Sidine intervention

Ciara Sidine is not used to this interview lark. Or rather, in her guise as book editor and scion of a mini lit-dynasty (her mother is the novelist June Considine, her uncle the writer Dermot Bolger), she's more used to hearing authors talk about their craft than explaining her own creative urges.

Sidine, soft spoken but articulate, has just released her debut album Shadow Road Shining, a collection of rootsy songs that echo Lucinda Williams and Gillian Welch as well as elder stateswomen like Dolly Parton, and features a distinguished cast of players including Conor Brady, Dave Hingerty, Steve Wickham and Jack L. But despite such pedigree, Sidine admits she came to the game late enough.
"I've sung always, and had a love of words," she says. "Literature was my first love, I've worked as an editor for a good few years. I was interested in lyrics, but it somehow didn't strike me to write songs until I picked up a guitar when I was in my late 20s, and that was a real moment of revelation. I didn't realise the mechanics of it could be so direct. So I began to put words and melodies together."
Many of which revolve around natural musical textures and elemental symbols: the road, the moon, the stars, rain, wind.
"Yeah, it's funny, you're not necessarily conscious of it at the time, but when I look on it as a piece, I do get a sense of the whole nature thing going on. I would be drawn to those kinds of metaphors."
Did she, per chance, hear Appalachian recordings blaring through the house of a Sunday morning?
"No, that wouldn't have been part of the tradition. My dad's record collection was the big influence, and that was very much rock 'n' roll. But as long as I can remember I had a slightly embarrassed love of country music, 'cos it was never really hip or cool when I was a kid. It was the directness of the songs, the way they speak.
“As an extended family, after the chit-chat was out of the way, the singing began. I didn’t recognise that inheritance for a long time, and it was a very rich inheritance. There was a very easy reverence for song as this quiet god. You’d get the Irish and American influence quite strong, songs from every decade, so I had a really wide love of different genres. There were songwriters in my grandmother’s family, rebel songs, Irish roots as well as American ones.
“I just heard an ad for Dolly Parton coming to town, and they played ‘Jolene’ – the way the guitar in that song goes around and around, it’s really grounding. Dolly Parton is an immensely gifted songwriter and an amazing singer. I know she gets sent up, but that song will go down as Shakespearian. And I recently read an autobiography by Ralph Stanley, a country folk singer from Virginia, he rose to fame in his 70s with the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, and whoever has ghostwritten it has really captured his folksy speaking voice. He's got this eerie vocal delivery, totally unforgettable. The phrase he uses for singing is 'mourning out a song'."
Way before music was an industry it was a means of social expression. People sang laments at funerals and danced at weddings.
"And you worked in the fields: the Cash family tradition of picking cotton. I read a really nice graphic novel by a German writer (Reinhard Kleist) called I See A Darkness, Johnny Cash's biography. I really recommend this book. It has a bit about the songs they sang through the working day, dawn til dusk. The tempos got slower as evening came in. Those songs not only reflect life but are life. It's highly practical. And listening to the Carter Family recordings, compared to Hank Williams where there's all this mournful emotion, there's none of that, it's just this very straight delivery: life is what it is and God looks after you. Everything is down to fate, you didn't ask too many questions, you just got on with it. I guess if life is that hard and your kids die for want of medicine and your crop fails, you need to believe in the afterlife.
"I think when songs come down through a tradition, in a way you become a little immune to the lyrics. But when you are actually writing lyrics and you listen to them in a much closer way, you get hit by these ideas. We have ways of thinking about particular times, social mores or whatever, and I think to a certain extent we suffer from this idea that we're inventing the world in every generation. We do live in a completely different society, but the struggles are exactly the same, the way people feel about the world, existentialism, truth, illusion, what it's all about – it’s all there, it’s the same stuff.”

Shadow Road Shining is out now.