GALWAY BASED singer-songwriter Sarah Lynch launches her much-anticipated debut album Letter To Friends next Tuesday at 8pm with an intimate gig live at her home-away-from-home, the Druid Theatre.
On the night she will perform with her band, including Wayne Sheehy, Garvan Gallagher, Stuart Craig and Eoghan Scott, and a few surprise guests.
While on a lifelong musical odyssey, for the past 12 years Sarah has also been a key member of the Druid team and this year won a prestigious stage management award for her exceptional work as company stage manager in keeping six Druid productions on tour in Ireland, Britain, Canada, USA, Australia, and New Zealand in 2009/10.
Her album Letter To Friends has been a work in progress over the past three years, between world tours with Druid. Sarah has been working with producer Wayne P Sheehy (who has also worked with Ron Wood, Bo Diddley, Paul Brady, Damien Dempsey, and The Chieftains ) to whom she was introduced by Juliet Turner, during the time she supported Juliet’s Burn The Black Suit Tour.
“I’ve been writing songs since I was a little kid,” Lynch reveals over a morning phone call. “My grandfather was a trumpeter, he had his own dance band. Even though he died when I was quite young I started playing music because of him.
“My first memory is seeing him on the stage at The Clare Inn and I just got bitten by the stage bug there and then. So I learned how to play the trumpet because I wanted to be like him and I started writing instrumental pieces. As I got older I learned the guitar and started writing songs.”
Lynch’s considerable commitments with Druid meant Letter To Friends took several years to complete.
“Druid’s quite a busy little organisation,” she observes with some understatement, “and my producer Wayne Sheehy is quite a busy little bee as well. With Druid my calendar would be laid out 12 to 16 months in advance.
“Between the two of us we would be going ‘I’ve got a week off here’ or ‘I’ve got a week off there’ and work around that. We’d be meeting in the weirdest of places - we had one meeting in Adelaide for instance. We just get together wherever and whenever we could.”
Lynch explains what Sheehy brought to the album as producer.
“When you write the songs first you write them in a particular way or mood but then you’ll get someone like Wayne in the studio who’ll say ‘Let’s strip it all back’ or ‘Try a different tempo’,” says Lynch.
“He can play practically every instrument under the sun and it’s fantastic when you have someone with that sort of repertoire on board. He’s an amazing drummer and percussionist and knows a lot about world music, which I love as well. It was just a real eye-opener for me working with him.”
There are nine tracks on the album and Lynch reveals that the title track sets down a marker for the rest of the set.
“The title-track ‘Letter to Friends’ was written about two friends of mine that were killed in an accident a few years ago, it’s quite a stark song,” she says. “The reason I took that title was because while each of the songs was written at various points in my life, in their own way they are all like individual letters.”
Letter To Friends can be purchased at the Druid Theatre gig or online at www.sarahlynch.ie
