A prophecy in her own land

“I’m coming to a point in my life where I want to do more work here at home. I’m not well known in Ireland, and it’s important to me.” Despite having lived in New York for 11 years and amassed a solid fan base there, Susan McKeown is thirsty for acknowledgement in her former hometown.

Sipping tea in a Dundrum pub, the Dublin-born singer is only a few days into a heavy-duty promotional tour organised by Kieran Goss’s Cog Communications. Between radio and TV appearances and press interviews, she’s been busy. She’s even chosen to release her new album Prophecy in Ireland on her own label while continuing to seek a licensing deal for it Stateside.

Maybe it’s the New York influence.

The baby in a family of five with a classical composer for a mother, Susan began intensive studies with opera singer Veronica Dunne at the age of fifteen. While she quit after a year, having decided to pursue other musical avenues, the influence does show through in her full-voiced, vibrato-enriched style.

McKeown and the album’s co-producer, guitarist Jon Sparney have been working together for three years now. He’s eager to talk about the making of the CD – and especially about the ‘optigan’, one of a number of rather exotic-sounding instruments that appear on it (in the aforementioned notes, Spurney is credited with playing mellotron, celeste and sleighbells, among other things).

“It’s this really strange gadget that they made in the 1970s,” he enthuses. “It’s a keyboard that has buttons like an accordion. You put in these little flexi-discs, and when you press a key down, it plays a sound off the record. It’s just this little plastic thing that was made for people to put in their rec rooms, you know, and the records you put in have these great cheesy names, like Sleigh Ride or Polynesian Tiki Party or whatever.

“But it’s an amazingly evocative instrument... and then Oliver Straus, who was doing the engineering, had the idea of putting the record in upside down, so everything played backwards.”

The result was the darkly evocative carnival-like sounds behind the nostalgic title track of the album, which was co-written by Spurney and McKeown on the final day of recording.

Unlike her previous album Lowlands, the new CD features original rather than traditional material. McKeown is quick to point out that although both strains feature in her live gigs, she prefers to keep them separate on her recordings.

“This is actually the eighth record that has my name on it,” she says. “Four of them were collaborations with other people, two of them were traditional purely – well, as pure as I can be! – and two of them were of rock songs, really. The first of those was the first album I ever did, Bones, and this is the second one like that.

“Part of my thing when I brought out that first record in 1995 was to not be pigeonholed. And it just happens that I started working at the time when it was easy to get licence deals for one record with a label that will do the marketing. You want to find the right label and make it easy for them to do their job.”

Other recent projects include writing and recording the score for the American premiere of Marina Carr’s play By The Bog Of Cats, starring Holly Hunter, which had a successful run last autumn, and recording the CD A Winter Talisman (released in November 2001) with Scottish fiddler Johnny Cunningham, with whom she toured coast to coast during the winter.

Despite her desire to do more performing in Ireland, Susan has no intentions of coming home on a permanent basis – all the more so since the events of 11 September. “Jon and I were on the road with our bass player at the time that it happened, and when we got back, it looked like the city was going through a collective really heavy depression.

“It’s incredible that it’s gone through it and survived, and good things are coming out of it... and that’s the main thing you can hope for.”