Pauline Scanlon's take on traditional music is coloured by everything fromSeamus Begley to Massive Attack. Siobhán Long reports.

It was in the back room of Dick Mack's pub in Dingle one balmy night last August. Tunes flowed and songs insinuated themselves into the gaps, a jigsaw of music that quenched the thirst after a long day on the road west. Pauline Scanlon's voice was just one of the many, but somehow she left her mark long after the session was put to bed.

Having wended her way from the townland of Barnham, near Ventry, to the wilds of Australia, North America, Japan and Europe, Scanlon offered less than a handful of songs to the session, but their surprising combination of fragility and steely strength set her apart.

Twenty-four years old and blissfully immune to the perils of an industry that has chewed up and spat out more ingénues than Clint Eastwood has raw tobacco, Scanlon is launching her début solo album, Red Colour Sun, having cut her teeth as guest vocalist with the Sharon Shannon Band over a hectic two years.

The purist nirvana that would spawn singers who expose their eardrums to nothing beyond the delights of the sean-nós repertoire is anathema to her. She's risked exposure to everyone from Seamus Begley to Tori Amos and Massive Attack, and contrary to what some might have led her to fear she's none the worse for it.

Scanlon doesn't exactly fit the bill of the solo singer who emerges from the ether fully formed and self-propelled. The happy alchemy wrought by her encounter with the producer and drummer John Reynolds was what enabled her to finally join the ranks of the solo recording artists, as it was Reynolds who intuitively knew how to harness that voice without wrapping it in cotton wool.

She's quick, too, to acknowledge the enormous influence that Donogh Hennessy, guitarist with Lúnasa, has had on her music and her début album.

"This album is as much Donogh's as it is mine," she says, smiling. "I don't think there's anyone I could work with who understands me as well as Donogh does. He's helped arrange a lot of the tracks on the album. His input is everywhere."

Churchyard, the album's opening track, is a reworking of a traditional song known as The False Knight On The Road. The song's twin themes of salvation and eternal damnation will sound familiar bells for many listeners, laden with what some might consider the baggage and others the rich inheritance of the tradition.

It's not the sort of flimsy three-chord-trick terrain that most débutante writers explore, but then again Scanlon doesn't quite see herself as a conveyor-belt singer either.

"I think that songs like The False Knight and What Put The Blood" - a tale of infanticide, hardly top-10 fodder - "are unlike anything else that's ever been written, apart maybe from some Bob Dylan songs," she muses.

"They've been embellished down through the years and they're so dark, whereas people these days are so politically correct that they're afraid to write songs like them. You don't ever hear anyone writing songs about murdering their children, do you?

"You know, there's a place near where I live at home called Gleann na nGealt, and it literally means the Valley of the Mad, and they found really high traces of lithium in the water there.

"That was a place where, hundreds of years ago, people used to be dropped and left to live or die. It's a place with an air of such desolation and sadness. So the material's everywhere, just waiting to be explored."

Although tradition might have grounded her, she's quick to acknowledge the other parts of her musical personality that needed equal airing on her first kosher visit to the studio.

"All of the music I've been listening to, including dance music, has influenced me. I didn't want to limit myself to just traditional music for my first album, and while I'll probably make a traditional album at some stage I didn't want to start out with a boundary already in place.

"Having done this record, I feel confident about going further into world music or even tackling a heavy groove record with some really big drum 'n' bass. I just see it as limitless now. I don't believe in pigeonholing yourself. Just because you come from one thing doesn't mean that you can't cross over and explore other kinds of music."

Scanlon has no shortage of precedents for her lateral thinking either. Her role models span the decades as well as the continents, but what they share is a sense of musical adventure that she insists is essential for any musician who cares a whit about evolution.

"Joni Mitchell is my favourite of favourites," she says. "Just listen to her song A Case Of You. Her lyrics make me go insane. I love Tori Amos, Alison Krauss, Neil Young and Bob Dylan, who are all incredible writers.

"And when I heard that Peggy Seeger was the person who wrote The Springhill Mining Disaster I was amazed, because I can't imagine that she had ever been caught in a mine, yet she was able to get into the story and tell it so well. Mind you, when I recorded it I felt it did need a masculine influence or colour in it, so I asked Damien Dempsey to sing it with me."

It's the storytelling that counts, Scanlon insists. Direct experience isn't always a necessary precursor to writing a great song, and it's this search for the global through the personal that she aspires to in her writing.

"Some of my favourite songs are story songs, written by somebody about somebody else," she says. "I think it's a really great thing to be able to write songs outside of yourself. Damien Dempsey does that a lot. You rarely hear the word 'I' in his songs. He writes outside of himself, and it's a very selfless thing to be able to do. I'm trying to develop that story-writing thing.

"What I enjoy doing is returning to the traditional songs that have mad stories and attempting to rewrite them. I think that's as much part of the renewal of the tradition as the original versions of the songs were. They belong to us all, and they've always changed and evolved anyway, so why would we stop now?"

With her forthcoming concert as guest vocalist with Sharon Shannon and her Acoustic Band at the National Concert Hall, as part of the ESB Ceol festival, Scanlon will have the chance to flex those vocal cords in a theatre setting. A far cry from Dick Mack's back room, yet she insists it's as attractive as any snug or session.

"I know that in those venues you get great audiences," she says. "They're really conducive to the kind of singing that I do: it's just pure silence, and you get to hear yourself really clearly. I don't find that intimidating at all.

"Now that people in bands are becoming so inventive with their arrangements it's great that people can listen to it in the right kind of setting, because it allows the listener to appreciate just how good the music really is."

ESB Ceol is at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, March 14th-17th. Sharon Shannon and her Acoustic Band, featuring Pauline Scanlon, play on March 16th