Marina and the Diamonds on New ‘Froot,’ Why She’s Not ‘Pop’
Marina and the Diamonds – the Welsh singer born Marina Diamandis – has worked with the biggest producers in music and scored a Number One album in her home country. Froot, a groove-heavy chronicle of high highs and low lows, just debuted in the U.S. Top 10, but the singer still doesn’t feel like a pop star. “I think because of my past albums people call me a pop artist,” she says. “But the music I’m making isn’t pop in term of being bubblegum or current, so I’m not really sure.”
However you classify Marina’s songs, the 29-year-old seems to hitting her stride: Froot might be the most sonically consistent, lyrically ambitious of her career, and this summer she’ll be taking its best tracks outdoors with “realistic, space-themed” performances at festivals like Coachella, Governors Ball and Lollapalooza. Just before the LP hit stores, Marina chatted with Rolling Stone about the meaning of the unusual title, how the Boston bombing inspired one of the stand-out tracks and why this album is more revealing than her previous chart-topper. “With Electra Heart, it was disappointing for me,” she admits. “Not because of the music, but because people think you’re different from who you really are.”
I’m sure you’ve been getting this a lot, but what the hell is a “froot”?
Well! The reason why I misspelled “fruit” was actually because I didn’t want the name of the album to hold any previous connotation. I wanted to have it’s own identity, like a non-entity.
At first listen, the album sounds very upbeat, but it also seems to be rooted in break-up and depression. Is that right?
I don’t know. There are four songs that are about that. In general it’s kind of about the process of getting through feeling a certain way and having a transition in your life and coming out the other end.
There’s a song on the album called “Savages” about some particularly heavy subject matter. Where did that one come from?
For me, it’s one of the most important songs on the record and the one that doesn’t scream radio single, even though I hope it gets its own release. I was reading an article in the newspaper about the Boston bombing. The journalist said, “It’s so hard to reconcile how one man can be running a charity race, while another man is building a bomb to blow this person up.” That’s how it started, and I think it was more a result about how these same kinds of news stories keep coming up day-in and day-out.
For example, the horrendous gang rape of a women in India started an onslaught of other rape stories because it was becoming relevant. Like most of us, I found it so hard to digest and what I wanted to write about in the song isn’t condemning these things – even though they have to be condemned – but questioning why these things happen. This is something that is eons old, and it’s more about how we deal with the fact that it’s a natural, perhaps common trait in man. I think there needs to be another way to approaching this, rather than saying, “Chuck ’em in jail.”