There is something quietly radical about making a record the way Lettie made the album ‘Pirate Lover’. No labe and no pressure to chase an algorithm. The result is nine tracks of sparse, melodic songwriting drawing on old blues and Molly Drake, set against a backdrop of real and vivid life: a near-death experience, a family gambling addiction, watching the Suffolk landscape of her childhood swallowed by a new power station, and an unlikely love story with an ex-racing car driver.

Today we talk with Lettie about what it actually takes to make something this personal. The home recording process, the songs that didn’t survive, and the ones she still thinks about. In this interview Lettie talks about recording at home with a bad back, the songs she had to let go, and what years of touring – selling merch, hauling a keyboard onto a tour bus – actually taught her about music and money. Plus the records she can’t stop playing in the car.

A conversation about honesty, limitation and making something that lasts. Let’s go!

Okay so let’s just start somewhere real — nine tracks, recorded at home, in whatever pockets of time you could find between work, and most people can barely send a coherent email when they’re stressed, so what does your actual recording setup look like physically, and what’s the most chaotic thing that happened in the background while you were trying to capture something beautiful?

My studio consists of an old-fashioned piano stool (so no arms) placed at a small wooden table that folds in and out in one corner of my sitting room.  I recorded on Cubase Elements 11 LE on an old MacBook. My biggest investment was getting a new interface the Universal Audio Apollo Twin.  The most important thing I had already was a vintage Microtech Gefell M92.1S Studio Tube Microphone given to me by my former writing partner and lifelong friend in America, David Baron.  I live in a crescent with very little through traffic.  It is the quietest street I have ever lived on in London.  My biggest thing that concerned me was the bleeding into the headphones so I do record at a ‘barely there’ level and hold a pop shield manually.  I find my back hurts after a recording for a few hours because I’m stooped so low down.  Recording and trying to perform at the safe time is really hard!  Also for three months last year I perforated my ear.  I went out on New Year’s Eve and bang I was hearing out of tune music and was really out of action and swimming for three months.  It turned out it was probably brought on by stress.

Dave Barbarossa was in Bow Wow Wow and Adam Ant’s band, he’s got this incredible rhythmic DNA, and yet you clearly weren’t going for anything loud or maximalist here — so how did that conversation go, did you have to talk him down from anything, or was he immediately on the same quiet stripped-back page as you?

Dave, who is a good friend, and I have done loads of stuff together including an EP called Crossroads a while back.  I would really like to write again on his drumbeats because that creates much more space in my songwriting and is always more fun but in this instance I gave him the tracks and he drummed to the songs as they were already written (after rehearsing solo beforehand).  He recorded them in about an hour at a lovely little studio called Slipway Studios in Richmond.  You never have to tell Dave anything.  He’s naturally musical.  This wasn’t the studio I originally booked. I had booked another studio on one of the islands in the Thames.  I won’t name the studio but let’s just say they were idiotic.  Honestly, I have no idea how they are still in business!

You went to the same school as Ed Sheeran, played the same festival weekend in 2010, accidentally sent him your tech spec, which is such a perfectly weird footnote — so do you ever actually bump into each other at this point, and is it awkward, funny, or just completely normal?

My mum bumped into him and his girlfriend, now wife I think, at the Yoxford shop and my Mum said how much she loved her shoes!

Nine songs is a very deliberate number, you’re not padding anything out, not chasing the fifteen-track streaming play, so what ended up on the cutting room floor and is there a song that almost made it that you’re still quietly thinking about?

I cut two long songs and a song about Manolete – a bullfighter who died in the ring.  I read a lot about bullfighting and went to Arles to the Gypsy Festival as a result of a film script I was given to read which was based on a former bullfighter in Perpignan in the gypsy community.

One of the songs was called Snowdrop by John Armstrong a poet I knew and he was very excited that I would put a poem to music but he insisted this was the wrong one.  I laboured and laboured on it and then he died.  I will perhaps come back to it one day but putting poems to music is not always easy I also wanted a voice and I couldn’t find a voice.  Ultimately, I wanted his voice on it but he died.

The music was dragging. I would burn a CD in the car and then think about it.  There are a couple of tracks I might just play live.  

Cameron Craig mixed this record and the guy has Grammy credits and works at a completely different scale to a kitchen table in Suffolk, so what’s it actually like handing something that intimate over to someone operating at that level — did it change the album, or did it just make it sound more like itself?

I was never in Suffolk recording.  I record in London because my work and my life is in London.  Suffolk is where I grew up and where my Mum lives.

