Denise Hagan has certainly paid her dues. The product of a musical family, she moved to LA at 21 and began playing gigs around the city and beyond, before returning to Belfast. There followed time on the live circuit, a stint as a music teacher, a nasty sports injury and now The Tangerine Moon, her debut album. You might expect all of this to have produced a record of gritty determination but, if that is the case, it is buried deep below the smooth, shiny surface.
The album pitches Hagan squarely in the middle of the road; she may draw on both American and Irish influences yet they are the most conservative aspects of each, a slight country feel married with an easy going lyrical quality. Her songs aren’t bad – ‘100 Crazy People’ bounces along on top of a rolling piano, and the duet with Finbar Furey is nice – but it’s all the musical equivalent of soft focus.
The title track encapsulates the problem, much being made of the fact that Hagan wrote the song when she was 16. The trouble is, with lyrics like, ‘“f you and the Tangerine Moon keep on beaming then I and the rest of the world can go on dreaming”, it sounds like it. It’s been twelve years since she wrote those words, yet The Tangerine Moon offers nothing in the way of insight into her life, despite the fact that she wrote, arranged and produced the whole album herself.
Maybe next time she should let a few others in on the act. Sometimes having to plough a lone furrow weighs too heavily on a neophyte’s shoulders.