The musician Gwenno Saunders grew up in Cardiff in a trilingual family – with a Cornish father and Welsh mother. After a stint as a dancer and acting in the Welsh-language TV series Pobol y Cwm, she became lead singer of the indie pop band the Pipettes before launching her solo record Y Dydd Olaf in 2014. Her most recent album, Utopia, was released last July. Her summer tour starts on 2 May at the Dartmoor Tors festival and continues with dates up to September. Gwenno lives in Cardiff with her husband and two children.

I went to see this Marianne Faithfull film last week. It’s about memory – what is remembered and what isn't – and, thematically, a lot of this is what I'm interested in. I can't imagine having been a woman in her position, in that era; for me the film was a celebration of her mind and her thinking. That was really exciting because it's always been very clear that Marianne was fiercely intelligent and had a lot to say about everything that happened and everything she witnessed in a very philosophical way.  When you see interviews with her from the past, journalists always want to make it very personal but she was far more preoccupied with ideas of what was going on at the time. The film was wonderful: a great celebration of someone who was one of the great thinkers of that time. I found it endlessly inspiring.

West Wales is such a fruitful place, culturally and musically so we go to Wright’s all the time. When we go to Aberteifi – Cardigan in English – we always stop by Wright's. It is in a little village called Llanarthne, not far from Carmarthen, and it's been there for a long time. It's got the best menu, the best food and a shop, a sort of pantry. It's just the place to stop and eat on your way to anywhere west of Cardiff, basically. 

We go as a family. The music's great. There's lots of books lying around that you want to read. It's the perfect place to have a lovely afternoon of nutritious, home-cooked food.

I've been friends with Lally for a long time now: she's part of a collective called Stone Club, and they've DJed with us on tour. Lally's from Cornwall and has an arts background. What I love about her book is that she's celebrating and exploring the day-to-day creative element of what makes folk. It's a really important book in the conversation around folk culture, because people say “that's folk” and “that's not folk”, or there's a certain aesthetic that's considered “folk”. And Lally is saying it's collective creativity that's happened for no other reason than for its own benefit in terms of an inner community space. There's much to be said about the celebration of people's everyday life that is not necessarily a declaration of any sort. She's got a few Instagram handles where she shares stuff – @thefolkarchive is a big one. We can overlook folk art – its everydayness – but she celebrates its value. It's brilliant.

This was an exhibition in a cafe in a small mining town in the Welsh valleys, in an area that is culturally very rich. It was creating a modern art space in a community that does not have a gallery but has a lot of local artists. It made me think about those exhibitions where you go into a gallery and there's a plinth, and there's something on the plinth, whereas here the art was taken out of that gallery context and put somewhere else. It felt more radical and democratic in the sense it was the people telling you about the place they lived through the prism of a convention that is often seen as not very accessible. It's not dissimilar to what Lally's exploring. Who owns art, and how do we present it?

As an artist, Joe Meek is endlessly inspiring. This album is one of my favourite records – I love the sonic ambition. I adore how it sounds. It’s a concept album about space seen through a 50s lens. Recently, I've been doing a lot more songwriting in London and revisiting places that I lived or have family ties to, around Islington. And Joe worked in a flat on the Holloway Road that is close to where my grandma used to live. Throughout my musical life I have always felt the spirits and souls floating around. I am drawn geographically to places. I write by tapping into that spirit. I really like to time-travel when I make music.

Interview by Jane Ferguson