Orla Gartland is an artist from Dublin, Ireland, who made waves with her music online from the young age of fourteen. She wasn’t old enough to play in the pubs of her hometown, so decided to share her songs online instead. The number of subscribers and fans mounted up, and a few years later she made the move to London. In terms of her musical journey, she hasn’t looked back since.

A publishing deal, two sold out headline shows (all tickets went in under an hour) and a successful single later, Orla was invited back to play her favourite festival Barn on the Farm. Luckily for us, we were there too!

Native managed to steal ten minutes of her time to have a chat about her recent release, what the future holds and the important things like, who would you invite to your dream dinner party? Now, there’s no fancy set up at this festival: the green room is actually a barn with a lot of sofas and bunting. So, when we caught up with Orla we took refuge in the most glamourous location we could find – a trailer in the tractor shed, of course.

If you read our review of Barn on the Farm you’ll know we loved every moment of it, despite the 30-degree heat. Orla’s a Barn on the Farm veteran, and has performed here many times over the years but we wanted to know: why does she love this festival so much?



“I just love everything about this,” she says, looking around the backstage courtyard with fondness, as her fellow musicians and friends are chatting in the sunshine, some are playing football. “It’s such a nice vibe – I know that’s a vague word. I’m biased in that I end up usually knowing so much of the line-up, it’s like a big reunion which is so nice. I love the size of the festival, I think it’s so nice that they’ve stayed on this site even though the festival’s grown.

"I think committing to this size has been really good for the festival. I went to Glastonbury for the first time two years ago, played a small stage there, and to call that a festival and call this a festival doesn’t feel like the same thing at all. It’s exciting and the acts are amazing, but this is so much more my kind of weekend. I bought a ticket to this before I found out I was playing, I just wanna be here all the time!”.

Orla adds that herself and a lot of her friends are often away, writing or touring, or they don’t live in London, so Barn on the Farm acts as an annual reunion of sorts. She says it’s good to have something consistent, and we’d have to agree.



Her most recent single ‘I Go Crazy’ has been a great success so far. It’s hit nearly 315,000 streams on Spotify and, as Orla wrote on her Instagram, that’s without being on any playlists – it’s all down to the fans! It was Orla’s first release in a while: “It felt like the right time. When I was releasing the EPs a couple of years ago I just sort of walked into being a musician via YouTube, but there was never any ‘breather’ moment for me to understand the music industry, understand the team that was around me, figure out what kind of sound I wanted to have. I hadn’t considered any of that, and that’s kind of what the last few years have been. To kind of hit the breaks for a second and think more mindfully about where this is going, where I wanna be as an artist, what kind of musician I wanna be: hence the radio silence.

“For the last year or so I’ve been working with two producers called Ben and Sean who are both really different and amazing. Sean comes from a guitar background and Ben is really synthy, he was one half of La Roux. He’s from a completely different world and it’s such a nice mix to bring them together. We had about six or seven songs written and produced up before we did ‘I Go Crazy’ and it was the first one where it kind of clicked and felt relatively effortless, so I was like, ok, I need to put something out now, this feels like the right thing.”



Song-writing is different for everyone, and there are so many methods that writers rely on or try in order to pen their next big tune. For ‘I Go Crazy’, the backstory gives a lot of insight as to how it came together.

"I told a boy I loved him for the first time, which is not a very ‘me’ thing to do. But I’d really psyched myself up for a long time, and he didn’t say it back so… good times! I was working with the producers at this point and I came in the next morning and they knew something was up, asked ‘what’s wrong with you?’ and I was like ‘don’t even get me started!’. We’d been working on this groove, we were going for a Stevie Nicks ‘Edge of Seventeen’ thing, and we had a musical motif for that but hadn’t found any lyrics. We dug that back up and I started ranting over it. It was one of those classic things where you spend two weeks trying to craft one song and then something like that, it pours out of you in twenty minutes.”

Orla is clearly dedicated to her music, but she’s enjoying the journey as well. She’s bringing out an acoustic version of ‘I Go Crazy’ tomorrow (Friday 27 July), with help from her housemate and fellow musician Martin Luke Brown: “It would have been more obvious to put on acoustic guitar, but I really wanted to lose the rhythm and just make this completely different version of it.” There’s a second single coming too, which Orla hopes to have out in late August, and they’ve just finished doing a music video for that. It was the same guys who did the ‘I Go Crazy’ music video, which is out now. A wonderful watch, with strange but engaging images that really capture Orla’s creativity.



She hopes to have even more music out by 2019. “Doing another single or two and having them culminate in an EP or a mixtape or something before the end of the year. I still have a soft spot for EPS – I think a lot of people get on the singles train and I get that, but if you stick to that you risk missing the ones you would never release as singles.”

To finish off our chat, we asked the most vital question: if you could invite anyone to your dinner party, who would it be? Orla’s answer did not disappoint: “I went to see Alanis Morrissette last night, so I think I would give her a seat as we would immediately have a talking point because I know she loves Dublin and I could just chat to her about the gig for hours if nothing else. I’d probably have… maybe Joni [Mitchell]. I feel like those two would get on. And then… I should probably have a guy but I’m actually not, I’m gonna have Regina Spektor – who I feel like is maybe inspired by the previous two, definitely Joni at least. So, I would want them all to meet for their own sakes as well. I want them all to collectively fangirl over each other, and then me to collectively fangirl over them.”

She doesn’t just put together a great guest list for an imaginary dinner party, Orla Gartland makes some pretty good music too. Check out her Facebook for updates and her Spotify page for everything she’s currently got out. She's performing at a couple more festivals this year, and supporting fellow Irish musicians Hudson Taylor on their tour.

She aced her set at Barn on the Farm which was great for us but also for her… they’ll have to ask her back to play again every year now, right?

More Barn on the Farm interviews with Lauren Aquilina, Farebrother and Maisie Peters coming soon.