Musical individualist Julie Feeney is reworking songs from her debut album for orchestra. It's a hint of what's to come on the follow-up, she tells Tony Clayton-Lea
What a difference a year makes in the life and times of a struggling musician and full-time workaholic. At the start of 2006, Julie Feeney was neck-deep in her primary job in the National Chamber Choir. When she wasn't doing this or part-time lecturing or occasional modelling or undertaking a master's degree in psychoanalysis, Feeney was sitting in her small Dublin apartment slipping her then recently completed debut album, 13 Songs, in between the covers of padded envelopes and posting them on to anyone she thought might be interested. That January, she recalls, she had a feeling that something important was going to happen to her career, so she handed in her notice at the NCO and waited for something - anything - to happen. Six weeks later, at the inaugural Choice Music Prize ceremony, 13 Songs nabbed the gong ahead of a few perceived obvious contenders. Cue shock, tears, celebration and a fork in the career path.
"My life is completely different now," says Feeney in the gentleman's club-type bar of Dublin's Four Seasons Hotel, a short walk away from her pad on one of those leafy lanes that virtually define Dublin 4. Despite having had just a few hours sleep the night before, Feeney is looking more than good and raring to go. Her shoes are scuffed and the strap of her handbag needs replacing, but Feeney's poise is so natural and instinctive you feel such style mishaps could actually start a trend.
"I am now not racking my brain to know how I'm going to pay my rent, how I'm going to pay back this bill or that bill, or how many months is the credit card going to last for.
"The Choice Music Prize didn't exactly help me with all of that, but it was amazing to get it. I was so much in debt I needed to get signed to a record label. At that stage, things were much more hectic and frantic in terms of the multitasking cottage industry thing I had. Then there was the job in the National Chamber Choir, the lecturing, gigs. It was an anxious period of time."
Artists of the calibre of Feeney are few and far between, probably because she is so much outside the supposed norm of what an Irish singer and songwriter should sound like. Certainly, she arrived pretty much out of nowhere with music that had no blatant or obvious connections with stock-in-trade formats. She stands alone and so far beyond her contemporaries she would be in danger of diminished returns were it not for the fact that her songs blend the weird and wired with the wonderful and "why-ever-not?". Her 13 Songs remains a fine debut album, not least because its inherent strangeness and charm refuse to be stripped bare.
WINNING THE CHOICE prize proved crucial in at least one regard - it provided Feeney with exposure beyond that of the discerning, almost compulsively obsessive music fan.
"I meet people now that have read about me, or seen my face in the newspapers or magazines, so it's about [more than] the music fan - it's the neighbours, their mothers, the guy changing the oil in the car. It happens all the time now. I mean, one of my songs is now on one of the music channels on Aer Lingus - it's fabulous, one of the things any musician or songwriter would want. I can't wait to tell my mother that!
"So it's good, but I can see how you can go wrong with it. I've done buckets of interviews for so many different things, and I now find I can easily steer the conversation to whatever direction I want it to go in, particularly if they ask personal questions. You're exposing part of your life, I know, but it's still down to you to be aware of how you're perceived. As regards that, I prefer to be perceived as serious, and I don't mind if it comes across like that."
Last year, Feeney signed to Sony BMG and acquired a well-connected UK-based manager. Unlike the cottage industry worker of 18 months ago, she is spending all her time on her music. She is aware that in order to maintain the momentum she has to work harder, which is why, as well as being knee deep in writing material for the follow-up to 13 Songs, she is revisiting that album through the composition of orchestral versions. The work was commissioned by BBC Northern Ireland's Declan McGovern for the upcoming Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival in Belfast.
While it's quite common to have musicians and singers perform their songs in train with an orchestra - some do it in order to invest a veneer of sophistication in otherwise humdrum material - it's far from common to have the songwriter orchestrate the parts. Feeney's background dictated that she was a perfect choice for such a creative endeavour.
"It's been a fascinating, unbelievable challenge to do it," she says. "I've taken all the different lines and paired them with certain instruments without wanting to make it sound like a pops orchestra-type thing. Some of it is quite sparse orchestration - you might have a high harmonic on the violin, matching it with the vibes."
FEENEY ADMITS SHE is using the experience to sharpen up her brain for the follow-up to 13 Songs. Using the orchestra and instruments in this way, she adds, is a pointer to the next record. "This is absolutely the direction creatively I'm going; I'm not going to go into the pop world."
For the moment, however, the leg work - attached more often than not to scuffed shoes, remember - still revolves around 13 Songs. "There is a lot of interest for the record in certain parts of Europe - Italy , in particular - as well as America . I want to do loads of gigs but they have to be done in the right way - there are more ways to get people to come see me than just playing the same venues. At some point this year, though, I'm going to have to lock myself away and just do the second record. I have better recording equipment than I had before - the likes of Pro-Tools for recording, an advanced sound library, and a new computer. And the record company are with me all the way; they suggest things for me to try, some of which I agree with, some of which I don't. There's certainly no heavy-handedness on their part to turn me into something I clearly am not interested in."
Indeed not. More Yoko Ono than Dido, Feeney is no more rock'n'roll than she is singer- songwriter; on the strength of 13 Songs she remains Ireland's premier individualist, a writer who has little or no obvious reference points, a performer with one foot in the arthouse scene and the other in the post-rock world.
She ponders this for a few seconds, realises it's something of a conundrum for the often purblind music industry, and replies, half enigmatically, half impishly: "In some ways it's quite good that they don't know what to do with you."
Julie Feeney performs at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast on May 3 as part of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, and Droichead Arts Centre in Drogheda on May 5 as part of the Drogheda Arts Festival