Marika Hackman: 2017

Marika Hackman's debut album, 2015's We Slept At Last, heralded the arrival of a fascinating folk rock singer and songwriter who cast provocative spells with her plaintive observations on mortality and preternatural occurrences. She toured with her good friend Laura Marling and seemed to be traveling down a particular acoustic road as an artist.

But Hackman is anything but predictable. Her 2017 album I'm Not Your Man strips away her debut's more gentle elements for an exhilarating, raucous, and confessional blast of guitar rock and lyrical fusillades, sometimes aimed at errant lovers and misguided men, as on the cheeky "Boyfriend." More significantly, it's an album of sensual awakening — Hackman was falling in love with her girlfriend as she was writing songs, blissfully evident in the eroticism of tracks like "Violet."

The Mercury Prize-nominated quartet the Big Moon stepped in as Hackman's backing band for the recording of I'm Not Your Man and the five women (and their tour manager) hit the road in a van for a co-headlining U.S. road trip this past summer, which concluded at New York's Baby's All Right. 

For her FUV Live session, Hackman and the Big Moon played two songs from I'm Not Your Man, "Boyfriend' and "Time's Been Reckless." I chatted with Hackman about the dynamic shift in her writing style, the romance that inspired her as a songwriter, and her long friendship with Marling.

In a a separate interview, I spoke with Hackman and the Big Moon together about their rowdy, hilarious and sometimes sleepless adventures crossing the country and how they came to collaborate as a cool London supergroup.

[Recorded: 8/16/17]