Julie, madly deeply

Sitting in a quiet corner of The Quay’s Bar in Galway, Julie Feeney is tucking embarrassedly into a large and rather pungent plate of fish and chips. “You don’t mind, do you?” she asks, dipping a piece of haddock into some tartar sauce. “I hope this isn’t really disgusting you at this hour of the morning. I’m just starving and I won’t have time later.”

Actually it’s just gone midday and the vampishly dressed Miss Feeney can be forgiven for eating during our chat. With her new album, Clocks, due to be officially launched this evening, time is of the essence. Having already risen at an unspeakably early hour, the 33-year-old singer and composer is on a tight schedule. She’s already done two radio interviews this morning and, immediately after this one, she’ll be sound-checking in the nearby Druid Theatre for tonight’s launch.
Having played her last two Irish gigs with amateur choirs doing the backing vocals, she’s relieved to only have a five-piece band to deal with tonight.
“The choirs were absolutely wonderful,” she says, “but it really adds to the stress and the workload. Once I get some sleep this afternoon, tonight should be grand.”
She’s very much on home turf in the City of the Tribes anyway. Like six generations of Feeneys before her, she was born and raised in the west
of Ireland.
“I grew up between Athenry and Abbeyknockmoy,” she explains, in a still-strong east Galway accent. Although she left to study music at Trinity in her late teens, and has been living in Dublin since, she returns home regularly.
Of course, she travels a lot, too. With her sense of Irish identity heightened from multiple trips to the US and other destinations in recent years, many of the songs on Clocks are thematically based on her Galway roots and extended family, both past and present. Two of the songs are written directly about her grandparents.
“I just felt like it was coming through me,” she says of the album. “And I very much let it be that. I’m not hippy-dippy or anything like that. However, I do feel close to the people who came before me. Nothing spooky about it. I don’t feel remotely spooked. I just feel that they’re there.”
As with her previous two albums, she composed, arranged and conducted virtually all of the music on Clocks . Although some of it was recorded in New York, the album was written in Ballinahinch Castle and Lough Inagh Cottages in Connemara, and all of the vocals were laid down in an old stone chapel in Kylemore Abbey.
“I wanted to really sing my heart out on this one,” she explains. “I was meant to do that with the last album (2009’s pages), but I actually didn’t. I wasn’t saying that at the time though! I did the vocals at the very end, when I was really tired. So this time round, I decided to start with the vocals.”
Having rehearsed the songs on the piano in her family home, it didn’t take her long to find the perfect place to record them.
“I wanted to do them in a beautiful Galway church and I just lucked out completely,” she enthuses. “I tried a few different places in Connemara, but when I went into the Visitor’s Centre in Kylemore Abbey, the marketing girl already had my last album. So straightaway she brought us on a tour and was really into the idea. It’s Benedictine nuns there, and they’re actually really cool women. But this guy had built a chapel for his wife there – I think she’d died of TB – and straightaway I knew it was the
right place.”
Clocks is released on Feeney’s own independent label Mittens (named after her mother’s favourite cat). Although she was signed to Sony after her debut album, 13 Songs, won the Choice Music Prize in 2006, she never actually released anything through the major. Not that this was necessarily a bad thing.
“A while after I signed, they fired the head of the label and they were all falling out with one another,” she recalls. “I think Dido’s second album hadn’t sold as well as expected, so there was all this panic. I was kind of stuck in the middle. My lawyer got me out of the deal. It was the weirdest thing ever. It was kind of nice because I got this injection of funding which meant I could buy a studio. And then I got out of the deal, got all my recordings back, and released the second album myself.”
She raised €24,000 towards the cost of
making Clocks through the increasingly popular Fund-It website.
“Fund-It is a wonderful thing,” she reflects. “But people have to be careful that they don’t undervalue what they’re doing. Already people are giving away free downloads and everything, and the music industry is falling to pieces. But it’s important that people don’t undersell. That they don’t say to people, ‘Oh, I’m going to make an album for three grand’. I mean, my album cost a lot more than €24,000. I got a loan, I put my own money in. It cost me waaay more than that.”
One thing she didn’t have to pay for was the mixing. American über-producer David Reitzas, who counts Madonna amongst his satisfied clients, mixed the album gratis.
