura began to suffer from debilitating panic attacks. Unable to spend a moment alone for fear of a ‘freak-out’, the pressures on her marriage with Themba Mvula eventually resulted in divorce.

Given this story of personal breakdown, that she could be capable of creating such a work as The Dreaming Room is testament to her strength as an artist and a woman.

These are the lyrics of the first track on The Dreaming Room:

If all I am is wrong
And all I have is gone
Then how am I to live?
I can only be who I am

This theme of a lack of identity is developed as the album progresses into some kind of resolution. While in the first half the lyrics lament lost love, the last four tracks tell a narrative of incredible self discovery and political identification. Issues of class and race are addressed in ‘People’ with a verse contributed by the rapper Wretch 32. Meanwhile, in Angel Laura speaks of the need to ‘find a way to move on…And learn to sing a new song’, a reference not just to the challenge of building a new life on the rubble of her relationship but the also the all-consuming process of overcoming depression.

Phenomenal Woman is the real gem, a feminist anthem that answers the question posed at the beginning of the album: Who is Laura Mvula? A black woman who won’t be phased by any kind of discrimination, nor just as importantly, let herself and her art be defeated by anxiety and depression.

For those people then who slam modern pop music as banal, listen to this and shut your mouths. This is art in its consummate form; relevant, beautiful and giving its audience so much to learn.