FRIENDSHIPS AND the sea dominate the songs of Lisa Hannigan. Her musical ambitions were brought to life by her mother, Freddie Mercury, and Maria Callas. She has emerged from the Damien Rice era strong and excited by the future. She could also prove a heroine to those who cherish the physical album.
Lisa Hannigan plays the Black Box Theatre on Wednesday October 1 at 8pm where she will perform songs from her superb debut album Sea Sew, released just last week.
Joining her on stage will be “four lovely men” as she describes them: Tom Osander (drums ), Gavin Glass (guitar ), Shane Fitzsimons (double bass ), and Donagh Molloy (trumpets ). “There’ll also be a couple of people getting up on stage to play the xylophone and things like that,” Lisa adds.
Resurrection
Lisa first came to prominence as the backing vocalist in Damien Rice’s band. Her distinctive voice added a grace and depth to the songs on Rice’s debut O, and were a large part of what made it special. Lisa was seen as an integral part of Rice’s music and photos of Rice almost always included her.
However things began to unravel around the time Rice began recording his inferior second album 9, culminating in early 2007 with his telling Lisa the working relationship was over - 10 minutes before they were due to go on-stage in Munich.
“It wasn’t the best day,” sighs Lisa, but she is determined not to dwell on the past. “Looking back it was good that it happened and I’m happy at how everything has turned out. It needed to happen and I have no worries.”
Lisa had been keeping notebooks “full of words” and ideas for songs, but it was her dismissal from Rice’s band that proved the catalyst for Lisa to properly begin exploring her own gift for songwriting. Her infatuation with music goes back to her childhood when Queen and Paul Simon were family favourites.
“Mum is from Baltimore in west Cork,” Lisa tells me, “and during the long six hour drives down there from Co Meath in the summer, Queen’s Greatest Hits, Paul Simon’s Graceland, and Joni Mitchell would be on constant rotation.”
However hearing Maria Callas was what convinced the teenage Lisa that her future lay in music.
“One day mum came back from town and she had bought me a CD, 20 Best Arias, and Maria Callas was singing the ‘Bell Song’ and it just punched me in the stomach. It was so well sung technically and her voice was so expressive. I spent a few years obsessed with her.”
Lisa’s own voice would prove to be much gentler than either Callas or Freddie Mercury, but its gentleness is part of its appeal and perfectly suits the kind of music she does.
“That’s the voice I have been given,” she says. “I don’t think Freddie Mercury could have sung lower than he did. My voice is getting stronger though and vocals develop over the years so where will it end up?”
However Lisa’s mother Frances was as important a spark to her daughter’s creativity as Freddie or Callas.
“She would be singing downstairs in the house and I would wake up to that most mornings,” recalls Lisa. “She’s pretty amazing and very creative, very happy, and she is always smiling. If I turn out to be half the woman she is I’ll be all right.”
Sea Sew
The news that Lisa Hannigan was to go solo prompted much excitement and expectation among Irish music fans and the music press. However Lisa was not going to rush into anything, but rather take her time with her first solo album.
“Once I stopped working with Damien I focused fully on the album, writing songs, and arranging them the way I wanted them,” she says. “The album was recorded quickly but working with the lads in the band, we took our time in crafting and arranging the songs before we put them to tape.”
Could this approach be the inspiration behind the opening lines of ‘Splishy Splashy’: “Surface slowly at your own speed...She waits her turn she waits her time”?
“That’s one of the older songs on the album,” says Lisa, “but looking at it now, it does make sense.”
The resulting album, Sea Sew, is an exquisite album of beautifully crafted intimate songs, which deal with the nature of friendship - both sympathy for friends and joy in their company - and firmly believes that the simple things in life are those which bring the greatest happiness.
It’s summed up in one of the album’s best songs - ‘I Don’t Know’ where Lisa sings: “I don’t know if you write letters or panic on the phone still I’d like to call you all the same.”
“A lot of the songs are about friendship and how friends interact,” says Lisa. “‘I Don’t Know’ is a snapshot of that moment before you know anything about somebody but you know you like them. It could be about a friend or boyfriend/girlfriend.
“I never really like saying anything too specific in case people think it’s about them. It could be about my pet rat! I was so devastated when I found out that Michael Jackson’s song ‘Ben’ is about a pet rat. Oh no! I thought, it’s so beautiful! - but no, there are no songs about pets on my record.”
The other recurring motifs on Sea Sew are water and the sea.
“I didn’t start out with the intention of putting in the references,” Lisa admits, “but looking over the lyrics I found them all there. I spent many childhood summers in Baltimore in rock pools and by the sea so I realised that’s where it came from.”
Given that Luka Bloom and Damien Dempsey are known to take a dip in Galway Bay when they play here, might Lisa do the same? “I’m a competent swimmer,” she says. “I’m a keen splasher and paddler. I won’t be doing any triathlons any time soon though. I love boats and rafts, and bobbing around on the water.”
A love of sewing
Sea Sew is a welcome release with both a quality and a personality that puts it head and shoulders above the general singer-songwriter crowd. Does Lisa think its release will encourage people to see her as an artist in her own right and not as ‘the girl who used to song with Damien Rice’?
“Hopefully,” she says. “I’m just going to keep doing what I’m doing. It’s fair enough for people to see me as a collaborator which is what I used to do.”
The care, craft, and detail that went into the recording of Sea Sew also went into the album artwork, created by Lisa and her mother. The album cover depicts rows of individual cloth dice sewn onto wool. Inside the lyrics to each song have been stitched onto cloth - every letter, every word in blue, maroon, green, and black thread.
“Each page in the CD booklet took a day and a half,” says Lisa. “Overall it took the month of May to do. Mum and I were sitting together sewing and we’d have movies on while we were doing it.”
Such craft going into an album sleeve is a heroic, indeed defiant gesture, in the age of the sterile download which seems to be killing off both the album and the much cherished world of album artwork.
“I think an album should stand alone by itself,” declares Lisa. “I do think if you get a nice CD cover, in this age when you can so easily get an album with no cover from the internet, that more than ever it’s important that people put a lot of love into creating album artwork. I don’t see why someone should get your album with no cover after all that love has been put into it.
“So many album covers are works of art and it would be a shame to lose that to anonymous white labels. It just makes me determined to make a better effort.”
For tickets contact the Town Hall on 091 - 569777.
