We’re sorry to be the bearers of bad tidings, but it looks like we could be losing Lisa Hannigan for a year. Yup, the divine Ms. H is planning to move to the US in the hope that her sophomore – it seems appropriate that we use the American parlance – album Passenger sells as many gazillion copies there as it has here. The omens are certainly good with the record recently topping the Billboard Heatseekers chart and Lisa being championed by everyone from Jay Leno and Paddy Moloney to Herbie Hancock
and Los Angeles’ uber-influential alternative radio
station, KCRW.

“It’s not 100% definite yet, but I’m thinking of spending 12 months in New York, where if I had my way, I’d just play all the wonderful singer-songwriter nights they have there,” she confides on a rare day off in Dublin. “Not because I’m fed up with Ireland – far from it – but because it’s good to experience different things. I moved out of my house a while ago, so I’m officially homeless!”
Ah, so that was Lisa I spotted sleeping rough the other night in the Whelan’s doorway!
“It hasn’t quite come to that yet!” she laughs. “Thankfully, there are a number of spare-rooms and couches at my disposal. I know some people find them difficult, but I love long tours. The playing and waking up every morning in a new town with your mobile family is brilliant.
“What I like about America, and the more southerly states in particular, are the record shops and second-hand clothes stores where you never know what you’re going to pick up. When we toured the US last, I spent an absolute fortune posting stuff back to myself because I was way over my flying weight-limit. I tend to forget what I’ve bought, so when the parcels turn up it’s a wonderful surprise! It’s like sending presents to my future self!”
It’s not just Lisa who’s mad for the bargains.
“In New York and LA it’s a bun-fight to get to things, but I remember being somewhere very southern and my guitarist Gavin Glass picking up a beautiful pin-striped blue suit for a dollar. Then they said there was 50% off. We kind of assumed that somebody had died in it. That was the only way it could have been so cheap, but we brushed that under the carpet!”
As Ireland’s foremost exponent of the small but perfectly formed instrument, Lisa must have well miffed when Eddie Vedder invited Glen Hansard rather than her to be on his Ukulele Songs album.
“He phoned me first but my mobile was powered off,” she deadpans. “So, he had to make do with second best... only joking Glen! I don’t know whether I was before Eddie Vedder with the whole ukulele thing, but it’s great that it’s finally got a bit of rock ‘n’ roll cred!”
It so happens that Lisa is playing the Music Show the same afternoon as those other ukulele-toters The Original Rudeboys.
“Oooh, we can have a ‘ukulele-off’!” she enthuses. “It’s such a weird thing. Somebody got me one as a present and I
started writing on it because it was there. Now it’s so portable that I take it to radio stations with me. It has a beautiful sound, but there’s definitely a bit too much ukulele around at the moment!”
While there’s unlikely to be a new Lisa Hannigan record before 2013, fans desperate for new material will be delighted to hear that she’s among the guests on the Chieftains’ 50th anniversary album, Voice Of Ages, which dropped last week.
“I got a phone call out of the blue from Paddy Moloney who’d heard me doing ‘Black-Eyed Dog’ on the Nick Drake tribute album,” she explains. “We brainstormed song ideas over coffee in the National Concert Hall and he suggested ‘My Lagan Love’, which I’ve always adored. I didn’t know whether I could do it justice, but I went out to the studio in Bray and everything clicked. It was good that I only got to meet (producer) T Bone Burnett after I’d done my bit, because I’d have been petrified singing in front of a hero of mine.
“There’s so much wisdom to be gleaned from people like him and Paddy. It’s insane to think that The Chieftains have been around for half-a-century and are still tuned-in enough to know who Justin Vernon is. If I’m that musically copped on in my seventies I’ll be delighted!”

Lisa Hannigan plays the Music Show in the RDS on Sunday, February 26. Her album Passengers is out now.