Not wishing to offend, but sometimes the process of writing about new bands and artists can be a bit of an uphill struggle. However good the music, there are only so many times you can talk about working your way up to a support slot at the Roisin Dubh. Thank God, then, for Julie Feeney. Consider her background: Galway-born, she has a Masters in Music & Media Technology from Trinity College Dublin, plus one in psychoanalysis, has studied at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, has composed for film and dance, performed with Riverdance, sings with the National Chamber Choir and is a part-time model. None of which you get with your average Irish guitar band.
“My background is just the way I am”, she says. “I don’t think about it being different. It’s only now I’ve started to talk to other people about it that I’ve seen it that way. You never feel different in your own skin, you just do what you do. I’ve studied a lot of different things but I’ve done a lot as well. I love studying analysis of classical music, there’s different kinds of ways of analysing music which are really interesting. I sing 24 hours a week full time as a classical singer, so I’m a doer as well as a student”.
Has being a student of music helped her in her non-classical work? “It does help when you’re in a studio, say. The more you know, the more you’re equipped to know what someone is talking about – or you can interpret what someone is saying, even if they’re not saying it the right way."
She adds: " However, I don’t think it’s that good, to study or practice too much. You can see people forming into certain modes of thinking. If I see myself going down a tunnel, I have to pull myself out and have a look around”.
The myriad strands of Feeney’s existence have come together on her debut, 13 Songs. It might not surprise you to learn that it’s a hugely interesting record – certainly one for the more adventurous music lover.
It works because Feeney writes songs that are essentially accessible, then does weird things to them on a flurry of instruments.
“I’d lined up the normal bass, guitar and drums set up and something came to me," she explains. "I started arranging the songs a different way and felt I’d really come onto something. I wasn’t consciously thinking of doing anything in particular. A lot of the instruments, I had around the apartment and I decided to use them because they sounded nice. It just kind of came to me to do it in that way. Also, I had no money and I wanted to find a way where I had complete artistic control.
"As a composer you write every aspect of the music, so I’m a bit like a composer writing songs. Sometimes songwriters would feel that they have to get someone else to arrange it or produce it – I don’t look at things in that way. I hear the whole thing. Every single detail is important."
Recorded at Joe Elliot’s studio (“he and I would have very little in common musically, but he has immense kindness”), 13 Songs sees Julie entering a world of identikit singer-songwriters as a breath of fresh air, although the desire to compare her to the usual suspects will undoubtedly arise.
Her time in the contemporary classical world has prepared her for such experiences.
“There’s often a cliché that if you’re going to be a singer and a composer than you have to be a neurotic female, there has to be screeching and roaring and you have to be a bit odd looking," she says. "People assumed I’d fit into that cliché, but I’m not really that. I don’t like to be boxed in."
Did she have any idea of how she was going to get this most untypical of records out into an industry populated by formulaic sound-alikes?
“I didn’t think about that at all. I just made the music without any idea of where it was going to go. One song, ‘1,000,001’ sounded amazing but it was too like a pop song, which wasn’t what I had in my mind. If I had been trying to fit in I wouldn’t have changed it but I did. I had some stupid notions."
She adds: "People would ask me what it’s like and I’d say Tori Amos or Suzanne Vega and now I’m listening to it and it’s not like that at all. If you’re able to categorise exactly what your music is, you’re not really going the right way.
"People think you have to sound a certain way. It’s not that I’m revolting against anything, the music just comes out the way it does. I do enough covers in everything else that I do, I’m singing Bach and other people’s music all the time. I’m interested in making something that grows into itself. Otherwise, what’s the point?”