AE MAK: "I wanted it to sound kind of raw and human – the raw emotion that folk music brings"

Aoife McCann has taken the long way around to her debut album. The artist better known as AE MAK has been a presence for a decade now, releasing singles and EPs, and beguiling listeners with her harmonious, frontal lobe-pleasing art pop (which, if you had to categorise, sits somewhere between Lucius and Björk).

The LP, Folk Songs For Mama & Papa, technically isn’t her first. Another was recorded in LA at some point but was shelved. McCann has spent the last few years in Berlin, and while the city might have birthed Bowie’s trilogy, the German capital proved more distracting than productive.

“There’s no pressure to be anything there,” McCann says. “And that’s fucking great in one sense, but in another sense you kind of get a bit lost in that. It’s like a playground for adults. Everything’s cheap, there’s lots of dancing and lots of different communities to get involved in. But if you’re not in alignment with what you want to be doing, it’s easy to get a bit lost.”

Her time in Berlin wasn’t entirely unproductive, much of her new LP was recorded and written there. The album was later finished with the help of Ye Vagabond’s Brían Mac Gloinn at a farmhouse in Ravensdale Forest.

In addition, the Dundalk native moved back to Ireland into her parents’ home, and got a new job. She is serious about music again, feeling a new sense of focus for the first time in a while.

“I just went through loads of emotional turmoil and pain, and a bit of loss of identity, as we all do,” McCann explains. “What I’ve been making recently is more true and pure to voice. You learn more about yourself, and about life and the point of it all, when you go through loads of pain, don’t you? I’d learned how to use all the tools: I’d learned how to write songs, and make sound aesthetics and different worlds. Then it was about going back to my voice, and a bit of truth, and actually having something to say.”

It’s a maturity that permeates the record; even songs about unrequited love (‘Love Free’) have a sort of philosophical, positive tint, and the project as a whole has a ‘cosmic-spiritual’ feel to it.

The title is firmly rooted in the real world, inspired by her parents’ record collection at home, which McCann describes as a shrine to her father’s encyclopaedic knowledge of greats like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young.

“I wanted it to sound kind of raw and human – the raw emotion that folk music brings,” McCann adds. “I know it’s not a folk record, but I feel like it’s my version of a folk record. I just wanted to give it to my parents, to be like, ‘Hey, I made this vinyl and it’s going to go on your shelf now.’ It’s a bit of self-therapy or something.”

There’s a Dylan cover in the form of ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’, which resonated so well with McCann’s voice that it ended up inspiring one of the record’s standouts, ‘Last Night You Cried To Bach.’

“I was singing the Bob Dylan song all around at parties, and I knew I wanted a song of my own that kind of hit my body like that,” McCann says.

The artist has a genuinely interesting way of talking about vocals, describing singing as a physical thing that’s all about resonance points and frequency placement. It comes from her years as a music teacher at BIMM.

“I guess it’s part of my language because I taught interpretive vocals at BIMM Dublin and Berlin for a couple of years,” McCann shares. “That really inspired how I expressed this record and came back to my own voice. It was basically teaching technique and theory, but also authenticity in voice, and how you express it from your body – primal human and guttural sounds, different resonance points and frequency points in your body. And how that’s attached to certain emotions – and how we express and deliver things.”

• Folk Songs For Mama & Papa is out now via Spacer Records.