Susan O’Neill told David Hennessy about her new album which deals with themes of gentrification, grief and mental health, her continuing evolution and sharing the stage with people such as Sharon Shannon, Mick Flannery and Phoebe Bridgers.
Susan O’Neill’s second album Now in a Minute, has arrived.
The Clare songstress’ sophomore solo collection confirms Susan O’Neill as one of Ireland’s most gifted voices.
Susan has toured with electronic dance band King Kong Company, as well as with traditional music legend Sharon Shannon.
It is her partnership with Cork troubadour Mick Flannery that has already produced the 2021 album In the Game (Ireland’s biggest selling independent album of that year) and continues to be fruitful with Mick co- writing four tracks on this new album.
Now in a Minute has already been described by Clash as “Superb” and the Sunday Times as simply “Exquisite”.
Susan boasts previous nominations for the RTE Radio 1 ‘Best female folk artist’ and the Choice Music Prize so it’s no surprise that the early reviews describe Susan as an “artist working at the top of her game..”(Hot Press).
You must be delighted with the response to the album so far..
“It’s lovely.
“You know, you spend so long organising songs and, I suppose, birthing them and nurturing them and getting things ready for an album that you can sometimes forget that they’re about to be shared when people hear them for the first time.
“It’s a long time in the making and it’s lovely to hear people resonating with them.”
And especially because of the nature of it, as it is so personal. It deals with issues such as mental health, addiction. I think you have said yourself you were ready to use your voice on all these things..
“Yeah, I just wanted to really embody the vulnerability that is sometimes difficult to do.
“Every day I suppose I would always be of the ‘get up and get on with it’, ‘keep going’ and ‘best side out’.
“But in a way, for this album, I really wanted to honour a different way of thinking and that’s just kind of baring a lot more.”
Was it a case then of holding back in some ways previously?
“It wouldn’t be as much holding back as, I suppose, just becoming better at communicating.
“I think that happens with evolving and with growing.
“I think the more I grow as a person, the more I look at my own cognitive abilities and what they are, and also how I function as a human.
“It’s lovely to kind of see it in all these new lights as you grow and evolve and mature.
“I guess that also allows a chance to sing about it in a different way seeing it both with the light and the dark and celebrating the hard things as much as the good things. I’ve been doing that as a person anyway so it’s been lovely to kind of add that into the process of making an album.”
You also shared your recent single, Everyone’s Blind. Where did that song come from?
“I was actually doing a Canadian tour.
“I spent a lot of time driving through the Rockies so it was stark mountains with beautiful, serene views and all very grounding.
“Then we were driving through the prairies which is just days and days of expanse, so I had been on the road and really just digesting all of these views and all of these landscapes while just thinking about life.
“You ponder a lot while you’re out on the road, it’s time to consider everything and so during the sound check, this kind of idea just came into my head and I just started to sing some of the melody into the phone.
“I was tinkling away with a few words here and there but there was nothing fully formulated and I sent Mick Flannery the demo and just said I had started working on this.
“So he collaborated with me on fixing some of the words together and so it ended up kind of becoming this song of movement and then just looking around at everything else that’s going on, seeing certain things that seem like problems, seeing issues here and there and everywhere and realising I’m part of the problem, a very significant part.
“It’s not until that responsibility is owned and considered, positive change can be made, and so I guess it became a bit of a song about responsibility as well.”
When you say you are part of the problem, do you mean like we all are?
“Exactly, we’re all blind to something. We might all be different, we’re all doing really well at something and we’re all struggling in another area.
“To acknowledge the balance of what that is, there can be a lot of power in it.”
Your previous single Sign of the Times has a different theme, dealing with gentrification and how a place can change. Is it about your home town of Ennis?
“It would actually be for a lot of places around Ireland because I end up circling back on a lot of places once a year or sometimes less, sometimes more.
“You do get to come back but it’s an interesting way to kind of get a snapshot of it.
“You just look around and about the town and you see things are happening very, very fast.
“You get to compare all of that then to the bigger lands when you go to the States or to Canada or across Europe and you see all sorts of ways of living slow and fast, the hustle and bustle of the city or the tranquillity of the countryside, and it’s all beautiful.
“I always find there’s a presence of everlasting in the countryside, there’s a state of renewal, constant flux of come and go and changes within the weather and streams and the trees and the fauna and the things that come and live and die and carry on.
“I suppose that same thing happens in a city, it just sometimes feels like it moves a bit too quickly.
“I don’t know what kind of an effect is it leaving after it?
“Is it a good one or a bad one?
“So Sign of the Times is asking questions.
“It’s just looking at things and then asking questions.
“I think it’s important for musicians, if you’re moved by a theme, I think it’s important to really go into the questioning of it and provide those questions if nothing else.
“I mean, everyone might have a different set of answers but at least asking the question is drawing awareness.”
What made you want to call the album, Now in a Minute? We’ve often heard it said, a very Irish phrase…
“I really like the Irish use of this phrase, ‘Now in a minute’.
“I think it doesn’t take itself too seriously because in a very literal sense, it doesn’t make sense and yet, somehow it does.
“It’s this kind of widely accepted thing that doesn’t fully make sense yet it’s also a vague answer in something.
“There’s something kind of urgent about it within the now and I really appreciate that, I feel that the use of that phrase is kind of a good way to look at things in it being maybe urgent but also not taking itself too seriously in any way.
“And there’s also the idea of like time. I think time is fascinating.
“The more we live, the more precious it becomes in some way and yet it seems to go faster as we grow.
“I like the idea of referencing time on the title.”
Time is very relevant. It was in 2018 that you released your first album Found Myself Lost so, in a way, it is six years between albums but in between you recorded and released your duet album with Mick Flannery, In the Game. That was an important step along your journey, wasn’t it?
