Loreto Convent Blues

Luan Parle is writing a song with the help of 30 teenage girls in the Loreto Convent in Dalkey, Dublin. One of girls is strumming a guitar, another is playing a malfunctioning keyboard and they’re all shouting out lyric suggestions. Meanwhile a young teacher walks around keeping their more excessive enthusiasm in check and I’m sitting in the corner scribbling in a pad of paper looking a little bit frightened. It’s not exactly Folsom Prison but in its own way it’s just as scary.

It’s not every day you get a pop singer visiting a convent, but Luan Parle has decided to do songwriting workshops in any school that’ll have her, for two reasons – 1) it allows her to give a little back to society and 2) in this era of music downloads and clueless musical marketing departments, it’s also, maybe, a way to take the music directly to the young people.
“I’d just completed a 50-date tour around Ireland and I’d played a lot of all-ages art centre gigs,” she explains. “And because of that I decided I’d go in and see the schools. Initially I just went in and had a little chat with them about music in general and about the music business. I basically grew up on a stage and I figured if I could pass on a bit of knowledge that’d be great. But it just developed. And it really works. They’re often kids who’ve never written a song before or played an instrument, but they end up achieving something. They’re writing a song and it’s a group effort. Plus they’re working together as a group and with their peers. That’s got to be good.”
Of course starting young must make sense to this Wicklow-based country-pop protégée who wrote her first song when she was eleven, and performed it on the Late Late Toy Show the same year. A few months later she’d been on Kenny Live and her first album was on the way. She even had an opportunity to go aged 12 to record with some Nashville greats (an opportunity she’s now glad her parents turned down). She’s only in her twenties but she speaks like a seasoned veteran. “My life in a nutshell,” she says. “Album at 12. Signed a five year contract. I went to school, put a band together and when I got out of school I sent a CD to Stuart Clark at Hot Press, who wrote a little piece about it. It was spotted by Sony at the time, this was before they had merged with BMG. I signed with Sony Ireland but then there have been so many changes since then. BMG came on board. It’s been ever changing really.”
Was this not all a bit weird for a teenager? “I grew up in a family of musicians and writing and playing music seemed very normal in my house,” she says. “It seemed very normal.”
And Luan still really loves music. She goes into reveries talking about Emmylou Harris, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton and Nanci Griffith (who she once toured with) and says she’s tempted to take the next album down a rootsier, maybe bluegrass direction. “Country music is all about stories, and I think that’s where I get into writing my own stories because I grew up listening to Dolly and Emmylou. The love of music has been there since I was very young. When I was a kid there was a little second hand shop around the corner from us and every day my dad would go down and he’d swap vinyl. He was big into his vinyl and that’s why I ended up listening to so much music. It was all sorts of genres really. And then when CDs came in. It was like... ‘ooh what’s this?’”
And it looks like now CDs will be the subject of the same kind of nostalgia as records. Her single ‘Ghost’ is to be released using a new company called download.ie which allows people to text for a copy of an mp3 using their phone credit to pay for the single. Luan knows the times they are a changing. “It’s a bit dicey in the industry at the minute,” she says. “I understand why kids go onto the internet and download for free. But I think at the end of the day people deserve to be paid for their work. I’m a huge MySpace fan but I think if everything was just mp3 it’d be a shame. The first thing I do when I get an album is I read the credits and the inlay. I’d miss that. That’s important. Someone spent a long time putting that piece of work together and it’s a big piece of their life. So although ‘Ghost’ is available as download only, the album (Free) is hard copy.”
And whatever happens to the music business, Luan Parle has no fear for her own future. She has, after all, just faced down a classroom of adolescents, arguably a more hardcore proposition than playing to the inmates of a prison. “I’m a songwriter and singer I’ve been performing for years,” she says. “I’ll always be able to hop up there and perform for an audience. I’ll have that no matter how the industry changes.”