Building connections with Orla Gartland

In front of a soft pretzel wall decal, decked out in camo capris and graphic eyeliner, Orla Gartland seemed calm and collected ahead of what ended up being an incredibly high-octane performance.

The venue, Underground Arts in Philly’s Callowhill section, was packed. All ages were represented. There were teenagers who maybe found her music through the show Heartstopper, which featured her 2019 single “Why Am I Like This?,” and adults well into their 50’s who maybe just love a good pop song. 

“When I go to a show, I don’t want to see someone who’s, depending on the music, apologizing for existing,” Gartland says to me in the green room before the show. “I just want them to really own every word they’re singing…so I guess when I’m singing my own songs, and touring my own projects…the goal is taking up as much space as possible and not being afraid to do that.” 

Her energy was cranked to 11 for the whole show. Gartland was backed by two bandmates, drummer Sara Leigh Shaw and bassist Scarlet Halton. The three of them came on stage to Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out For A Hero,” a pick that felt vaguely prophetic. In a room packed full of queer teens and adults, we are holding out for a hero. Even though Gartland can’t solve our problems, she can at least make us forget about them for a night. 

She invited fans on stage to hype up their respective sides of the venue, she switched instruments with her drummer, she bantered with the audience. It was kind of a non-stop barrage of good times.

It was over ten years ago when I first heard Orla Gartland sing for the first time. “We grew up together,” she says to me when I tell her that.

The Irish-born singer-songwriter has been posting videos to Youtube since at least 2013. In front of a butter yellow wall, armed with just a guitar, Gartland would post originals and covers. Most of these seem to be scrubbed from her page now, but it was through these videos that I learned about the likes of Joni Mitchell, and where I felt like I could pick up my own guitar and write. Last fall, she put out her sophomore studio album, Everybody Needs A Hero (there’s that word again).

“I feel grateful that I’ve grown at the pace that I have,” Gartland says. “I’ve never had this big kind of overnight spike…it’s just been this kind of marathon, not a sprint. It’s almost like the more eyes that have been on me, I’ve been old enough to handle it.” She says she feels lucky, and that she thinks she’s had a better experience than most.

If Gartland introduced so many people like me to their favorite artist through her covers, how did she get introduced to hers? She wasn’t shown legacy artists by her parents, so for her, it was exposure through her friends covering songs like “Big Yellow Taxi.”

“I mourn a time where people were so much less accessible online,” she says of the mystique of Joni Mitchell. “I just love, as a fan of an artist from that era…there’s so many degrees of separation that makes someone so much more alluring, and then I think it makes you listen to the music differently.” Even if a song sounds nothing like her, Gartland says “all roads lead back to Joni.” 

Gartland’s era of the internet was a true moment in time. She grew up in the same area in Dublin as the brother duo Hudson Taylor, who took her under their wing and taught her to busk, and later brought her as support for their gigs. She followed them to London where she met people like Lauren Acquilina and Lewis Watson, who also had started their careers on YouTube. She says this community of musicians made her feel at home in a place where she really had no family or friends to start.

Gartland doesn’t just have her solo work. She plays in the band for fellow YouTube self-starter dodie, and the two of them are half of the band FIZZ, a campy, dreamy pop collective. In 2023, FIZZ put out The Secret to Life, a full-length record featuring Gartland, dodie, Greta Isaac, and Martin Luke Brown. The group is on hiatus now to focus on solo work, but have hinted that there’s a possibility of another future release. 

Gartland was supported by FIGHTMASTER, an actor and musician from Cincinnati. Some of FIGHTMASTER’s hits include “Cowboy Tumbleweed” and set closer “Bad Man.”

The show was a much needed light spot in what seems to be nonstop darkness. Performances like Gartland’s and FIGHTMASTER’s, that have so much queer joy written into their DNA, feel radical and much-needed.