‘I love Clare, I’m a Banner woman at heart’ – Susan O’Neill’s love of home

The singer-songwriter is here to talk about her second solo album Now In a Minute, which is due for release in September. It is her first solo release in six years and it comes on the heels of 2021’s acclaimed In the Game album, which she recorded as a joint venture with Mick Flannery.

She has spent the past few years touring, either with Flannery or else as a solo act.

“I really enjoyed Toronto,” she says. “Phoebe Bridgers [who tweeted to her 2.9 million followers about In the Game: ‘I love this f**king record!’] invited us to open for her in Philadelphia. West Virginia Public Broadcasting have this festival called Mountain Station, where artists perform on this beautiful stage and it’s all being podcasted.

“Sometimes I have a band. But I do the solo thing too. I’ll pack up everything into one suitcase: all my pedals, my trumpet, my sax and my clothes all wrapped around it. It’s lovely. It’s hardcore. It’s on the road, you know? You carry your own shit!”

Although advance copies have not yet been made available, it seems likely the influence of North America will loom large on Now In a Minute.

“There’s a new song on the record called Everyone’s Blind,” she says. “That came from a soundcheck in Canada. I’d been travelling all day across Prince Edward Island and I’d got this melody stuck in my head. It just sounded nice to me so I pulled out my phone and started recording.”

But, freshly returned from her latest round of travels, today’s focus is on reconnecting with her home in Co Clare.

I love Clare. I’m a Banner woman at heart. The colour palette excites me

She laments that one of her most beloved houseplants died while she was away.

“This afternoon I’ll go to a friend’s house and help them plant trees,” she says. “They have a couple of acres. I’ll help stick trees in the ground. I’ll do anything that allows me to give something back to the land on my days off.

“Or just go walk along the coastline in rugged Doolin and listen to the birds singing in a certain frequency. I’ll listen to the cattle and the sheep and the horses. I love Clare. I’m a Banner woman at heart. The colour palette excites me. I go for walks and I get goosebumps watching curlews or just seeing the mist fall down on the hills.”

​We are seated, as previously noted, at a table in the Falls Hotel. Directly behind me are two gigantic windows with panoramic views of the town, its famous waterfalls and the cascading waters of the River Inagh running beneath.

Not for the first time it occurs to me I may have botched the seating arrangements here. Spring is in the air and the countryside is teeming with new life. I’m having trouble holding Susan’s attention. But her love for the west of Ireland is so pure and infectious, it is impossible to take umbrage.

I suppose, if the roles were reversed, it would be like her trying to interview me while the Champions League final was playing on a big screen directly behind her.

I ask her does she paint at all?

“I do like to paint,” she says absent-mindedly. “But I would never... I wouldn’t try to paint a river. I could never capture that ebb and flow of colours...”

I mention that Monet painted Rouen Cathedral 30 or 40 times, precisely because the light and the colours were constantly changing. This chance reference to the founder of Impressionism sounds apt later, when I’m transcribing this portion of our conversation.

Because typed up in black and white, Susan’s words at times read like an incomprehensible blizzard of half-completed sentences. Whereas in person, somehow, she manages to convey the gist of her meaning, despite some loose brushwork along the way.

For example, I ask about her practice of explaining on stage where she drew inspiration from before performing a song live.

Here is her response verbatim: “Some of the songs I write are... I love kind of painting a picture of the arc that I’m trying to...The things that I’m trying to say, where I am or I’m not... I feel an explanation, beforehand or after, helps to shape that... In a way... If you know what I mean?”

A lovely heron has just landed on the water. Do you see it?

Oddly enough, I think I do. Then she directs my attention back toward the river. The Champions League final has just gone to penalties.

“Look, look,” she says urgently. “A lovely heron has just landed on the water. Look. Just over there on the bank. Do you see it?” I turn around. I don’t see it. But I pretend that I do.

