CMAT is the world’s greatest pop star. With her new album ‘CrazyMad, For Me’, she’s created her masterpiece.

Words: Jake Hawkes.
Photos: Sarah Louise Bennett.

Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, or CMAT as she’s known when in pop star mode, has had a very long day. A Dork cover shoot, an Instagram live where she discussed getting scurvy on an early tour, and the release of new song ‘Stay For Something’ all precede our chat. By the time we meet her on an unseasonably hot September evening, she’s lying down on a sofa in her label offices. “This feels like the first time I’ve laid down in two days,” she says, pushing herself back up to a seated position with a mock groan.

If it feels like a gruelling schedule, that’s because it is. CMAT’s debut album ‘If My Wife New I’d Be Dead’ was released to critical acclaim early last year, hitting Number 1 in her native Ireland and winning the Choice Music Prize for Irish Album of the Year. 

Ramping up for album two, she’s released a song with long-time hero John Grant and received a shout-out from none other than Robbie Williams. It all feels like a turning point for someone who currently describes herself as an ‘H List’ celebrity (“Not a household name, but I’m definitely culturally relevant.”)

We retreat to a roof terrace where, despite the exhaustion, Ciara is on top form, bouncing between topics so fast it’s hard to keep up. We skip from Joan Didion - “A brilliant writer, her style is so beautiful” - to Dostoevsky - “He just writes bangers! People love to be all intellectual and literary about Dostoevsky, but he’s just like James Patterson” - to Patterson and Dolly Parton’s co-authored book - “Dolly’s probably lying on a chaise longue, dictating things that she thinks are a good idea, and he’s ignoring 70% of them and just writing a book” - within the first five minutes.

It’s a series of digressions that any long-term follower of CMAT on social media will know is par for the course, but this scattergun approach to topics doesn’t carry over to new project ‘CrazyMad, For Me’. The album is a tight twelve tracks based around a disastrous relationship and period of poor mental health that started when Ciara was 17 and ended when she was 23.

“I think time is a very important element in all this,” Ciara says, when asked about how she manages to write about such dark subject matter without things going off the deep end. “I’m only telling this story now, when it happened in what, 2017? If I’m being perfectly honest with you, I still have terrible thoughts and do terrible things, and nobody ever fucking hears about them because I can be very secretive when I want to be. These things take time to gestate, and I start to feel a certain amount of guilt around not communicating or expressing them. That’s when it comes out in a song - whether I want it to or not.

“Obviously, there is conscious input into all of it as well. When I was going to make this record, my idea was to make ‘Bat Out of Hell’ by Meatloaf, but for the girls. My producer said he’d rather make a Big Star record, so that’s the moodboard - if ‘Bat Out of Hell’ married Big Star.

“There’s also a singer from the 70s called Dottie West. She has an album called ‘Special Delivery’, and I think every single song on the record was a reference for almost every single song on my record, being perfectly fucking honest. I’m only saying this because she’s dead, so she’s not going to care… I hope!”

This sense of songwriting as something that happens automatically or unconsciously is one that Ciara comes back to. Not in the sense of being effortless or something she does in her sleep, but more in the way that her songs are about the subjects they need to be about, rather than a curated collection of topics she thinks will resonate most. Themes of mental health are streaked through her output because it’s something she’s grappled with for years, not because it’s relatable or worthy to talk about the subject.

“I think the worst, WORST thing you can do is to put mental health issues on a pedestal and romanticise them,” she says forcefully. “Look, if I was to be a bitch about it, which I am, I do not appreciate the way a lot of musicians talk about mental health these days.

“There’s so much crap on the airwaves and in the public domain from people who are writing about mental health in a way that’s just capitalising on the zeitgeistiness of it all. As someone who has been a wibbly wobbly wonder my entire life, the only thing that has helped is when someone communicates a specific situation in a laser-focused way that makes it clear that the world has been a difficult place for them to live in. And that doesn’t have to be miserable - it’s probably more effective to be relatively jovial about it because it demystifies it, it makes it feel less romantic, less big. People writing mass-market songs about mental health aren’t interested in the craft of making music; they’re interested in good marketing, good advertising, and getting a leg up for their career as a mommy or daddy influencer in a few years. I think it’s very manipulative, to be honest.”

Ciara pauses for breath and takes a sip of Diet Coke. “I have lots of strong feelings about that,” she says with a grin. “You know what else I hate? People saying music has to be relatable - it doesn’t! I worship the ground that anyone who is good at songwriting walks on. What do me and Lana Del Rey have in common? Nothing. She’s glamorous as fuck, different upbringing to me, always lived in America. But I love her, and if I was in a room with her, I would be a wreck because I am so not cool and would not be able to say anything coherent.

“Some of my favourite musicians of all time have been extremely privileged people that have just not hid it from me; they’ve just written about problems that they’ve had that are completely different to the problems that I’ve had but the way that they write about it is so touching that I find a vein or a thread of similarity. That’s what good songwriting is; it’s not about relatability, it’s about tapping into something that’s beautiful and sad and profound.”

