Laura Mvula: "I get quite stern about being stereotyped as the Green Garden soul singer chick"

The Birmingham-born songstress enjoyed a phenomenal debut with her record Sing to the Moon, scooping two awards at the Mobos, a gong at the Urban Music Awards, and nominations across the BRITs, for the Mercury Prize, and at the Q Awards.

But as she rode the wave of success and acclaim, Mvula admits coming hand in hand with it was frustration.

“Sing to the Moon was so neatly packaged, and that was not all of my own doing,” says Mvula. “We presented this very classic, beautiful, intimate and serene album.

“I would perform wearing all white, always smiling like the Cheshire cat. Not that it wasn’t genuine but I was conscious about not trying to dissuade people from this strange music.”

But this degree of self-awareness, which paved the way to a degree of torment, is something which Mvula has felt she can do away with on new record The Dreaming Room.

“I was done with hiding anything,” says Mvula. “I was done with worrying if people would think I am too menacing if I do not smile and whatever the musical equivalent of that is.”

She goes on, “If people shout out for Green Garden in the show, while I love and appreciate what the song did for me, I am passionate about sharing the whole catalogue I have now.

“It is about writing a body of work with a beginning middle and an eye, while there are nuances which nod to that start of the story, I want people to still the full picture.

“I get quite stern about being stereotyped as the Green Garden soul singer chick.”

Her powerful, deep and multi-layered music is of course intrinsically linked to her passionate, heartfelt, and brooding character.

“I think I am naturally an intense kind of person,” she says. “But I think I grew up to be sort of ashamed of that. I was often labelled as the ‘dramatic child’, but that is partly why the music is so limitless. I just allow myself to go wherever I want to go.”

Even before bursting onto the scene in 2013 and enjoying almost overnight success, the past ten-years of Mvula’s life have been fraught with ups and downs.

After graduating from university, she became a supply teacher, then a receptionist, her parents’ divorce, her own marriage and divorce on the cusp of her sudden success, and then battling her own battles with anxiety, which spilled over to stage fright.

“The Dreaming Room is a more accurate picture of where I have been at,” she says. “I can’t really remember where the title come from, I feel like my therapist made it up, which makes me feel I might owe her something.

“I feel like she was trying to talk about metaphorically what it means for me to be totally liberated and to be totally myself.”

Mvula adds “The album is a musical expression of that place”.

The second track on the album, titled Overcome, features a collaboration with one of her idols American musician and producer Nile Rodgers who she met while attending the BRIT awards in 2013. 

“It is kind of crazy,” says Mvula. “I was in New York for a holiday to reconnect with friends and Nile is actually in that bank of friends now.”

Of course Mvula went and she says in those moments she recalls when they first met on the red carpet at the BRITs, which at first “did not feel like a real conversation”.

She says “It is one of those moments in movies when someone is like ‘I want to make you a hit kid’.”

But while making it into the listening library of Rodgers, Mvula’s music was also a favourite of the late and legendary Prince.

"I did not really know him, but the beauty of it was I did not really need to," says Mvula. "I do not really think many can say an icon championed or treasured their music."

Prince invited Mvula to meet him backstage after she lost the British Female Solo Artist award to Ellie Goulding in 2014.

She said Prince told her the reason he agreed to present it was because he thought she was going to win, saying she feels now “more than ever” inspired by his legacy.