Background

‘There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in…’ L Cohen

I am a Dublin-based singer/songwriter who has recently released my debut EP, recorded live in Dublin’s Cauldron Studio. I’ve been performing in the city over the past two years, and most recently have been supporting the wonderful Jack L in gigs in the greater Dublin area. I usually play with my band but sometimes by myself or with another guitarist. My sister Michelle, who’s an upcoming visual artist as well as a talented singer, often sings harmonies with me. We grew up in a singing family.

As a child, nothing gave me a firmer sense of warmth or belonging than listening to the sound of voices in unison or in harmony, often way past bedtime in the wee small hours, when it seemed that something magical penetrated the air and the night would last forever.

The first song I remember singing was ‘My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean’. I thought it utterly beautiful. It called to me just as its narrator called to his lost love. I’ve always been a sucker for songs with longing at their core, age four no exception. I hear it now in my own songs.

To an extent I had taken singing for granted into my twenties, and though I had never sung much outside of the party circuit, I always knew that I wanted to. By my late twenties it was burning a hole inside me.

As that decade drew to a close, something shifted and, in time, something had to give. I often contemplate the resonant words from Leonard Cohen’s song ‘Anthem’, ‘There is a crack in everything/that’s how the light gets in’. I think we all innately understand those words. Bonnie Prince Billy shapes it differently, and it tears at the soul with a more stark desperation. ‘And then I see a darkness.’ There is always a darkness. To sing it is at least to name it. When I picked up my first guitar, something gave.

Sometimes we can take for granted the gifts that are at the heart of our lives, in my case the ability to sing and easy love for song that was all around me. When I learned to play guitar, however basically, I quickly discovered the revelatory truth that melody is not a mystery that dwells beyond our reach, rather it is something graspable, tangible, something that can come into its own with only the support of a few simple chords; that can change shape and dynamic with the simple inversion of those very chords.

I still clearly remember the exact moment when melody was born in my mind. On the same chord progression that gave rise to Eleanor McEvoy’s ‘A Woman’s Heart’ and U2’s ‘With or Without You’, I made my first music. In a beat, my world changed.

And that’s how I ended up fashioning myself as a singer/songwriter in my early thirties. As I say, I’ve been playing live around Dublin and, more recently, in the greater Dublin area, for a couple of years now, and I sing my own songs. I would describe my style as ‘alt country/roots’, but I like to keep the borders open.

As a mother of two small children, and a working book editor, when I set about the course of becoming a singer/songwriter, I made a pact with the universe. I would pursue my love of making music and performing with absolute commitment, in the time I had for it. I could kick myself in ten years for being too busy to go after it. Or I could give up telly. I think of Virginia’s Woolf’s ‘room of one’s own’ idea as a metaphor. Creative space is something you have to be prepared to fight for, never more so than if you’re a woman.

As I say, I like a song that opens up its borders, as Jack L sings it. My lyrics are accessible; being cryptic seems beyond my gift. I write about my own life and struggles, about the things I see around me, about the night sky and the secrets of the deep. I’m a student of words and there is joy and heartache in attempting to refine melody, rhythm and word to create an energetic chemistry. For me, writing songs is very challenging, until that blue-moon occasion when one flows out like an easy birth and sets itself before me fully-formed.

But that’s a rarity. Mostly they take me weeks and weeks, eating away always at my brain, waking me in the small hours to demand attention. I drive the kids around and sometimes my best thoughts come to me in the car. A melody rights itself at a red light. I smile internally at the sight of a traffic jam. More time.

Songs come easiest when I feel moved, and looking around this country of ours in these crazed times, there is no shortage of things to move one. I wrote a song about a season of love, called ‘Sweet Breath on a Lonesome Flame’. In it are the lines ‘Baby I loved you best, I loved you most, I loved you right and wrong/you try and try, you turn an eye, you don’t see what you don’t want’. In Ireland, I think we’re really good at not seeing that which is easier ignored. Like a dying love whose inevitable end makes it no less resistible until the final hour, maybe the fallout is too painful. But as we all know, the fallout is happening anyway, and rightly so. We’d better get used to it.

At the moment, I feel that to be Irish is to have just emerged from your teenage-hood, having wrecked your parents’ gaff in a massive drug-fuelled party. Great fun, no one’s arguing, but they’re due back any minute, and you’ve and woken up to an almighty hangover and an unbright future. The beautiful chick/dude from last night is nowhere to be found. Tomorrow you’re about to discover that you failed the leaving. There’s a queue stretching around the corner for a Mac-job. It’s time to sink or swim.

There’s always choice, always possibility. Maybe I’ll write a song about that.