Corr Survivor – Sharon Corr talks to Hot Press

“I suppose there has always been a huge innocence to me my whole life, in that I was only ever 'streamlined' in one direction,” muses Sharon Corr. “I only ever worked towards a direction that I hardly decided upon.”

Coming of age in dreary Dundalk during the '70s and '80s, Sharon and her three siblings – older brother Jim and younger sisters Caroline and Andrea - were encouraged to follow their artistic dreams by their professional musician parents, Gerry and Jean.
The beautiful brunette, most recently spotted as a mentor on The Voice of Ireland, purses her bee-stung lips in momentary reflection.
“My parents transferred to us a great belief in doing what you love in life. There was never any inhibitors put down on following your dream. That was like the be-all and end-all.”
Music being at the core of the Corr DNA, the kids didn’t really need cajoling.
“I didn’t ever go, ‘I’m going to be a musician’,” she recalls. “I was already a musician and writing music from when I started thinking, you know what I mean? So it was just this tunnel view that I’d always had of who I was, without truly identifying that I might do something else or that I might be something else.”
Sharon’s not complaining about the way her life and career turned out. One of the most successful family bands ever, The Corrs sold in the region of 45 million albums, toured the globe many times over and, as Irish music ambassadors, were regular visitors to such exclusive addresses as Áras an Uachtaráin, 10 Downing Street and the White House (more of which anon).
Today, on this bright but biting last Thursday of August, Sharon is kicking off the promotional campaign for her second solo album, The Same Sun (the follow-up to 2010’s Dream Of You).
The album is obviously very important to her, a labour of love. After all, she hardly needs the money at this stage.
“Yes, but that’s never been the thing,” she says, shrugging. “I very much do have to do it. I’ve made music from when I was nothing. This is what I do, it’s my life, it’s my love, and I am physically and emotionally compelled to do it, full stop.”
What age was Sharon when she wrote her first song?
“Six,” she smiles. “It was something to do with castles and princes. I may have been Rapunzel in the song, very likely somebody like her. She definitely had very long hair in a plait.”
There are no songs about castles, princes and long-haired damsels in distress on The Same Sun. Tackling subjects such as unrequited love, loss, lost opportunities and loneliness, the predominant emotion on display is sadness. Produced by Mitchel Froom (Crowded House, Pearl Jam, Sheryl Crow) and mostly recorded in his LA studio, these 11 songs – many of them co-writes with Froom or Don Mescal – are largely slow, mournful, pop-tinged love ballads, reminiscent of Karen Carpenter or Dusty Springfield.
“It was very organic,” she notes. “I wrote some of it on my own as well. What I really wanted to do was to get out of my comfort zone. I was very used to working within certain parameters, and I think I got a little bit safe. Before we had The Corrs, I was kind of all of the extremes of myself, without thinking about it. Once you become part of a four-piece, all of you get subsumed by it.
“What I wanted to do in my solo career was take on everything I was afraid of, because I was a little tentative. I was scared. I thought, ‘If you believe you’re a good writer,' which I did and I do, 'then I need to work with other people and be free to do that.”
She credits EMI chief executive Willie Kavanagh with introducing her to Limerick songwriter Don Mescal.
“Willie’s a great friend of Don. And now a great friend of mine - and there was no agenda, because I was not signed to EMI, and nor was Don. He said, ‘I think you guys would work really well together.’ So basically Don and I went on a blind songwriting date, in my house, and it just worked.”
How exactly did it work?
“Don has been 20 years out in Nashville, and collaborated with a lot of people. He’s a great writer. He came into the house and I said, ‘How do you normally go about this, Don?’ and he said, ‘I just play’. I started playing, and he sat beside me at the piano. I came up with a chord progression he felt was good, and then we just started writing and singing and meandering through lyrics to find out what worked.”
It must have been a very different process to working within The Corrs. Was sibling rivalry ever an issue back in their heyday?
“There was always a rivalry from the point of view that if one of them wrote a great song, I would immediately feel that I had to write a great song,” she admits. “So it was healthy. We all needed to participate, in order to feel that you justified the publishing, that you justified all the rewards from it and, more than anything, to have your own integrity within the four-piece, to feel that you were really genuinely contributing as a musician.”
