Last week, Susan O’Neill released her sophomore album Now In A Minute. In the six years since the release of her debut record, Found Myself Lost, rather a lot has occurred in the world of the artist also known as SON. For starters, Bono is an über-fan, writing to the Clare native regarding her cover of U2’s Joshua Tree cut ‘Exit’ to express his admiration.

In The Game, her collaboration album with Mick Flannery, was nominated for the Choice Music Prize and the RTE 1 ‘Best Folk Album Of The Year’, and was also the biggest independent selling Irish album in 2021. For good measure, none other than Phoebe Bridgers invited O’Neill and Flannery to open for her in Philadelphia.

Touring her 2022 EP, Now You See It, O’Neill also opened for Tennessee royalty Valerie June, headlined shows in New York, and performed on the main stages of festivals in Canada and Denmark. Add into all of that jamming with Calexico and playing a gig on Willie Nelson’s ranch and, yes, it’s been quite the ascent.

So, what’s on today’s agenda for the globe-trotting, all-conquering Susan O’Neill? Well, there’s an early morning interview with Hot Press from a wild and stormy Lahinch, followed by a day’s landscaping in her sister’s garden.

“I’ve been roped into doing some physical garden work today,” she laughs. “I love doing it so much. It’s really more cleaning up after the actual job – my brute force comes in handy at certain moments, and that’s about it!”

Credit: Mrs Redhead

Lahinch, a small seaside town and surfer’s paradise, sitting snugly on the northwest coast of County Clare, is just a half hour down the N85 from Ennis, the town where Susan grew up, and where she learned a thing or two about diversity in music. The finest of trad reeled out of the bars and lounges of O’Connell St and Merchants Square.

There were heavy metal nights and garage band jams. Her dad was into rock and roll, her mother dug Beethoven. Susan was the youngest member of the Ennis Brass Band and the Really Truly Joyful Gospel Choir. Telling me that in the former, she got to grips with her first instrument, the cornet, I wonder how a child chooses that particular member of the brass family?

Turns out, they dished out a murder of instruments and left you to it for a short while, just to see how you got on.

“And you’re there trying to make a fart noise,” Susan giggles at the recollection. “They taught us in a way that you didn’t realise you were learning. And you know, after a year of rolling around with it, you’re essentially playing music, not learning music. A year later, you’re being added to the full band, 30 adults, which was amazing. You have all the emotions of a 13-year-old – you’re riddled with hormones; nobody knows what you’re going through, no one’s ever been through it before.

“All this stuff is going on, and then you play two hours on a Tuesday or Wednesday night, and you come out feeling completely different. One thing that happened for me very early, was the awareness that music had the ability to change our feeling and make-up. It was chemistry.”

After four years on the cornet, Susan progressed to trumpet after a friend sold her one that had been gathering dust in their shed. And her rather original style of guitar playing was ignited when she stumbled across Nirvana’s Greatest Hits.

She recalls thinking, “Oh my god, it’s rock and roll, but more melancholic. I thought, this band, they’re playing my feelings.” Wanting to know how they did it, she picked up the guitar and “began to just fumble around and learn my own things. I never really know what I’m doing. I just play what I think works sonically.”

Susan’s new album is a product of her manifold music experiences, hoofing across boygenius-style indie-rock, surf-pop, the Devon folk of PJ Harvey, soul, and lo-fi blues.

“I was very grateful to be surrounded by different genres and to realise, ‘Oh, there’s a thread here,’” Susan explains. “I was very chaotic in my thinking, like most teenagers I suppose, but I just always had a very hard focus on music. I didn’t have to think about it. It was the thing I was good at and that was a nice feeling.”

A baptism in garage bands soon followed amongst “neighbourhood dudes with long hair, large guitars and amplifiers”. And when it came time to decide on college, music was the only thing on her CAO form. She got a place at Waterford Institute of Technology to study a BA in music, working bars at night to pay her way.

She enjoyed the work, the buzz of it, the music in them, leading her to start doing her own gigs – “hundreds of them”, she recalls – across Waterford, Wexford, Tipperary and Kilkenny. Then she moved to Dublin and did the same thing there, learning how “to stand in front of people and deliver a song.”

She also realised she was delivering the gift of music to people, when in association with Waterford Healing Arts Trust, she began working in hospitals, playing at the bedsides of long-term ill people. Liam Merriman was a mentor there. “He taught me that there’s a way of playing that is not for you, that you can gift songs to people, it doesn’t have to be for you, it can be for someone else.”

After those experiences, Susan was never the same again on stage.

“You realise if you’re going to be brazen enough to stand up and make noise, then you’d want to know why you’re making it,” she says. “And at least direct some of it in a place whereby it’s for the greater good.”

‘Drive’, the lead single from the new album was written in one brief sitting, Susan comparing it to alchemy. I mention that in a recent interview, Nick Cave said art has a way of bringing you to the things you need to know.

“I love that statement,” she says. “I really do, that’s given me food for thought when I go gardening later! I agree, I think that art itself is part of a frequency and it feels like songs are in the ether – we are the antennas, if you’re open to receive it. I do feel that sometimes songs come straight down, like a bolt of lightning. And other times it’s a slow process of needing to chisel, in the same way that Michelangelo said you reveal the piece from the rock and marble.”

Now In A Minute was recorded with long-term band members, brothers Cillian and Lorcan Byrne, at Monique Studios in Midleton with Christian Best in the production seat.

“Christian actually is a wizard,” she enthuses. “He has this delightful set-up with old vintage gear, the place looks like the inside of a DeLorean. It’s a big studio and you don’t know where he is, and then you find him surrounded by three or four different machines all wired up. He is fanatical about sound.

“Sometimes, when I’m explaining what I think a song should sound like, instead of using actual adjectives, I’m saying, ‘It should sound like a storm passing, but when it’s passed, then it could be the flap of the wing of the butterfly.’ And he’s replying, ‘I’ve got just the amp!’”

Credit: DeeDee Morris

Susan’s hectic schedule shows no sign of easing. Next month, she embarks on a lengthy tour of Ireland and Germany.

“I’m looking at the diary with one eye half closed,” she laughs. “But I’m loving every second of it. I realise that I’ve changed as a person because of touring. It’s a beautiful conversation I had with Killian Browne, another lovely player – I was on his album. He said when you fall in love with music as a child, at no point do you ever realise that you have unwillingly, but also amazingly, accepted the role of a nomad.

“That’s if you are to push beyond doing it in your locality, which is also obviously an amazing thing to do. I love doing home turf projects. But I never could have imagined the life that I have,”

I remark that learning music is perhaps something of a portal key to another realm.

“It is,” Susan agrees, “and it will push you. It is the teacher. It’s back to the thing about art being the thing that takes you to the places you need to go. I have no idea how people are going to react to the music, but when I’m in a gig or playing a show, and somebody has a feeling, and then they come up and tell me about it afterwards, I realise this gig was more about them than it was about the band that played it. When you surrender to that, that’s where true magic is.”

• Now In A Minute is out now. Susan O’Neill plays a nationwide tour in October – full details of which can be found at susanoneill.ie