Flying Solo, Free As A Bird

I’ve known Tara Blaise for a few years now. A close friend of Susie Shorten, who worked for Hot Press, I first encountered her when she was a member of the Wild Oscars, an adventure that was followed by a stint in Igloo and then Kaydee – a band of rock hopefuls, who were signed to EMI in Ireland and released a promising debut.

We’d meet at launches and parties and now and then get a chance to shoot the breeze. She was the kind of person you’d always want to see at the next bash – a lovely, calm and positive presence, she radiated a sense of composure. There was always the glint of something special about her.
The Kaydee project stuttered to a halt, but if Tara was upset she didn’t show it. Her response was to move on. She embarked on a process of learning more about the craft of being a singer and a performer. She sang for a period in Abba-esque. She also attended the Gaiety School of Acting. And gradually she focused more intently on writing her own songs. Still known to her mates as Tara Egan-Langley, she began to see herself as a solo artist.
The break she had been looking for came when she hooked up with John Hughes, who manages The Corrs. They were put in touch with one another by a mutual friend, at a time when Hughes was aiming to bring his own solo record, Wild Ocean – released towards the end of 2004 – to fruition. Having decided that the album needed vocals on a few key tracks, he asked Tara to get involved. He wanted someone, ideally, not just to sing but to write the lyrics for the tracks.
“She has this lovely, trippy, hippy way of looking at the world,” Hughes told me, around the time of the album release. “I got her into the studio and asked her to have a go at writing lyrics and singing them on the spot. I just loved what she came up with for ‘Dancing In The Wind’. And she has a gorgeous voice. I knew straight away that I wanted to work with her. There was something special there.”
It was, as Lou Reed would say, the beginning of a great adventure…

Tara Blaise sits down opposite me, a shy smile flitting across her face. It’s a bit strange, this shift in things, a tape recorder sitting between us on the table. You get the impression that she hasn’t quite worked out yet how to deal with the formalities of the journalistic process and the fact that we know one another adds a different dimension of amused intrigue.
The tape rolling, she throws her eyes to heaven good naturedly often enough at the questions, but it doesn’t take long for her to establish a rhythm. She’s a good talker, intelligent and sophisticated and very balanced in her view of things. You can sense that she always felt comfortable in her own skin.
Her parents were great, she says. “You could tell them anything and I guess that helped us to find what we were good at quicker and easier because we didn’t feel like we were fighting against things.”
In contrast to a lot of rock’n’roll stars, Tara remembers her teenage years as happy ones.
“I went to a good school for me,” she recalls. “I went to Newtown in Waterford, which was very encouraging for music – and for different things other than going to college and that kind of stuff. It was really encouraging for people who were interested in acting or pottery or maybe who just weren’t very academic. There was a real mix of people there, and it was okay to be into choir or guitar or whatever.
“As a result, I guess maybe I wasn’t as angry as some kids were and maybe that’s taught me to always look for the positive in things.” She laughs self-deprecatingly. “I sound like a saint now!”
She began forming bands and putting on plays while she was in her teens. Her first outfit was called Les Legumes. No shrinking vegetable – nor a wilting violet either – when she left school, she moved to Dublin and began to get involved in the scene in the capital.
“I was very lucky to be in circles of extremely talented people,” she reflects. “They certainly weren’t doing it for fun – they were doing it because music was in their blood, people like Damien Rice and The Frames.”
She became backing vocalist with the Wild Oscars and was subsequently invited to join Kaydee when – their debut album already in the can – the Kilkenny band’s vocalist and chief songwriter Jan Kiely left. The album was re-recorded, with Tara handling vocal duties.
“That was my first time fronting a band,” Tara reflects, “so it was a real learning experience for me. When I recorded that album it was Jan’s lyrics and Kaydee’s songs. I found that quite difficult – to do someone else’s songs in that way. But it was such a huge learning experience that even when it ended, I didn’t regret it at all. I learnt so much and it felt like the most natural thing at the time, and when it was over that was quite exciting – because it meant that I was going on to the next part of the journey. I just didn’t know where that was going to take me.”