Cameron is a genius and I have worked with him a lot.  I would call him a producer on this record.  He did some really unusual effects on the piano that I haphazardly recorded on the song Pirate Lover at the end.  I sat with him several times in Battersea where he has his studio and he also helped me edit because there was this one track when he kept falling asleep so that was it I cut it right at the last minute!

Molly Drake is such a specific and slightly obsessive reference point because most people don’t even know Nick Drake’s mum made records, which says a lot about how deep you dig when you’re looking for inspiration — so what else are you currently listening to that nobody in your life fully understands why you love it?

I am a bit stuck in my ways.  I listen to a lot of classical music but in the car its mainly Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Bo Diddley, the old blues stuff like Lightnin’ Hopkins and John Lee Hooker, Tom Waits, JJ Cale etc.  Half way through recording the album I got obsessed with The Incredible String Band’s The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter for some reason! It was on serious rotation for a while in the car!  Rory Gallagher’s three acoustic songs from his ‘Live in Europe’ album were also on repeat.

I have been to a lot of gigs the last couple of years highlights include Mavis Staples, Meshell Ndegeocello, Jerron Paxton, Chris Smither, Lankum, Billy Childish (the violinist Richard Moore that plays on my album plays in his band), Laurie Anderson, Nacho Vegas in Las Palmas, DakhaBrakha and Gogol Bordello and so many more I just can’t remember!

Most Fridays I go and see the jazz at the Club I go to.  The band is led by Greg Davis the saxophonist that appears on my album but the musicians are all fantastic many of whom play at Ronnie Scott’s.  I don’t mind some of the mainstream stuff, but I hate soulless big venues and the ticket prices they ask and really do not like backing tracks which nearly all major acts now use! 

The album is called Pirate Lover and it came out in March 2026 which is a genuinely wild cultural moment where everything feels slightly lawless and unmoored, so whether you intended it or not the timing feels kind of perfect — did the title come early or late in the process, and did its meaning shift for you between when you chose it and now?

The song was called Pirate Lover and I needed to find an album name that might have a chance of being found on Google!  There was no song or album of that name that existed.  Tears of an Actor also an original title was a bit too negative and sad.

You’ve clearly pushed back against AI-generated music but you’re releasing onto the same Spotify where your dentist’s AI tracks live, so how do you actually think about that on a day-to-day level — does it bother you, have you made peace with it, or are you just genuinely not looking at the numbers?

It doesn’t bother me because luckily I don’t have to make a living from it!  I think when I was working with David Baron in America and he invested all this time into me for free I felt much more worried and concerned about it all. So much changed.  

In 2008 there was no Spotify, no Facebook, Instagram or TikTok.  The vast array of platforms now makes that a very time-consuming part of a young artist’s life now. David told me a label would not pick up an artist now unless they constantly updating their social media and had half a million followers.

Supporting Peter Murphy across Europe while also being his merch seller on the same tour is the kind of detail that says everything about where you were at in 2009 — fully committed, doing whatever it took, not too precious about the hustle — so what do you know now about the music industry that you really wish someone had told you back then?

You can’t make any money from it!!

Supporting Peter Murphy across Europe was an eye opener to me on many different levels.  Firstly I do not think there is a greater vocalist out there right now than Peter Murphy and the energy he was putting into those shows every night was incredible.  I think there were two days off so it was gruelling for him but bands can’t afford to pay per diems.  

Peter was very kind to have me on board because I had this enormous keyboard which was a big thing to put on the bus. I did the merch desk because I benefited so much from meeting his fans and also seeing him every night was so incredible and actually having something to do I mean I was only playing 30 minutes!  The only trouble I had was in Barcelona where a number of t-shirts were nicked so I think I paid for them in the end. When I came home from that month away I felt so depressed and I never get depressed.  

I learnt a lot more about being a full-time musician and artist from Hugh Cornwell and it put me right off!

The album is out now, it exists in the world, it’s no longer just yours — so what do you actually want people to feel when they listen to it, not what you think they will feel, but what you genuinely want?

I did several things on this album which were conscious. I wanted to make an album that avoided the minor keys as much as possible (more difficult than it sounds!); I spent longer on the lyrics and I wanted people to put the album on for 34 minutes and not skip a song.  I wanted to create an album that sat comfortably in a particular mood like the albums I listen to in my car.  I wanted it to be musical with tonality light and shade without just a big build.  I wanted it to be raw and wonky, and I wanted it to sound original and honest.  Ultimately the more I added the worse the tracks got.  I knew my meagre budget and my limited time would mean I had very clear production limitations (also because I’m not a technical engineer).  I worked in a small space and created a sparse album and felt it was time to create something pastoral and uplifting in a way even though some of it is of course sad.  I wanted to create some light in what I think are dark times we are living in.

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