Pop Icon Marina Talks Witches, Feminism, and Olivia Rodrigo

Remember in May, when Olivia Rodrigo dropped Sour and suddenly we were all awash in angst, melancholy, and all the other feelings that fester in the sweltering heat of heartbreak? That experience reminded a lot of people of listening to Marina in the early 2010s, coming of age to her music when she was known as Marina and the Diamonds.

Over a Zoom call, I read the pop icon a tweet from May with more than 28,000 likes: “I didn’t need Olivia Rodrigo in high school. I had Marina and the Diamonds and I was monster level mentally ill.” She delights at the choice of words, repeating “monster level!” between delicate peals of laughter.

Scroll through that tweet’s replies and you’ll see that a significant portion of its 28,000 likes come from millennials who lip-sync to “Driver’s License” while wondering why, at 30, they relate to Olivia’s teenage woes. “I think [Olivia’s music] kind of reactivates parts of ourselves that we haven't been in touch with for a long time and therefore relegate to the high school section of us,” ruminates Marina, who is 35. “But really, they're parts of us that will always exist [and] can be reignited again.”

Feelings, she suggests, never really die. They simply hibernate until an album like Sour shakes them from sleep. “This is why I'm such a big believer in music's ability to heal us and transform us, particularly when it's lyric-centered,” Marina says, “because each time that you listen to a song about a certain feeling—whether it's unacceptable feelings that are ugly or that we can't talk to our friends and family about—you're going through a period of processing. And that's essentially what therapy is: you're acknowledging the feeling exists, coming to terms with it, and accepting it so that you can move on. That's [the role] songwriting serves for me. I'm trying to solve something for myself. And I'm very lucky that other people resonate with that.”

From the outset, Marina has excelled in smuggling self-examination and social commentary into our ears through the honeyed, humble arms of pop. It’s music that sneaks up on you, driving you to dance in one moment and stare at the wall, mulling over the meaning of life (or your ex) in the next. In recent years, she has been lauded for her 2010 debut album, The Family Jewels, which paired cheeky critiques of conformity, gender roles, and American celebrity culture with campy iconography and a devil-may-care attitude. At the time, though, “I was dubbed as quirky, you know, in quotation marks,” she says, “There was conversation around the fact that my lyrics were magnifying topics that hadn't really been discussed in such a literal way.”

Her second album, 2012’s Electra Heart, dissected decaying American values of family, sex, youth, and femininity. Marina adopted Electra Heart as a persona, channeling her to portray a handful of female archetypes: the housewife, homewrecker, the beauty queen, the pin-up, and the starlet, among others. The album’s iconic aesthetic themes—pastel pink, 60’s glam, and old Hollywood nostalgia—inspired hundreds of thousands of moody gif sets and dramatic photo edits on Tumblr. We all wanted to be Electra Heart, drawing tiny black hearts under our eyes and reciting lyrics like “I want the world to go away / I want blood, guts and chocolate cake!” and “Sometimes I ignore you so I feel in control ‘cause really I adore you and I can’t leave you alone.”

“I think probably Family Jewels and Electra Heart were angsty records. There was also a lot of anger which I, to be honest, still don't quite feel comfortable expressing,” Marina admits. By her third album, 2015’s Froot, that anger had dissipated. Her lyrical introspection deepened and grew more informed by spirituality, nature, and the shifting cosmos than culture. On her fourth album, 2019’s shimmering Love and Fear, she summed up the triumph of her career on the song “Soft to Be Strong,” singing, “Took my bitterness and made it sweet/ I took a broken heart and made it beat.”

Her new album Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land is a satisfying return to the more pointed cultural criticism of those early records. In “New America,” she asks the country to address its history of systemic racism and colonization that led to the murder of George Floyd and the displacement of indigenous communities. On “Highly Emotional People,” she warns of the deadly consequences of toxic masculinity. But, as she told The New York Times, the central driving force behind the album was “a yearning for a focus on the feminine.” She makes this pointedly clear in the album’s lead singles, “Man’s World” (“I don’t wanna live in a man’s world anymore”) and “Purge the Poison” (“I just want a world where I can see the feminine / Ownin' female power, takin' back what's ours”).

Gender has always been a central tenet of Marina’s songwriting, but she’s now critical of earlier work that may reflect her own internalized misogyny. Recently, she told a live stream of fans that The Family Jewels’ “Girls” feels “catty” and mentioned to Vulture that though Electra Heart’s “Sex Yeah” “felt relevant” in 2012, it wouldn’t be something she’d write today. “[My feminism now] is so different and a reflection of how the discourse and freedom around what it is to be a female doesn't have anything to do with how you look,” she explains on our call. “I think at the time that was such a big block for me and other women. What you wore, how much you revealed, and what your sex life was like somehow passed comment on who you are as a human being, and particularly a woman. Now, that's completely blown out of the water. I don't have any conflicts about that anymore.”

Her outlook on relationships has changed, too. On her first two albums, Marina expressed a voracious desire for success at the expense of everything and everyone else. “If I’m not number one, then I’d rather be lonely,” she sang during an appearance on CONAN in 2013. “Don't do love, don't do friends / I'm only after success / One track mind, one track heart / If I fail, I'll fall apart,” she declared on The Family Jewels’ “Oh No!”

As a teenager experiencing that song, I remember feeling empowered by her brassy individualism but, looking back on it, Marina sees the pain behind those lyrics. “I think I was poking fun at the fact that I knew [that behavior] was odd,” she says. “I felt like there was no room for anyone else because I was so obsessed with making [my career] a reality. But now, God, I couldn't feel more different! I'm so happy that I've evolved out of that because I think the source of those kinds of things is always pain. It's not just that someone decides to not depend on anyone anymore. It's always from a wound.”

