Reuniting in the quiet: How L Mayland’s debut EP felt like coming home
To address the elephant in the room – yes, Lizzie Mayland is the guitarist from The Last Dinner Party, the band that skyrocketed to success as one of the brightest ones to watch the UK has seen in quite some time, going from London pubs to being Brit Award winners in no time. But in the quiet spaces between spotlight moments, all stars are just people, and all exist in the silence of themselves just as anyone else does. That’s where L Mayland writes from, presenting their debut solo EP, The Slow Fire Of Sleep, as a tender dispatch from the heavily emotional experience of existing in the gaps.
Because the gaps are stark. For a work and touring musician, especially one experiencing something like what Mayland has with their band, life is a process of being thrown between two intensely opposing poles. For many months of the last years, Mayland has spent them on the road, living on buses and in hotels, removed from any sense of normality but existing vividly within their dreams and the dream of a rockstar. When that’s not happening, it is something completely opposite as they come home for off-periods and settle back at home for a moment that is at once both restorative yet somewhat eerie.
Touring, especially, is a fascinating state to exist in and one that isn’t truly understood unless you’ve done it. For the rest of us, we look in on it as a thrilling and fun lifestyle. But when you’re living it, Mayland found that overwhelmingly, it’s just odd.
“It’s just so unnatural, like it’s so weird,” they said, “You’re travelling with like 14 other people who you see from the moment you wake up and open little curtains on your tour bunk, all the way through the day. They’re the only people you know to socialise with because you’re in Brussels or whatever. So it’s very insular, but also intense.”
The picture Mayland paints, despite obviously being thrilled by the band’s success and grateful for the experiences, is a smothering one. Touring is like a holiday with a group of friends, where the need to keep everyone happy and be on top form and navigate everyone’s feelings is heightened even more now that there is a professional aspect involved.
The solution for success and survival is a somewhat necessary act of putting yourself aside. Artists have to step into their tour self, leaving the messier, fuller picture at home. But eventually, you return to it, and there is always more waiting, with more thoughts and feelings and tricky experiences gathered along the way.
For Mayland, the person waiting was L Mayland, and this EP became a channel through which to work through all these things, both comforting themselves in the quiet that feels daunting upon return and using it to finally catch up with the inner self. “I kept writing in sort of the interim periods between tours, when I’d come back and want to be alone, but then also feeling a bit sad and worn out,” they said about the crafting of the project, “I was just kind of figuring out what was going on with me emotionally because you can’t really do that on tour. You’ve always got to be somewhere or talking to someone or doing something.”
It makes sense then that The Slow Fire Of Sleep is as soft and introspective as the circumstances that crafted it. Across the songs, Mayland delves into big feelings and topics like queerness, love, and the environmental crisis with a tender, folk touch. But one key topic prevails: home. What is it? Where is it? Who is it? What does it mean anyway?
Sure, the project being sung in Mayland’s northern accent was always going to make for a distinctly northern sound. But it’s more than that. The project feels utterly coloured by the history of northern folk and the settings that birthed it. It’s something Mayland has always been fascinated by, especially the energy that exists in places like the Moors. “There’s something about a place being quite bleak, but the people in it being very warm,” they said, “There’s something about bone-chilling winds and feeling dwarfed by the nature that’s around you, I think, is super powerful.”
Images and memories of home stuck in their mind during the making of the project, just as they inevitably would during long months untethered to familiarity. Those places and the music attached, like the folk legacy and Mayland’s own love for more introspective, lyrical works, began to represent, in their mind, “a mental kind of antidote to the like grey box rooms, concrete dressing rooms, windows in a lot of motorway services”.
But home, realistically, isn’t a place. It’s cliché, but home is a feeling, and it’s one Mayland found time to reconnect with when they were finally back home, sitting in silence with their instrument. It’s exactly the state that birthed the sound of the EP, as they said, “That’s where I feel I could be the most vulnerable, resting my chin on my acoustic guitar.”
Mayland makes the project sound so simple; “It was very much trying to reconnect with myself and my feelings and even what my opinions are and what’s important to me or what’s been weighing on me.” But nothing about that process is. Nothing about finally listening to yourself now you have the quiet needed to do so, or confronting yourself after months and months in a suspended state away from the true depth of you would ever be easy or simple. But in the beauty of The Slow Fire Of Sleep, Mayland navigated the difficulty beautifully, with soft lilt and a sharp pen.
