With her new album Secular Hymns already receiving rave reviews, Madeleine Peyroux plans to make her way to Dublin for a show at the Olympia early next year on February 9. It's been 20 years since her first album, Dreamland, and Secular Hymns is her next journey of self-expression. “Music has been our spiritual life,” she says. “So I think of these as hymns, secular hymns—songs that are very individual, personal, introverted.”
What makes this album unique is the story behind how it was recorded. Last year when Peyroux and her band were invited to perform for the guests of French chef Raymond Blanc at a 12-century church near his house, she was struck by the unique acoustics of the building. “At the sound check, I was singing Randy Newman’s song ’Guilty,’ and it was amazing the way my voice sounded in the cavernous room,” Peyroux says. “It has a wood ceiling that gave my voice a reverb. My live engineer Doug Dawson told me I should make a record there.”
And so the band found their new studio. They were able to book the church for three days- one for soundcheck, one for a show for the locals that was recorded, and a third to do a recut of some of the show recordings. The experience was productive for both Peyroux and her band. “We had all become very close, and we were stretching to come up with new sounds,” she says. They took the opportunity to add a guilele (an acoustic, nylon-stringed tenor ukulele) to the band. “Jon (guitarist) became very versatile on the guitar and Barak (bassist) was good with the bow. Plus they both like to sing.”
Tickets for the February show are €36.50 and go on sale this Friday, November 11 on Ticketmaster.