If there’s one thing Ciara takes seriously, it’s writing music. The story of how she started making music again because of a feedback session where she told Charli XCX exactly how she could improve new songs is CMAT legend now, but it’s still a great encapsulation of who she is as a person. Behind the hilarious on-stage personality and disarmingly honest interactions with her fanbase, good songwriting is the lodestar which guides the good ship CMAT. 

Does that mean she never worries about the possibility of making a bad album? “Oh my god, I’ve definitely been worried about making something shit!” she says, half laughing, half groaning. “It would be SO BAD if I made a shit album. The worst part would be that I don’t think I’d have any idea that it was shit. I’ve studied songwriting so much, and I know everything about it, but I also know that the best songwriters on the planet don’t have a clue what they’re doing at any point. The only thing you can do is tap into what’s going on in your life and try to write about something that’s actually relevant to you and your interests at that moment in time.

“My favourite musicians have always swung big. When you swing big, sometimes you fucking miss. Bob Dylan, love him, adore him - he’s also made some of the worst shit I’ve ever heard. You can’t try to be too smart about it because that feeling of impulsiveness is so crucial to a good song.”

That impulsiveness is more prevalent than ever on ‘Stay For Something’, a track which was released about an hour before our interview and one which Ciara says she “pooped out”. The video sees her running around Macclesfield dressed like Marie Antoinette, but the song itself is a country-flecked blast of emotion which covers the process of trying to find meaning in a bad relationship. So far, so CMAT, but Ciara is insistent that it’s “not a smart song; it’s a very impulsive song”.

She pauses as she tries to think of a comparison. “’I Wanna Be A Cowboy, Baby!’ is probably the best song I’ve ever written. I’ll maintain that for the rest of my life. That song is great, and I wrote it very quickly, and it feels quite impulsive, but it’s also very smart. I was flexing my smart muscles and trying to use country and western references, but mixed with the modern chain restaurant-isation of the world - so it’s a smart song on that front. ‘Stay For Something’ is not a smart song; it’s 100% impulsive, and people like impulsive. 

“People don’t necessarily need something to be fun to listen to, but they do need to feel that impulse, that sense of something innate which comes to you naturally. I try to make sure all of my songs have that, but ‘Stay For Something’ really leans into it in a way that a lot of them don’t. That’s because I was emotional and angry and felt like I wanted to kill someone before I wrote it, and that’s always led to good songwriting for me.

“Having said that,” she raises one finger in a Columbo-esque ‘just one more thing’ gesture. “I do have the ‘too much’ gene flowing through my veins; sometimes I do too much with the think-y songs. All the songs on the second album are a-ok, but I’ve started writing for the third album, and I’ve been coming away sometimes like, ‘Ok Sylvia Plath, let’s reel it in here!’ I’ll write the most think-y, lyric-y thing possible, then step back and realise I’ve done way too much.”

Speaking to Ciara, you get a real sense that this back-and-forth is at the heart of what she does. It’s a tightrope walk that she makes look effortless. This is especially true considering that alongside the music, she’s also one of the most engaged artists around when it comes to her fanbase. In-store signings are one thing, but few musicians simultaneously go live on YouTube and Instagram every time a song comes out, or write a regular newsletter and speak to fans so often on social media that people can instantly tell when it isn’t her writing the captions. 

“I was the victim of a character assassination!” she proclaims dramatically, leaning in to spill the gory details. “I was really busy one day; I think I had loads of admin to do or I was in a cave for two days contemplating the nature of existence, one of the two. Either way, we needed to put a video up of me announcing in-stores. In the video, I was holding a little dog because I thought it would be funny, which it obviously was. But the person who wrote the caption wrote something like ‘this pupper wants you to come’. Which was obviously a hate crime against me personally. I don’t do ‘pupper’, I don’t do ‘doggo’, I do not use the millennial language. But what was funny was my fans were just instantly in the replies saying, ‘CMAT did not write this’, so thank God the brand remains strong.”

On the flip side of this, social media and its implications for mental health are something Ciara has been vocal about in the past. There’s an implicit demand for musicians to be across several social media platforms 24 hours a day, which can be unhealthy for even the most detached person. Multiple studies have found a strong link between heavy social media and an increased risk for depression, anxiety, loneliness, self-harm, and even suicidal thoughts. And that’s without it being directly tied to your job and future career.

“I just can’t go on it every day,” Ciara says. “I have to ban myself from it because it’s so bad for my brain, and it makes me mentally ill. It triggers something explicit in my mental makeup, and it’d be one thing if it was addictive and made you feel good - at least hard drugs have some kind of upside! But you go on your phone, and you’re addicted to it, and you just sit there scrolling, going, ‘Oh, I’m a big fat ugly cunt who can’t write songs and isn’t successful - and also I’m a barren woman, and nobody will ever love me unless I get botox’. So yeah, it’s no fun.