The pandemic aided in that evolution, granting her opportunities to strengthen friendships that had been strained in the past by her constant traveling for work. After leaving a long-term relationship and moving from London to Los Angeles in the fall, “the biggest realization has been how hugely important community is. I'm like, ‘Oh, wow! This is how it feels to belong and be part of something!’” she explains, with awe in her voice. “I can see how I've missed out on that and I'm grieving that a bit. Even though I've had extreme luck and fortune with my career, I've also sacrificed some things that I wasn't really aware of. People think your 20s as a musician are this wild, crazy, exciting time. And the reality is quite different.”

After more than a decade of sacrifice and immense success making music, “the point for me [now] is my own growth,” she says. “That's always been the reason I've wanted to be an artist and the reason I write songs. There's a lot of joy that comes from the fact that other people gain something from listening to my music. To feel like I'm part of increasing consciousness in myself and other people, for me, is the best experience in life.”

Marina is probably more tapped into that consciousness than most. She makes mention of witches several times on Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land and, though she’s clarified that her personal definition of a witch is anyone who is “intuitive, in touch with nature, unconventional and unafraid to go against the grain,” she has been told by psychics that she has “witchy vibes” of a different kind. “I see a lot of things in dreams,” she says, noting that they can be prophetic. “The person who I was with for six years, I dreamt about him eight months before I ever met him. And when I meet people [for the first time] I receive a lot of information about them.”

I ask if that additional information ever overwhelms her. “For a long time, it scared me,” she concedes. “I didn't like being alone sometimes because I could, like, sense things. Once I started meditating, I began to really be aided by it as opposed to trying to repress my, I don't know what to call it, ‘sensory abilities?’” She thinks we all have those abilities, to varying degrees, rooted in our intuition. “A lot of older cultures, older religions, shamanic work, or mystical work was essentially based around that, right? It's just in modern life... I don't know if we've been taught to ignore it, but I just think there's so much going on within our external world.” “So many other signals,” I add. “Yeah, exactly!” she agrees. “I don't know if God is even an entity. I think whatever created the universe is this superconscious source of creation, and we are all a part of it. It's like an octopus with tiny tentacles. And that's how the universe experiences itself. That's not my theory, but it's one I've read that I think is really interesting.”

Whatever the universe is or isn’t made of, Marina is pretty sure it’s pissed. On “Purge the Poison,” she personifies an irate Earth, warning, "What have you been doing? Don't forget I am your home / Virus come, fires burn until human beings learn / From every disaster, you are not my master.” The song feels particularly cathartic as we languish in pandemic uncertainty. “I feel a little bit of hopelessness,” I confide to her, “All the ambitions I had before the pandemic don't seem to be that important when there's existence on the line, you know?” She sighs in agreement, “I feel exactly the same as you. And it's this underlying, gnawing feeling of deep worry. There is a huge sense of overwhelm. Usually, I try to focus on what I can do... donating a percentage of my income to [decarbonization] charities... or buying less shit. And I don't even know if those changes would be enough! How do we change government policy? That's where I kind of get stuck.”

She’s channeled some of that energy into a “vegetable patch” she grew during the pandemic. “That's my number one joy actually, outside of music: seeing things grow,” she says. I wonder aloud if there’s a connection to be made between her love for gardening and floriculture and her apparent compulsion to care for others. On “Goodbye,” the closing song on Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land, she bids farewell to a former version of herself that prioritized others’ needs over her own, singing, “I've been a mother to everyone else, to every motherfucker except myself.” Plants don't really ask for much more than a little water and a spot in the sun—does she see them as an easier outlet for mothering than people? She laughs at the thought. “Maybe! I am a nurturing person. And I love to be that way. That's my nature. I definitely feel that role with my fans as well. I'm 35, I've [recently] left a relationship, and all women this age, even if you think you don't want [kids], still ask yourself questions. And we're still at a point where we don't quite know what life looks like for those women or men who choose not to [have children]. I have been thinking about that subject a lot. Sometimes I think maybe it's not so much about having kids, it's about still being able to develop that quality in different ways. There are so many parts of the world that need care.”

In February of 2022, Marina will head out into the world again to nurture those fans, and the post-pandemic economy, on tour. As for what comes next for her music, I mention People magazine’s observation that Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land “proves that [she] knows what she wants, why she wants it and where she wants to go with it.” Marina thinks that’s true, for now. “I always feel like that when an album comes out!” she laughs. “When I'm in the studio, I know exactly what I want. But in life, does anyone? We're constantly changing human beings and our identity is never really fixed. I'm at peace with the fact that sometimes I don't [know what I want.]”

That sense of ever-changing identity, that willingness to explore and grow and change that’s so visible in Marina — that’s what we were all seeing in the 2010s, teenagers figuring out our own way to go. There’s a poignant magic to growing up alongside an artist, intertwining your memories with their music, and freezing a feeling forever in the time capsules of their chords. It’s why, upon admitting to her that I’ve been a fan for over a decade, I find myself hurriedly brushing away tears, as if she can see them through our audio-only Zoom call.

Thankfully, there’s no reason to be embarrassed; Marina, of course, understands.

“Oh my God, don’t be sorry, it's fine!” she assures me. “It’s so nice to hear that... I get [the same feeling] when I meet artists who really mean something to me and have been [with me] through formative periods of my life. That's the power of music and why it's so important for all of us, whether we digest it or make it. I totally get it.”

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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue