Laura Groves: 'Communication is an ongoing theme'

Radio Red finds the Shipley-born singer-songwriter leaving behind acoustic guitars and folky settings in favour of sophisticated, keyboard-led songs more in the manner of Laura Nyro or Carole King.

Speaking to The Yorkshire Post video call, she reflects that Blue Roses was “just part of that whole chapter and that whole time” when folk-pop was in vogue thanks to the likes of Laura Marling, Noah and the Whale and Mumford and Sons. Since then she has worked on “lots of different projects and lots of different music” including the soulful jazz-pop trio Nautic, a series of collaborations, and as a touring musician with Mercury Prize nominee Bat For Lashes.

Releasing a clutch of EPs under her own name was part of “a gradual transition”. Now, she says, finally “felt like the right time” to put out a full-length album of her own. Radio Red is a record about communication, something that Groves feels is an “ongoing theme” in her life. “It’s something that interests me in general, in all sorts of different ways,” she says. “The lockdown period was like a whole other facet of that subject. Then places that I’ve lived in and worked, like my studio, that has come into it as well.”

Its title stems from two radio towers close to Groves’ studio in London; it also cast her mind back to growing up in the shadow of another radio tower in Shipley. “I can see one of the towers out of my studio window,” she says. “I’d be doing lots of late-night recording sessions, working on music, and it would always be there lit up at night, it was something I could always see, like a constant that was always there throughout the whole process. The symbolism of that interested me.”

Groves produced the album herself and admits that she favours a more homely recording setting to conventional studios. “I’ve always worked on my own music in some kind of version of a home studio,” she says. “At the start it would be my bedroom. I’ve had a studio away from home for a little bit, but I always seem to end up coming back to the home studio set-up, having the instruments that I’ve collected over the years and just experimenting with sounds.

“I think the songwriting process for me is really linked to the recording process and the production. I’ll sit at the piano and write a bit of the song, then the sounds that I start to use inform the rest of the songwriting. It all goes hand in hand.”

The Mercury Prize-winning singer-songwriter Sampha guests on a couple of tracks. Groves says it was “really beautiful” to have her friend come in and work with her. “I love singing with other people generally, and it means a lot to have his voice on there,” she says.

Although she’s been based in London for the past decade or so, Groves says she still feels close to her West Yorkshire roots. “I think after finishing the record and starting to talk about what it all means has made me realise how much of that is in there as well,” she says. “All those formative experiences and the landscape.

“I think memory is a big part of the record as well, so the layers are all in there… Writing songs, it’s not always in the moment a conscious thing, it’s like writing letters to myself and I can then listen back. With the layers, you think it means something at the time, and then you listen back a few months later and it reveals more to you. That’s one of the reasons why I love writing songs, coming back to them and learning about myself and being able to share that.”

Radio Red is out on Bella Union now. https://lauragroves.bandcamp.com/album/radio-red