Sorrow does not strut, it suggests itself. A Girl Called Eddy, otherwise known as Erin Moran, is not the kind of singer to bother much with fanfares of self-promotion. Nevertheless, her eponymous first album, made in Sheffield, co-produced by ex Pulp/Longpigs member and solo artist Richard Hawley, but with its spiritual location somewhere in one of those arty mid-east or western college towns, was a mere two songs off album of the year contender, and by anyone’s barometer, a stunning debut.
Brought up in Neptune, NJ, near Asbury Park, Moran was the child of a pharmaceutical sales rep father who played trumpet in bands at the weekends, and a mother who sang along to Tommy Dorsey and Sinatra records, while her elder brother favoured The Beatles, The Monkees and Chicago (“God help us”). Married young, she took a succession of lower tier music industry jobs while mustering the moxie to become a singer and songwriter in her own right. It took more than a decade, including a messy stint with Setanta records (“A nightmare,” she says, “I’m still living it actually,”) before finding a home with Anti, but it was worth the wait. Moran’s songs are lovelorn but unromantic life-lessons. There’s the hymn to her late mother ‘Kathleen’, which swells with chamber pop strings and exquisite chord changes. There’s ‘People Who Used To Dream About The Future’ and ‘Tears All Over Town’, desolate girly-pop answers to the Tindersticks’ city sickness, their protagonists unhooked, adrift, bereft of gravity.
“Yeah, it’s about love, but I don’t consider it terribly romantic,” Erin says, “I like things a bit more real. I thought maybe it was too heavy-handed, letting it all hang out like that, songs about my mother or whatever, but I’ve been living with them so long I thought, it is what it is. Death, divorce, disease, a few other things, that’s all part of my life in the last 10, 12 years.”
Isn’t she still a little young to sound so weathered?
“Well, no, y’know, I’m a gal in my mid-30s,” she points out. “My mom died in ’96, my dad died in the middle of making the record, I got married pretty young, got divorced around the time when my mom died, so it was all a bit boom-boom-boom in the space of about five years. I had no clue how to deal with my mother’s death, I was so beyond distraught.”
If all this sounds rather bleak, the weight in Moran’s songs is counterbalanced, just so, by her exquisite phrasing. No surprise that she learned at the hem of those mistresses of restraint, Karen Carpenter, Dusty Springfield and Chrissie Hynde.
“I really admire those singers,” Moran says. “I’m not a big fan of a lot of the overblown style of singing today, those R&B singers and pop singers bore me really. The way you say something can buffer, for better, a lyric. Even though the lyrics maybe are emotionally overwrought or heavy, I think I do also have a massive lyric censor in me, and as much as I wanted it to be moving, I’ve always thought, ‘Is it too girly, too confessional, too Alanis Morrisette-y?’ ’Cos as much as I love Chrissie Hynde and Dusty and Karen Carpenter, if I were to list my favourite songwriters, they’re all men. I always liked a woman singing a lyric that a man could sing without him sounding fey. I like a tough lyric.”
Which is not to downplay the importance of the music, a lush tapestry of Bacharach, Spector and Big Star, with just enough of Nico’s autumnal Chelsea Girl to give it that bundled up boho hotel chic. And although Moran maintains the DNA for her songs, including the string arrangements, was all there in the original demos, she admits that Richard Hawley’s production – not to mention his band – gave the record much of its magic.
“I got signed to Setanta, which was also his label, early on,” she explains. “I was looking for a producer and I heard his record and I just went, ‘Oh my, this is pretty beautiful and blue and cinematic and very musical and tasteful.’ Heavy and emotional but classy, sort of all things I love and always wanted to bring to these songs. So I chatted to him on the phone briefly and I flew over to Sheffield, thought we’d try three songs, and by the middle of ‘Tears All Over Town’, which was the first song, where he goes into this guitar solo, very short, I just started weeping in the control room. ’Cos it had been a long road, I’d been trying to work with a lot of people in New York, guys from the lower east side, I’d play them Scott Walker records and god bless ’em, they’d go, ‘That’s a bit, like… European sounding isn’t it?’
“So when I heard his band start playing these songs that I’d been dicking around with for the better part of three or four years, it was pretty amazing. I have to tell you though; he’s such a fucker. When we finished the album, we were on our second bottle of wine at that point, and he turns to me and draws on a cigarette and he goes, ‘Well, good luck playing this live!”

A Girl Called Eddy is out on Anti