A sylph-like, neo-punk figure in shiny mac, jeans and purple slingbacks, Eileen Rose Giadone is currently fishing on the outskirts of commercial success - and in Ireland for the Kilkenny Arts Festival.
Eileen Rose is 36 and has been through the usual range of career and personal foul-ups: a succession of commercially-failed bands in her native Boston and in New York, divorced from an English husband, disappointment in the eyes of her Italian/Irish family.
One of nine children, she is the only member of her family who plays music full-time. She studied law for a while, then went to the Berklee College of Music for a couple of years.
"It was always a tear for me to do something responsible, because I got good grades and my parents wanted me to be a lawyer. When I finally accepted that music was what I wanted to do, it was hard on my parents. It still is a small bit. They think one day I'll grow up and be serious. But it's actually starting to develop into something tangible, so they're a little less worried. A typical story."
In many ways it is. Yet Eileen Rose gives the impression she has seen life's downside more than most, her innate self-confidence pulling her through the tough times. Born and raised in Saugus, north of Boston, her mother's maiden name is Maguire. Eileen Rose says she was always fascinated with music, from the Irish songs she was taught by her mother and her aunts to the rumble of rock 'n' roll she heard in Boston clubs. As well as family and school influences, she also engaged in a few seasons of dancing in the time-honoured kids-from-Fame mould.
"Then I started to write songs and play guitar," she says, sipping from a pint of Guinness she clearly isn't going to finish. "It never crossed my mind to join someone else's band. I've always been a singer/songwriter with various bands around me."
Eileen Rose seems to be a low-maintenance woman - no husband, no children - with a blend of irony and self-deprecation borne out of weathered circumstances. She has been in London for the past seven years. Now firmly entrenched in the music scene, she was taken under the avuncular wing of Rough Trade's Geoff Travis in the late 1990s, resulting in her dΘbut solo album of last year, Shine Like It Does. Her winning mixture of Janis Joplin, PJ Harvey, Patti Smith and Bonnie Raitt has had the glossy music magazines scouring for superlatives.
What took her so long? "I guess I've never been trend-oriented. If whatever's coming out musically isn't natural or sincere, then I feel like a fraud - I can't really deliver the song. You can hear all my influences in the music but I don't think I sound like them. In the past, I was always trying to accommodate people in various bands. If you're trying to have a sense of a band you have to accommodate other people's egos and sensitivities, and at times that's a pain.
"With bands such as The Beatles, U2 or REM it works. But they were together from when they were kids, and that's crucial - you have to develop the musicality for it to bond. As soon as I stopped accommodating other people, things started to work." If there's a motif running through Shine Like It Does, it's a distinct Irish/Italian one: family is crucial. It is, by her own admission, a very thirtysomething record. Where there is family, she says, there is also nagging guilt and disappointment.
"I'd been divorced and I'd moved away from home, which in my family was a bad thing to do in the first place," says Eileen Rose. "I'd put out an album that had failed and I'd had a bitter legal battle getting off the record label. When I was writing those songs for Shine Like It Does I felt like all the people who thought I was a loser were right. But through the writing of the record, I came to the conclusion that, although I may have failed, I wasn't a failure. I might not be the perception of what my parents would have liked but it doesn't make me bad; or that they don't love me just because I haven't turned out the way they would have wanted me to."
Guilt and disappointment? According to Eileen Rose, it's just parental perception of rules. "It's not their fault, because they inherited that. They're doing the best they can with the understanding they have at the time. However they make you feel, they're doing so because they think in some way it will protect you. Being a parent is all about protection; even if they're protecting you from your wild dreams." A tattoo peeps out when she raises her arm to sip her drink.
All that familial, recriminatory feeling dissolved with the writing, each messy encounter excised as each song was forged. "So I messed up," she admits. "It doesn't make me a bad person." The reception of the album, says Eileen Rose with a genuine beam of a smile, has totally vindicated her.
Work on her next album has been completed. Due for release early next year, it has the intriguing title of Long Shot Novena. "Creativity is a spiritual process, if it's any good," she contends. "I've explored a lot of different religions, trying to figure out what makes sense, what can I adhere to, because I like belonging to something, but none of them really clicked for me. So now I don't know where I am. If I have to give myself a title, I'm an agnostic. I hope it's just ignorance, I hope I'm going to get enlightened, because I want to. It's too scary to think that nothing means nothing."
Maintaining she's too short to be a sex symbols (not that former record companies haven't tried the lipstick-pout and Wonderbra route), she looks as if she will persevere with whatever comes her way. Her armour is a lifestyle unencumbered with dependents ("no stuff," as she plainly puts it) and a thick skin.
"When I'm recording and playing, I'm totally contented. At the moment, I'm not willing to change that. I've learned to make myself understood, creatively. I like it when people get me. I don't mind being disliked and I don't mind being judged, but I hate being misunderstood. Once you listen to my music you don't question my intentions. It's clear that making a million is not my priority."
Shine Like It Does by Eileen Rose is released by Rough Trade