f38 O’Neill’s Favourite
Lisa O’Neill’s musical career trajectory has accelerated upward this year with the release of her album Heard A Long Gone Song. Cara Gibney talks with the woman with an old voice.
I
t’s not that she shifts from old soul to stripling. It’s a simultaneous state. The wisdom and insight of Lisa O’Neill share equal breath and phrase with a forthright inner child. The confluence is real-time. She writes from both ends of that spectrum, her words straddling the light, her music buoying equally the world-worn with the unspoiled. Her voice long filched from someone ageless, something ageless. Hoarse and serenading, lamenting and cotton and extraordinary.
O’Neill first graced fRoots’ pages back in July 2017 with an enquiringly fresh Root Salad served up by Tony Montague. Howev- er, since then life has moved quickly for the Dublin-based singer-songwriter, not least with her recent signing to Rough Trade imprint River Lea: “A new record label releasing beautiful and strange traditional music from the British Isles and beyond.”
“For as long as I’ve known Radie Peat from Lankum she’s been telling me about Lisa O’Neill,” explained River Lea’s Tim Chipping. I’d asked him why they had decided on O’Neill as their new label’s first release. Peat had been telling him how O’Neill would “silence a room at singing sessions in Dublin,” but until this year Chipping had only heard O’Neill singing her own songs. Then someone sent him recordings of O’Neill singing traditional songs. “I burst into tears at my desk (in an open-plan office),” he confessed. “I emailed them to Geoff Travis and Jean- nette Lee who run River Lea with me, and it turned out they’d already been thinking of her for the label. We met up, we talked about Margaret Barry and Nick Cave and she went away and made a record beyond anything we could’ve hoped for. Jeannette thinks it’s already a classic album that will live forever. And she may well be right.”
That record is Heard A Long Gone
Song, a nine-track mix of O’Neill’s original material and traditional songs, rounded off with an old beauty of Shane Mac- Gowan’s, which contains the idling, enig- matic line that ultimately became the album’s title. But for Lisa O’Neill it’s impor- tant to connect with every song she’s working with. “I don’t get very far with a
song I’m not feeling… some songs I’m so moved by that I know they’re not for me to sing, I can enjoy them and listen to them. But some songs – I hear them and they do go in and I can feel it, soak them up, and I just know that I just can’t wait to sing that myself.”
Some years ago she received sage advice while touring with David Gray that helped her trust her guts in regard to all this. “One night before I went on stage, I said to him, ‘I don’t know what song to start with, what do you do when you’re in this situation?’ And he said, ‘Sing the song that moves you the most at the moment.’ And that stayed with me. I don’t just bring that into the live show, I bring it into sessions that I do, and in going to the studio as well.”
And so she did with Heard A Long
Gone Song. “Along The North Strand and The Lass Of Aughrim, I just felt them that week, the week I was recording,” O’Neill recalled. “There’s only so much time in the studio for someone of my level who can’t afford to just be in there and mess around until something happens, you know. I had six days and I needed to get it down, so I went for the ones that I was feeling emo- tionally that week. That’s why they’re on that album.”
“He was so generous with his advice,” O’Neill remarked of David Gray. It set her thinking. How lucky she’s been with the people who have supported her over the years. “Glen Hansard,” she stated. “Unbe- lievable. It’s endless with him you know… Just that somebody comes behind you and believes in you and says, ‘Yeah keep going. You’re doing the right thing.’ I can’t say it enough. I have to use every opportunity to say it because I know I’m in no other posi- tion to thank him. You carry it and you feel it when people give you a leg up, and you know that without that you would maybe be back there.”
Another leg up for Lisa O’Neill along the way has been distinguished music film maker Myles O’Reilly who has worked with the singer on numerous occasions over the years. O’Reilly gravitates towards music that “translates to ‘away from venues’… music that’s played in environments where
humans go naturally. I guess that errs on the side of folk music and traditional music, even jazz or lots of ethno-world music.” He’s been a fan since first hearing O’Neill sing in a campsite at Electric Picnic.
“What I love about Lisa’s voice is how
unaffected it is by influence and how she’s not pretending to be anybody else. There is no hint of another voice within her… in the last five or six years she has become completely unique and grown into her voice. It’s like her voice was always there and she was able to grow into it. It sounds like an old voice, like an older lady, which is very appropriate in that so many of her lyrics are very wise, you would think that they came from the mind of an old woman. Some of her songs could be 400 years old and Lisa’s voice complements their age and their wisdom.”
A
part from Radie Peat, with whom she duets on one song, O’Neill owns the only voice on Heard A Long Gone Song. “I wasn’t always necessarily mad
about my voice,” she recalled of the young Lisa O’Neill. “I physically enjoyed the feeling of singing… how my body felt when I sang, I would get a release from it. But I didn’t really enjoy it because I wasn’t getting great feedback. I wasn’t necessari- ly getting negative feedback but just maybe none for a few years.” She reckons that’s a good thing though. You need to learn your craft before you build your confidence too early. “It’s good to have inspiration in order to reach a level that you want to get to, and a high level too. You need the journey.”
And the journey has brought her to here, the October ‘18 release of her fourth album, Heard A Long Gone Song, on River Lea. Produced by David Odlum and O’Neill herself, long gone are the days of her pre- vious self-releases. This is a collection of O’Neill’s own inimitably fascinating, root- ed, bare-to-the-bone songs, and in equal measure, four traditional songs, slanted from O’Neill’s very specific angle. The ninth song though, that is Lullaby of Lon- don, Shane MacGowan’s song with lyrics that contain the album’s title. “It can mean so many things,” she mused. “What song?
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