‘The Family Jewels’: Behind Marina’s Glittering Debut Album

The EP brought a great deal of attention to Marina. Her sound was a mixture of high pop, with glam and disco influences, yet with a choppy underground feel (she dubbed herself “an indie artist with pop goals”). In this, and in her determination to release her own music rather than playing a fame game, she was influenced by US singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston. “I thought, If he can do it, then so can I,” Marina said in 2011. “That’s when I started to produce things myself, even though I wasn’t even great on the piano. It’s about emotion; if you have heart, people connect to that.”

The mix of vulnerability and self-determination apparent on Mermaid Vs Sailor bleeds into The Family Jewels, even though the album was released on a major label and had a far larger recording budget. “Without sounding ridiculous,” Marina said in 2011, “I had a surefire instinct that I would do this with my life. I just knew.”

Is ‘The Family Jewels’ a concept album?

Although there is not one single concept to The Family Jewels, there is a unity to the album’s 13 songs. “It is a body of work largely inspired by the seduction of commercialism, modern social values, family and female sexuality,” Marina told NME in 2009, as she was preparing to release the album. “Each song was intricately produced and written by myself, and my only hope is for it to be enjoyed and consumed as a story and theory that encourages people to question themselves.”

This clarity of vision is apparent from The Family Jewels’ opening track, Are You Satisfied? Leading off with fractured strings and equally kaleidoscopic vocals, the song seems to set out Marina’s headspace. With lyrics that reference signing her record deal, she vacillates between self-belief and insecurity. “I decided to have it as my first song on my album because it gives insight into why I decided to do this whole thing,” Marina said of Are You Satisfied? “And it’s because I never feel satisfied, or that happy – or I didn’t at the time.”

In terms of female sexuality and empowerment, the song which most prominently deals with this is Girls. It rails against the sexism of tabloids seeking forever-young pop blood, and decries the stifling expectations of women to look, perform and act a certain way. Discussing the lyrics to this particular song, Marina clarified that the lines about the boring female obsession with “calories” was not a dig at other women, but a moment of self-reflection. “I definitely had issues with my weight – most girls do at some point – and it takes you quite a long time to break out of it,” she said.

Guilty, the album’s closing track, is the most abstract of The Family Jewels’ songs. Sharp, new-wave-ish in sound but unsettling in its story of a dead dog, body parts and self-reproach, it finds Marina’s voice wavering and undulating throughout. “For me, [Guilty] solves the puzzle of The Family Jewels,” she said in 2010, revealing that the track was inspired by a surreal dream and the very real emotion of missing her father.

“I think with the way that I write as an artist, I love to package things up so that concepts hit,” Marina reflected in 2024. “So sometimes that involves adding a little fantasy to it, or imaginary elements.”

What were the singles from ‘The Family Jewels’?

Six singles were lifted from The Family Jewels. Obsessions and Mowgli’s Road were both released in February 2009, a full year before the album. “Sonically, [Obsessions] is very bare and exposed,” Marina said in 2010. “Everybody has obsessions, and that’s why I think people related to the song very early on.” Mowgli’s Road, by contrast, was far poppier, Technicolor and accessible, built around a “cuckoo” refrain. “I had some trouble with some bits. And then a bit of the chorus was like… ‘And I don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know.’ It sounded like [The] Jungle Book and a bit Disney-ish. And so I just went ‘Cuckoo!’, and it’s stuck.”

The album’s next single, and the one that propelled Marina into the UK charts, was Hollywood. Writing it as a critique of celebrity culture, Marina viewed the song – just as she had with Girls – not as a take-down of others but as a reflection on her own proclivities. “That track is a sarcastic and cynical take on everything that’s commercial about America,” she said. I love the country and people dearly, and can’t wait to tour there, but I hate the way it brainwashes you. I am seduced by its pop culture, but I don’t want my brain to be infected.”

I Am Not A Robot, The Family Jewels’ fourth single, was one of Marina’s personal favourites. Absolutely infectious, this single was accompanied by one of her most striking pop videos: her body and face are sheathed in extreme makeovers, including the opening shot of shimmering black oil (which gave her an allergic reaction). It beautifully accompanies the song’s themes of human flaws and emotional walls. “I do think it’s a song particularly aimed at my generation because of the way that modern life dictates our lifestyles,” Marina has said. “Because, you know, technology is present in everyday life, we can’t live without it, and I do feel that’s really bad for human interaction.”

Oh No! and Shampain were the final two singles taken from The Family Jewels. Again, they were sonically dissimilar to each other (and from the rest of the album, too) yet thematically linked: Oh No! is about the fear of failure, while Shampain is what Marina called “the depressing side of getting drunk”. Marina’s interest in exploring the crevices of human vulnerability throughout The Family Jewels created a conceptually whole yet stylistically diverse album.

Who produced ‘The Family Jewels’?

Several producers worked on different aspects of The Family Jewels, including Marina herself (she co-produced The Outsider and Hermit The Frog). Liam Howe worked on a majority of the album’s tracks; the other co-producers were Richard “Biff” Stannard, Ash Howes, Pascal Gabriel, Greg Kurstin and Starsmith.

Liam Howe was part of the band Sneaker Pimps in the 90s and, from there, entered production. “I didn’t go to college to learn the technical nature of music,” he has said of his road to production. “At Art School I learned different things and think that’s more important… learning a creative language rather than a technical language.” It’s easy to see why this approach would have resonated with Marina, whose musical education skipped between formal learning and the warmth of singing Greek folk songs with her grandmother.

But this didn’t mean that the recording sessions always ran smoothly. “Oh my God, there’s one track called The Outsider, and I did, I think, 486 vocal takes,” she told the BBC in 2009. “I think Liam Howe actually wants to kill me. I’ve ruined music for him!”

What did Marina do next?

The next single Marina released after The Family Jewels was Radioactive. This was a fine track that moved the singer further into the pop stylings she would explore on 2012’s Electra Heart. In 2011, Marina revealed she had changed her mode of songwriting, moving away from the bedroom compositions of The Family Jewels.

This means that The Family Jewels remains distinctive in Marina’s discography. Earnest, youthful and splashed with the self-starter energy that drove Marina to MySpace in the 2000s, The Family Jewels is a gem. “I’ve exposed everything about myself,” she told BBC Radio 6 Music in 2010. “Why was I so open?”

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