It took her to a new identity as Tara Blaise – and the opportunity to record the songs that she had been storing up, in a way that would ultimately do full justice to her growing self-assurance as an artist. Meeting John Hughes was pivotal to her progress.
“ I went to meet John in the studio where he was recording Wild Ocean,” she says. “This was one of our first meetings and he played me the track ‘Dancing In The Wind’ and he asked me if I thought I could write anything over it. Inside, I was thinking ‘Oh god, I can’t do this’ – but I also knew that this was a great opportunity and I didn’t want to let him see that I was nervous. So I said ‘yeah, no problem’. And he said ‘well, I could do something really hard, I could put you in a room now and give you half an hour’ and I said ‘yeah, fine’. By now, inside I was feeling ‘Oh my god, I have to get out of here’.
“So he put me in a room and I was thinking – ‘What the hell are you doing? Why did you say you could do this?’ But I wrote ‘Dancing in the Wind’ in about half an hour. I think it was just a fluke, it was just luck – but it worked so well that we did ‘Come Away’ also for the album. And then we went on to do my album.”
With Olle Rohm at the production desk, the ensuing Dancing On Tables Barefoot is an album that matches the inherent musicality and ambition of Blaise’s songs with a finely-tuned pop sensibility.
“I wanted a happy album, I guess, rather than a sort of self-indulgent, depressing thing,” Tara reflects. “The song ‘21 Years’ is about my father. He died when I was 21 and I always thought, if I wrote a song about him, it would have to be the saddest song to write and the hardest. It took me a long time to do it and so I was surprised that it turned out to be one of the most beautiful that I have written and one of the happiest. It’s a real celebration of him – and not at all what I had anticipated.”
“He was great, amazing,” she adds with a relish that is touching. “He was an architect, he was quite artistic and musical and a real gentleman. Both my parents were always very encouraging to us, to find what we were good at, and what would make us happy.”
She went to LA to work on the record with Rohm – a man who has had a considerable share of success with Eurhythmics and The Corrs, amongst others.
“He was interesting because we spent a lot of time talking about the lyrics,” she says. “He would tell me what he thought a song was about before asking me, and that was great – to hear his interpretation. Sometimes, he’d raise things I hadn’t thought of at all but which would make sense. He brought a sensitivity to what I had written – he lived and breathed it really when he was working on it. And I think, in a musical sense, he has interpreted the songs really well.”
With ‘The Three Degrees’, the song from which the title of the album is taken, Tara brings to life the Dublin scene of the ‘90s, with Hogan’s and The Globe coming up for honourable mention. There’s a warmth and freshness to the song that is thoroughly engaging.
“It’s a song about friendship,” Tara reflects. “It’s about myself, my sister and Susie Shorten, who used to work for Hot Press – we were called ‘the three degrees’ and we had a great time being together and looking out for each other. So it’s a celebration of that – of friendship and of life, I guess.”
But Dancing On Tables Barefoot isn’t all sweetness and light. The songs reflect what it’s like being free, single and independent in a world in which relationships are so often assumed to be the only thing that really matters. Titles like ‘Here Comes The Prettiest Girl’, ‘Fool For Love’ and ‘Unbearable Lightness’ give a sense of the emotional territory being explored – with affairs, broken relationships and the inner turmoil that ensues, all being hinted at. To what extent are the songs based directly on her own experience?
“To a large extent,” she says, before qualifying that. “I mean, there are bits of me in all the songs and there are bits of situations that I haven’t been in. ‘For Your Own Good’ is actually about a really unhappy domestic situation – a really unhappy family – and about the way they put on a good show for everyone outside the family home. You know the feeling you get sometimes: you have no idea what goes on behind closed doors and people may seem happy or unhappy to us but we have no idea how they are with their families or on their own. I just love that feeling of being a fly on the wall and seeing someone else’s most personal and private moments. But that’s something that involves using your imagination, which is what a writer does.”
Right now, her favourite song on the album is ‘Unbearable Lightness’, which references Milan Kundera’s magnificent work The Unbearable Lightness of Being in the title.
“It’s about the book,” she says, “and it’s about relationships and the soul and the whole idea of physical attraction – and then something deeper than physical attraction.”
In the pursuit of this, she has the curiosity and sense of adventure befitting an artist. In this regard she has no idea what the future holds; her bohemian sensibility intact, she’s still trying to throw her arms around the world…
“Love is it, isn’t it?” she adds. “That’s what it’s all about. Whether it’s friends or family or lovers. Love is very important. I think that’s what it’s about – you have to throw yourself into certain situations and sometimes have your heart broken if that’s what it takes. That’s what life is all about. Life is to be lived and I think you should try and experience as many different emotions as you can.”
She name-checks Kate Bush, Nina Simone, Tom Waits, Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac and Joni Mitchell among the artists she most admires. Then there’s The Killers – and in an Irish context, Damien Dempsey.
“It’s great to see him doing well,” she says. “He has been doing it for so long and so it’s great to see people pay attention to him. He’s a great songwriter.”

With the release of the album, people are now beginning to pay attention to Tara herself. Her ‘Fool For Love’ single was a UK radio hit, BBC Radio 2 in particular supporting it heavily. The follow-up single ‘The Three Degrees’ has done even better in Ireland, hitting the Top 10 in the national airplay charts and, among Irish tracks, ranking second in plays only to U2 over the past month or so. She recently featured on Hell’s Kitchen alongside Liam Gallagher – contrary to his public image, she found the Oasis frontman very friendly and gracious.
While the portents are hugely positive, Tara is under no illusion about what the future holds. Even for the biggest acts in the world, it can be a bumpy ride – whereas she is just approaching the fifth hurdle. Has she had her own dark private moments, feelings of despair when she thought that the work would be wasted, that the break was never going to come.
“Oh, yeah, hourly,” she laughs. “Perseverance is such a huge part of this business. So, yeah, there have been moments of despair, and times when I’ve asked myself what am I doing? And even when you’re writing a song, trying to get it to come together, there’s the potential for that. And nerves and meeting new people and having to talk about yourself – in fact it’s all pretty nerve-wracking!”
Still, it’s said with a smile. With her impressively warm, honest, optimistic and open-minded take on things, and the genuinely cultured view of the world that goes with it, Tara Blaise is bringing a fresh dimension to Irish music – and one that has the potential to go global. There’s many rivers to cross before she’s up there, battling with her heroes in terms of record sales, but the trajectory is good. Tara is beginning to blaze a trail: get ready to watch her fly.
“It may be tough at times, and lonely, but I love it,” she says by way of conclusion. “The good things override the bad bits and the scary bits. So hopefully it will be okay.”
Amen to that…