“He heard me on the radio in America and immediately wrote to me offering to mix a track for free. I didn’t believe it was him at first. I wrote back to him and asked would he mix the album and he wrote back and said, ‘Yes, I have one week free and it begins next Monday’. So I had to get everything ready. It was just unbelievable. I had to borrow money and I was on a plane to LA a few days later. He was amazing. I learnt so much from him.”
However much Feeney has progressed over the course of three albums, she’s conscious that there’s always something more to learn.
“I just love music. I love every part of it. I love recording. I love mixing. Even the mastering part. It’s magical. There’s so much in it, so much more to learn, and each time you do it you learn more. Now that I’ve made my third album, I feel like I’m only finally beginning to know how to do it.”
In addition to her recordings and theatrical live performances, she’s also currently working on an opera called Bird, based on Oscar Wilde’s celebrated story ‘The Happy Prince’.
“Yeah, there’s the opera too. It’s still a work in progress, but I’m really loving the experience.”
Asked who she regards as her Irish contemporaries, she replies, “Well... Lisa, I suppose, or Cathy, Gemma. Vyvienne Long is brilliant. Then there’s Imelda May – and it’s brilliant to see her doing so well. We’re all doing very different things, really, all doing our own thing. We meet now and again. Vyvienne would be the one I’d probably have most contact with. We’re kind of similar. She doesn’t do the big, mad performance things that I do. In terms of background though, we’re quite similar.”
As a serious artist, what does Feeney make of TV talent shows such as The X Factor or The Voice?
“As a clueless 18-year-old, I’d possibly have entered one of those shows,” she shrugs. “But I’m a working musician and I’ll hopefully still be doing this at 90. I just think it’s a really bad idea to place your destiny in the hands of somebody else sitting on the other side of a table. It’s so wrong. I believe it’s within yourself to make yourself into whatever you want to be.
“Having said that, it’s probably a good experience performance wise,” she continues. “It’s great to have to perform things in different styles and all that sort of stuff. Maybe that’s kind of fun. So there’s a lot of merit to it from that perspective. The Voice is probably better, but at this stage I couldn’t watch The X Factor. It’s total exploitation. I mean, they’re filming
them crying and all that. You can’t have people thinking that their lives are going to be made in the music industry by walking into a room and auditioning for 40 seconds. What is that about? It’s completely wrong!”
She’s hard-pressed to name the high-point of her own music career to date, but admits she was extremely chuffed with one high profile newspaper review earlier this year. Writing in the New York Times during her 10-night run at the Irish Arts Center in NYC, esteemed critic Jon Pareles said, “A brainy, adventurous Irish songwriter lives within the flamboyant theatricality of Julie Feeney... intricate, articulate... Ms. Feeney’s songs don’t shout. They tease, ponder, reminisce, philosophise and invent parables, and she sings them in a plush, changeable mezzo-soprano that usually holds a kindly twinkle.”
While obviously always happy to get good
reviews, she says she’s generally not bothered by negative ones.
“If somebody doesn’t get my music, or emotionally connect to my music, then who am I to say they’re wrong? But it does annoy me if people have their facts incorrect. If I read a review like that, I lose respect for their work. It drives me bonkers.”
By her own admission, Feeney is a total perfectionist and borderline control freak about her creative work. Although she spends a lot of time writing and composing in solitude, she still manages to play around 70 live shows a year.
“I like every show to be different and have a special thing,” she says. “I love performing. If somebody goes to see me, they want to be entertained. People are paying money to come and see you. You’re being paid to be there. It’s your job to give them a good show, and that’s the way I see it.”
She didn’t always see it that way. She admits that she used to be somewhat precious in live situations.
“A good few years ago in Cork, somebody was making a lot of noise with glasses,” she recalls. “And I got annoyed and stopped the song. God, I’m so embarrassed to think about it! What a knob! I wouldn’t do that now. Now I’d look at it like the person washing the glasses is doing his job, I’m doing my job. It’s all okay. They’ve asked me back, but that night I realised I needed to show more grace. Why was I like that? My response brought an element into the room that people didn’t need. And it was me. I could have controlled that and I didn’t.”
Feeney shrugs and dips her last chip into the
tartar sauce.
“I suppose you live and learn.”

Clocks is out now on Mittens Records. Catch her in the White Horse, Ballincollig (November 29); St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin (December 2 as part of the Peter McVerry Trust Concert); Pepper Canister Church, Dublin (7) and Linenhall, Castlebar (10)