ATHENRY SINGER, composer, multi instrumentalist, orchestra conductor, inaugural Choice Music Prize winner, and watersports enthusiast Julie Feeney, releases her new album pages on Friday June 5.
The album is the much anticipated follow up to her acclaimed and Choice award winning debut 13 Songs, which revealed her as a unique talent on the Irish scene, with songs straddling classical, pop, singer-songwriter, and avant garde.
Julie wrote, sang, and produced all the songs on pages, and conducted the Irish Chamber Orchestra for their parts on the album in one epic six hour recording session in Limerick.
“It was one of the happiest days of my life,” she says, “although I needed a week to recover from it.”
The album was composed over a five-week spell at a remote artists’ retreat in Co Monaghan.
“I wanted to put myself to the test,” she says. “I wanted to reach that stage where you actually come to the essence of what you’re feeling. I didn’t want to have any word on the album that was superfluous.”
She then returned to her apartment in Dublin and completed the instrumental music. Starting in silence with pencil and manuscript, and often working for 24-hour stretches or longer, she spent the best part of four months composing, arranging, and scoring the songs for a full orchestra.
“In pop music, orchestras are generally incorporated in a certain way,” she says. “I wanted to make a particular sound using an orchestra with songs that I hadn’t heard before but one that I could hear in my head. I wanted to use the instruments as if they were voices and the voices as if they were instruments intertwining in the songs.”
Julie Feeney will be doing an in-store signing in HMV in Galway on Saturday June 6 at 11.30am. The single ‘Love Is A Tricky Thing’ is out now. See www.juliefeeney.com