“Yeah, it was a huge experience and very different to anything I had done before.
“Mick is such a great writer so to work with somebody who had all of these tools and different kind of approaches and processes within the songs, it was lovely.
“He’s an unbelievable writer and he had this idea to use two characters.
“In playing the character of a person outside of myself, I just got to try different singing styles. I got to consider being somebody else or embodying all of these different women while singing those songs.
“When I was coming back to do this album as a result of that, I was thinking, ‘I’ll go even more personal now with this’.
“Every experience really informs the next.”
Mick is involved here also co- writing four songs off the album so that collaboration and relationship continues.
But you think of every album as a collaboration, don’t you?
“Yes, I think it’s all a collaboration.
“I just feel it comes together from everybody and now that we’re playing the songs live and we’re doing this record store tour around Ireland, it’s all lending itself into us playing them differently now that there’s people listening.
“You always change according to how people how people are.”
For this album Sussan worked with multi-instrumentalists Cillian and Lorcan Byrne, as well as Killian Browne.
“I reconnected with friends of mine from college which was really nice. It just brought in new sounds.”
Speaking of live performances, I saw you playing a few months back when you were onstage at the Imagining Ireland show at the Barbican in London. Did you enjoy that?
“I did. It was a lovely show. It was a beautiful thing and it was really great to be asked.
“We have such an abundance of amazing Irish artists at the moment and so to be celebrating with them and to be part of that, really it’s a special thing.”
Speaking of special live performances, your Everyone’s Blind video shows you on the road and playing to big crowds, what has been the highlight of the great stuff you have done?
“We just played Haldern Pop festival this summer in Germany.
“I played there a couple times before, but we actually played with Stargaze, a beautiful eight piece orchestra, and Cantus Domus, an incredible choir, and they learned all our songs. We did a full set with them in front of five thousand people.
“It was just unbelievably fulfilling and nourishing to have, to play these songs that were unheard and they were all with us and listening.
“When I go around Ireland in October, I’m going back to a lot of places I’ve been before.
“I absolutely adore the idea of getting to see all of these places that I cherish over the winter, it’s really beautiful.
“We have a really special collection of spots around Ireland. The music listeners are brilliant. And I feel privileged to get to do that.
“It feels like a very unusual lifestyle. My office is my car, then sometimes it’s the studio and then every other night, it’s somewhere different.
“One day you’re in a castle playing for a gig, another day you’re in a church. The next day you’re playing in a graveyard for someone that you might know. It’s always something different, but you just bring your song to wherever it might sprout. The rest is just a bonus.”
Speaking of highlights, you got to share a stage with Phoebe Bridgers, was that a big honour? “Yeah, it was.
“Anytime that you’re getting to play for people that you admire and play before them, it’s a huge thing. She was very kind.
“It means a lot, really means a lot when somebody shares the music that way.
“I think it opens other people’s ears and minds to the music, and the fact that she did that was really cool.”
It must have been something like when you got the early support of Sharon Shannon and even Bono. That must have been really meaningful…
“Yeah, of course it is.
“It’s invaluable really because, more than anything else, it’s just being recognised by someone at the start of your journey and that kind of stuff means a lot.
“I did a lot of touring with Sharon in the earlier days.
“She was very good to me.
“It was a great eye opener to be doing that with her.”
It was only ever music that spoke to you, wasn’t it?
“Yeah, that is true.
“I mean, I’ve been involved in songwriting workshops. I’ve worked with kids in youth groups and in schools. I’ve done music with Waterford Healing Arts Trust and they just bring music to the bedsides of long term patients in hospitals and nursing homes.
“I like working in many different capacities.
“I directed a documentary (The Space Between) there two years ago and TG4 gave it a spin and it lives online.
“I love the world of film, cinematography and directing as well but I have to say that film was largely about artists and music, so it was just the world of creations and exploration and from a very young age, music was my medium for that. And it hasn’t changed.”
Is it true that school was not for you or you struggled in school, but music gave you some solace in those times?
“I’ve always found reading to be a little bit tough.
“I mean, I always had nice schools and nice teachers but my mind wasn’t necessarily equipped for some of the ways that we would examine ourselves at the end of the year, but music was always a good flow.
“I think it’s very important when you have something that makes you tick, to follow that. To follow the thing that brings you joy and I feel that a lot of answers come from doing that. A lot of people land exactly where they’re supposed to.”
I want to ask about a couple more tracks off the album. I wanted to speak about Rewire and Malachi, it seems they have a common theme of grief..
“Malachi, there was a bit of grief there but I actually changed the name in order to kind of keep that aspect of it for myself.
“Rewire was grief in a love, grief in the love that didn’t transpire.
“With Malachi, it’s really the reminiscing of a conversation that actually isn’t happening but the idea of, if you could have that conversation with somebody and how would it go? And would it even be worth having because you could be so downtrodden at the time.
“But Rewire, I was finding strength in it again.
“They are on different topics but there is grief in both of them, you’re right about that.
“It was also just looking towards the slightly more hopeful, that there was an acknowledgement maybe it’s a choice, maybe I can rewire at any point and it just means that I have to change, so there was an acknowledgement there.”
Back to the album, you feel it’s more you than any previous album..
“I wouldn’t say that it’s more me, I just think that I’ve opened up even more.
“I suppose, as a singer and as an artist I really believe that the voice is always developing, it’s always changing and your style is always changing.
“You don’t think the same way about something five years later, maybe not even five minutes later so I guess it’s just this stage on the journey.
“It’s another step.
“It’s another expression of myself and it’s probably a little bit deeper than something I’ve done personally before.”
Now in a Minute is out now.
Susan O’Neill tours Ireland in October and plays London’s The Lower Third on 15 November.
For more information, click here.
