You won't hear anything like it all year. Julie Feeney – whose debut album waltzed off with the first Choice Music Prize – is back with a deft blend of pop and orchestral music. The former student of sonology and psychoanalysis tells TONY CLAYTON-LEAabout her high-concept approach – but we still don't know what she's at with that sofa
NOTHING about Julie Feeney is average. Her 2005 debut album, 13 Songs, was the result of a background in classical studies, theatre, dance and opera. A stint at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, studying composition and sonology, and a Master's in psychoanalysis also figure in her CV. She's a polymath and proud of it.
13 Songswent on to win the inaugural Choice Music Prize in 2006, and Feeney's off-centre music was greeting by much hand-clapping, and by a little head-scratching puzzlement.
The same could happen with her second album, Pages, which fuses fully-formed pop songs with instinctive, seamless orchestration. It isn't an exaggeration to say that you will not hear anything like it this year.
But much has changed for Feeney in the past three-and-a-half years. The cottage industry surrounding 13 Songshas all but disappeared (Feeney initially posted out that album to anyone she thought might be interested), and following the Choice win she signed to Sony. At that point she said she no longer had to worry about how many months her credit card was going to last for. These days, Feeney is less concerned about money, but just as involved in wanting to make music that has no obvious connections with stock-in-trade formats.
Any aspiring inventive artist has to review their creative stimuli regularly, and Feeney was particularly rigorous about it. “I began to feel the desire to develop my orchestral sound world,” she says. “I’ve always felt a pull creatively from different sides, but things have to gel before you can do anything about it. Yet I felt drawn to the orchestra side of things, and so I did lots of courses in that area and also in conducting, which I loved. So over the past 18 months I was able to develop all of that.”
The way she tells it, at the beginning of 2008 she intuitively sensed that if her second album should be based around anything at all, then it should be a spirit of generosity. This intuition kicked off the writing of the new batch of songs. These were subsequently teased out and formed over a six-week period in the artists’ retreat, the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig, Co Monaghan.
“I wanted the album to work on several levels – the essence of it, the subject matter and the music – and I wanted to push and challenge myself, too. I went right back to the drawing board with what I call my ‘thought copies’, which are essentially notebooks and folders of texts and jottings. Anyway, while I was there I stayed in one of the houses, which meant I totally removed myself from the rest of the resident artists. I know there are very interesting people there, but I felt it would hinder my creativity if I were to have been introduced to them.
“So it was a mixture of miserable weather, beautiful surroundings, a walk every day and lots of work. It was a little bit like solitary confinement, really.”
Feeney broke the work down into drafts, placed the lyrics into piles and subsequently rewrote each song as an essay. “I decided to take out personal stuff, so that they didn’t come across as me-me-me songs. Rather, I wanted to frame them for other people to relate to. My approach was also very analytical in that I wanted to find out exactly why I wanted to say what I wanted to say, and so on.
“In the end I had 12 poems that I had to marry with melodies. What did I want to say? Well, I suppose I wanted to comfort people, to give them something. I certainly didn’t want to be indulgent, or for anyone to feel as if they were a gooseberry in the room.”
In this, Feeney has triumphed. The biggest surprise about Pages is its overall sense of warmth, joy and light-headedness. Whenever we hear of a pop or rock artist fiddling about with orchestras in order to enhance their music we can also hear – not too far behind – the clash of alarm bells, but Feeney has done the often-derided fusion a huge service by deftly and indivisibly integrating one form with the other.
“I had a strong feeling that there had to be a distinct tuneability in the songs,” she explains, “in that I definitely want people to sing along to them. After all my exploration of orchestration – composing for the Crash Ensemble, among other things – I wanted, in a very particular way, to make a pop album using an orchestra. I could hear in my head the way I wanted to use the orchestra, and I didn’t want to add any synthesised sounds or to do any retakes. I felt I was developing an album that I had never heard before. Some people over the past few years have been saying I’m something of a singer-songwriter, but I’m not, simple as that.”
Since signing to a major record label, Feeney’s once beloved cottage industry work ethic has altered, but, she says with conviction, all her ideas are still her ideas. “I’m not particularly interested in the amount of units the records sell in shops, but I love the people side of things, the collaborative aspect.”
“Boundaries aren’t actually boundaries anymore, because there’s always another way at looking at things, or having a different way of working.”
The most important lesson she has learned from going from cottage to penthouse, is that an artist can actually do things their own way. There is freedom, she contends, within the “major label” music industry. “If you really know what you want in your head, then people take the lead from that. Knowing what you want makes it easier for the record company, anyway.
“Sometimes, of course, people don’t know what they want, and that’s fair enough, too. But my impression is that the record company just want to get on with it.”
Well, yes, but when a record company hears that an artist knows exactly what they want, do they think, great, or do they instead regard the artist as a control freak? We seem to have touched on a nerve here.
“Oh, stop. Yes, okay, there’s a fine line between the two. Some people say to me that I have so much independence in what I do. But whyever not? Some people also perceive that they don’t have artistic freedom, but you can have that without being aggressive about it. I think when people in the record company know how you work it can help. But then, unlike me, maybe some musicians want to know how many units their records sell in shops. I’m more interested in the art side of things – I’m not money-oriented, and I’m not sure why.”
So, album number two is finished and ready to walk out of the shops. Were all of her objectives for Pagesrealised?
"A lot of musicians and artists talk about still wanting to tweak their work, going back to it. It's tempting, but I came to the realisation that the songs on Pages, creatively speaking, state who, what and where I am right now. If I started doing more it'd be like submitting an essay after the final deadline."
And what about the record’s sheer and unadulterated accessibility?
“It’s what I wanted to make, isn’t it?,” she reasons. “I was dying to get this album made. For some reason you get a notion into your head and you get obsessed with it for 18 months. It’s a bizarre thing that we do, don’t you think?”
Pagesis released through Sony BMG on May 29. Julie Feeney will tour next month, exact dates to be confirmed
