Billie Marten & Nùria Graham in Montreal
Photos by Marianna Georgiadis
November 29, 2025
Montreal, QC @ Fairmount Theatre
The sold out show had people packed in every nook and cranny of the Fairmount Theatre.
Nùria Graham
Catalan-Irish singer, Núria Graham began the night by serenading the crowd with her soulful and lo-fi sound as silence fell over the room. Inspired by the likes of Björk and Lou Reed, her velvety sound draws you in and lulls you into her daydream. She sings a song in Spanish, which she hasn’t sung before because she used to be embarrassed about her Spanish, but we aren’t in Spain so she figures this is the time and place to take the risk.
Billie Marten
When Billie Marten takes to the stage, she jumps straight into ‘Feeling,’ the opening song of Dog Eared. Throughout the night she plays an array of songs from across her many projects, scattered with the stories behind them, such as ‘Planets,’ which she wrote about the best bar in the world: a bar off route 66 in Tulsa, Oklahoma she visited on tour. By paring back the performance and touring as a trio, accompanied by Andrew Maguire on drums and Katie Martucci on bass and backup vocals, towards the middle of the set a few songs’ instrumentation began to blend together a little, but through it all Billie shone on and still managed to infuse each song with very distinct and vivid emotion, and she has a song for every mood. To watch her perform live is to watch her untethered, and full of feeling in a way that will have you listening to her music with a renewed appreciation. She brings every song to life in an all-consuming way where time seems to stop existing as you are lost in her melodies.
After releasing her first music at age 15, Billie Marten’s soft voice has grown to be unmistakable in the indie music scene. Now, in her mid‑20s, her music shows a deeper emotional nuance, richer instrumentation, and a willingness to experiment and ultimately be more earnest. In an interview with Luna Collective, Marten described her latest record by saying “Dog Eared is just a metaphorical way of feeling kind of worn — but in the way books are worn when they’ve been loved. I used to be precious with everything. Now I underline, fold corners, let it all get messy — and that feels more honest.” She continues to elaborate that Dog Eared came from the idea that we are all taught to keep things pristine, yet the things we love the most often end up a little bent, marked, and lived in. Marten’s love for books has also led her to begin an initiative where she hides signed bookmarks in independent bookstores across cities she tours, encouraging her fans to keep reading and support independent book stores. Ahead of her performance at Fairmount Theatre, she stopped in at Joie de Livres where she left a bookmark in an edition of Camus’s L’Étranger.
After taking a moment to play a few acoustic songs alone on stage, she invites Núria to join her once again on stage, sharing with the audience that Dog Eared wouldn’t have happened without her, and if you look closely you will find Núria’s name and mark all over its credits. Billie jokes that she first brought her to New York to work on the album, and has now stolen her away on tour. Marten released her fifth studio album, Dog Eared, this July, following a series of organic, “live” sessions. Despite Billie’s distinct and singular sound, the idea was to create a more textured and collaborative project, rather than a stripped‑back singer-songwriter album. The sessions were instead recorded in a shared space where musicians gathered together, playing intuitively without headphones or feedback to try and capture the energy. You can hear the ‘aliveness’ of the record, brought to life by Billie’s strikingly warm vocals which gently tie together her quiet reflections on love, stillness and change against the album’s background of playful instrumentation.
On stage she is charming and honest, and her dry British humour comes out in small quips and is exceedingly endearing and disarming. For her encore, she turns the crowd into a two-part chorus, to join in singing ‘Swing’. In conducting the crowd on how to sing its melody, she instructs us to visualize two worms riding a wave away and finally breaking free, for the uptick at the end, which has everyone laughing and ends the night on a wonderful moment of camaraderie as all of our voices blend together for one final hurrah.