Most siblings naturally break free of each other in their late teens or early twenties, but they all lived in each other’s pockets for years. Did that have
an effect?
“For sure,” she nods. “It’s quite a cocktail. You’re on the road 24 hours a day with your siblings, and you should have flown the nest separately, but we didn’t. We had to leave the normal structure of family and figure out how this would work without pulling each other’s heads off. We had to eliminate pecking orders, we had to make sure everybody
was equal.”
Some touring bands eventually become a family. The Corrs were a family that became a band. They somehow navigated the choppy waters of fame and fortune without ever having a serious public tiff. While they made it look easy, it was of course a struggle at times.
“The whole world thought we all felt the same way about everything, and we had to focus on the fact that the magic was made in the music,” she explains. “And it’s important that we get on, but respectfully get on - you don’t have to agree with each other all the time, you certainly don’t need to think the same way, and you have to leave each other room to have an identity.”
They’re all still very close and in regular contact. Only Jim has courted controversy since the band split. He hit the headlines a few years ago when he posted some inflammatory 9/11conspiracy theories on his personal website, and has been tabloid fodder ever since. Is she cross with him for tarnishing the band’s squeaky-clean brand?
“I was for a little while, and I told him so, but you know, I’m not because I really believe in his right to be himself. Because we were the ‘one entity', that should not suffocate what he feels and what he thinks. It also doesn’t mean that I have to agree with it, or that I do agree with it, that’s my own stuff. But for Jim, he’s his own keeper, it’s his life, these are his choices.”
Does she agree with any of his New World Order type theories?
“Some of it I would go, ‘Yeah, there’s a truth in that’, but then some of it I’d go, ‘He’s quite insightful about that but…’ Then there’s some where I’d just go, ‘No!’ He knows that and we’re very open
about it.”
She laughs when I point out that the White House is unlikely to extend another invitation to visit should The Corrs ever reform.
“I wondered would I ever get into the States again, never mind get to the White House. I wondered if I’d get past airport security and through immigration and whatever. I do believe that you should say what you believe. I do believe in the right to do that. I don’t believe you’re harming anybody by doing it and that’s really, really important. That’s kind of it. I mean, he’s a total individual, as am I.”
Sharon’s solo path hasn’t been easy.
“After I came out of The Corrs, sometimes when I was really overstretched. I would feel nervous in silly situations. Like, I’d be meeting my friends for a drink and get overly anxious about something.”
She has a pretty good idea what caused this.
“It’s always a number of things that come together to sort of snap the band. I was pretty durable for a long time and then all of a sudden it became too much. It was years and years of touring, years and years of diplomacy, years and years of being part of a thing rather than just yourself.”
Motherhood obviously added to the stress.
“A month after coming off the road with The Corrs I became pregnant. I had two children back to back and basically didn't sleep for four years, they’re seven and eight now. You start looking at them going, ‘Are they breathing?’ It’s a totally different type of emotional stress.
“All of a sudden, I found the things that were most natural to me the hardest to do. Also I had performance anxiety on stage, and the reason for that was I was really used to nursing kids for three years. I knew how to change a nappy standing upside down, cooking the dinner, blah blah blah, as a woman does. I knew that so well, was so immersed in this. It’s daunting going back into the world that you inhabited before you had children. Unfortunately for me it manifested itself onstage, because it’s high adrenaline.”
Does she mean she fucked up onstage?
“Yeah, I fucked up,” she sighs. “I had one experience, but I slew the dragon recently, because I went back and played the same show and had an absolute blast and loved every minute. I did this show where I had literally spent three days shooting my first video for my first single. There were big expectations and I was on my own. I’ve two very young children, they’re in nappies, while I’m doing all of this; a flight to London, no sleep and I get onstage, and I had nothing. I had nothing left to give, so I shook the whole way through the songs. It was total negativity. It’s an internal thing, like another voice in your head, kind of schizophrenic.”
Thankfully, with The Same Sun set to imminently rise, Sharon Helga Corr seems to have gotten over all of that stuff and is set to shine again.
“Yeah, I’ve really chucked all of that out,” she laughs. “I don’t mind being me. I have all my little quirks; there’s nothing perfect about me, which is just 'perfect' in its own way. The most interesting thing about a person is their little nooks and crannies and the madness of them – that’s great, that’s exciting. I love that!”