O’Neill’s debut album Found Myself Lost was released in 2018. An EP titled Now You See It followed in 2022. Even still, six years is quite a gap between full-length solo albums.

For her, she explains, music is always a collaboration of one kind or another. It’s what she’s been doing her entire life. The first recordings she remembers being exposed to as a kid were CDs of Mozart, which belonged to her mother, and The White Album by The Beatles, which belonged to her father.

“I remember just lying back on the couch thinking ‘I can feel my muscles easing.’ At that point, I realised music can be a kind of medicine,” she says.

She first performed live as a member of a brass band. “I mean, as a 12-year-old, to be in a room with 30 or 40 brass instruments... Even just warming up. I love the sound of an orchestra warming up. The anticipation of what’s about to happen. I remember getting goosebumps all over my hands and neck thinking, ‘What is this?’ It’s not like anything you could explain.”

​She mentions playing with dance acts like King Kong Company as a teenager, and touring Australia and New Zealand with Sharon Shannon in her 20s. ​

​More recently, she recalls performing one of her own compositions with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. “They’re total pros. When they started playing that song in rehearsal, I just welled up.”

It’s about learning to work with your own muscle, learning where your limits are

She talks about learning from other singers how best to protect her voice.

“When I sing, it can be quite abrasive. But you learn how to keep your voice going. Lots of my favourite performers never really looked like they were doing anything. David Bowie always had a fag in his hand. Tom Waits the same. Aretha Franklin was pretty heavy on the booze at one point.

“But for me, I think it’s a matter of what you’re doing and what your sound is. It’s about learning to work with your own muscle, learning where your limits are, then pushing them just enough that you’re getting what you need,” she adds.

But it’s never a solo effort. “I get endless, boundless joy from collaborating. I feel every time that I’ve played with another artist there’s a download of data and an exchange of frequencies and sound. And I’ve been doing that since the get go.”

The new album Now In a Moment is just the latest in a long series of such collaborations. The recordings were done with Christian Best at Monique Studios in Midleton, Co Cork.

“He’s the best. He’s got so much old vintage gear you get to mess around with. He has lots of these beautiful, wild knick-knacks he’s collected on his travels over the years. And he dives with you down into that rabbit hole of how to make it interesting,” she explains.

It was mixed by Irish-born, LA-based, Grammy-winning producer Cian Riordan, best known for his work with the likes of Lana Del Rey and St Vincent as well as Canadian Isaac Barter.

“So we had one person in LA, one in Nova Scotia and us in Cork,” she says. “I really wanted to try something new, to make it left field. Still being organic and wooden, but twisted in a unique manner. I ran my vocal track through a vintage amp to get this old distorted sound. Then there are folk songs, there’s some more stripped-back stuff. I really hope people enjoy it.”

And even though Mick Flannery’s name doesn’t appear on the album this time, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t around to lend his friend a hand.

“Oh, I think it’s really important to mention Mick has helped to write some of the songs on the album. I will often send him a little piece of unfinished music and an explanation of what it’s trying to say. Then he’ll write a verse or a chorus using exactly the words that I could only have hoped for. He has been incredible, both as a person and as a musical mind that is so open to questions.”

​The next time Susan and I speak, it’s over the phone. She has just returned from Switzerland where she performed at the Zermatt Unplugged festival in the Alps. After finishing her set, she discovered that the Matterhorn is a magnet for paragliders.

She had never paraglided before, but on a whim she texted a number for a nearby paragliding school. Initially, she was told they were booked out until July. Then she was informed they’d just had a cancellation for later that day. This would be a 10,000 foot jump and she had planned to ask for 3,000. Nevertheless, she gave it a go.

“I like to push my own boundaries. So I went up there and I had this really cool instructor who did it with me. We were the last two people up there. You have to go against every single instinct in your body and just run off the side of the mountain.

“The trick is not to sit down, but really to run and kick those toes out from the rock. It became this really beautiful shared experience where you face your fear and power through. It was incredible,” she says.

Then there is her account of downtime in west Clare.

“It could be our band’s off day and nothing’s happening. But you know, you open a door in a quiet cottage or a pub somewhere and there’s a session going on inside. The place is heaving with smiling faces and feet stomping. And yet it’s completely peaceful outside.”

​At times, O’Neill’s life, at least as she describes it to me, reminds me of one of those Sunday newspaper columns where a notable person gives an account of their average Sunday. You know the ones – 5am: Run on the beach. 6am: Yoga/meditation. 7am: Finish film script I’ve been working on in my spare time and immediately get a call from Spielberg begging to direct.

There’s nothing wrong with these pieces per se and it’s not that I don’t believe them exactly, it’s more the nagging suspicion that no one’s life could possibly be that perfect all the time. Personally, when I read those pieces, I’m always hoping someone will say “8pm: Arrive home from all-day bender in my local. Slam a Goodfellas pizza in the oven and pass out unconscious on the couch. When I wake up, the fire brigade is in my living room.” (That’s a true story that happened to a guy I knew in college, by the way.)

I ask O’Neill if there are any aspects to the life of a widely admired poet-and-one-woman-band which aren’t as romantic as they might appear from the outside?

“There are plenty of unglamorous parts to travelling. It’s long days. It’s long waits. But I love them. You’re so confronted with your own thoughts, in a way, it can feel like you’re running or you’re escaping. But you’re not,” she says.

I share a couple of my own recollections of life on the road, to see if these will nudge her in the desired direction. Once I drove 643km from Atlanta to Memphis with a guitarist who smoked cigarettes and insisted we listen to murder podcasts the entire way. By the time we arrived, he was fortunate we hadn’t our own true crime scene festering in the back seat.

On another occasion I was travelling alone through Alabama when, among a sea of fast-food logos, I spotted a billboard with a photo of a dinner plate with roast beef, potatoes, vegetables and gravy on it. It was an advertisement for a local diner. I realised I hadn’t eaten a normal meal in two or three weeks. I spent 45 minutes driving around the countryside looking for that diner. But I never found it and I ended up eating in a Popeyes.

But this kind of kvetching just isn’t in her register.

“We chose to drive across Canada once rather than to fly,” she offers. “It was eight hours a day. Sometimes 10. But gimme that any day over an airport. You walk into a truck stop. You see people coming and going. You see what they’re ordering for breakfast. What they’re eating for dinner. You’re getting the pulse of the place.”

She does admit some trepidation about how the album will be received.

“It’s an unusual thing to pour something out from inside of yourself and then present it to others to be considered. And you don’t know how they’ll look at it. You only know what your intentions were when you brought it into being.”

My thread, at the moment, is a thread of movement.

The subject of Willie Nelson comes up. In On the Road, he sings “the life I love is making music with my friends”. I mention that, during Covid lockdown, Nelson would sometimes sit in his tour bus, which was parked outside his Texas ranch and pretend he was headed somewhere for a show. His sons told The New York Times they were worried he wouldn’t survive without an audience to perform to.

Could that be her? Could touring ever become her whole life?

She laughs. “That’s hard to predict,” she says. “Certainly, the role I’m in my life at the moment is the music wanderer. My thread, at the moment, is a thread of movement.”

This is complicated, however, by the fact that, even when she’s not touring, she does not currently live a sedentary life. Because of high rent prices in west Clare, she lives in one rented property in the winter, which isn’t available in summer, and a different rented property in summer.

“I had been advised starting out to consider that there might be financial struggles embarking upon the path I’ve chosen,” she explains.

Not that she has ever regretted her decision for a second.

“I’m so accustomed now to being on the road. It feels like being at home to me. I’ve learned to feel at home in a place very quickly, even if it’s far away. I think that’s something I’ll keep with me. But when I see the landscape of west Clare, that’s when I know I’m back to the motherland.”

Susan O’Neill is playing Live at the Marquee, Cork on June 21 and touring in May and June