Ave Maria

“When you’re making an album you’re climbing this massive mountain, and you really try so hard to find the right voice for the songs and to complete it,” says singer Maria Doyle Kennedy. “And when you’ve made the album and you’re happy to say, ‘I’m done, I’m finished now’, you kind of go, ‘Phew!’

“And then you realise that actually that was a tiny mountain! Now the real mountain is, how do you tell people about it? And that’s the really tricky thing. If you run your own label and you make an album, you have a responsibility to try to get it heard. You have a responsibility to figure out how to do that but, fuck, it’s hard!”
It’s a wet, windy Wednesday afternoon in August and, with new album Sing in the can and ready for release, Maria and the entire staff of Mermaid Records have set up shop in a Dublin city centre hotel for a day of mountainous media promotion. Given that the entire staff comprises just herself and her husband, Corkonian musician Kieran Kennedy, they’ve drafted in a couple of clipboard-wielding PR types to assist.
“Mermaid Records is really just us,” the raven-haired Dubliner explains. “We are the actual definition of cottage industry, and our kitchen table is mostly our office! It’s a bit mad, but we feel it’s worth it, I suppose. The songs keep coming so we keep trying to figure out a way of getting them to people.”
While they’ve released a couple of compilations over the years, the label is ostensibly a vehicle to promote her own efforts. Her debut album Charm came out over a decade ago; Sing is the 47-year-old’s fifth solo release. Co-written and produced with Kennedy (who also plays most of the instruments), it’s a near-perfect blend of country, folk, avant-rock and balladry, with well-measured dashes of flamenco rhythms and Celtic, Mediterranean and Appalachian airs.
“I suppose the album took us about two years probably,” she muses. “Although I started writing the first song four years ago. It takes me a while to make albums. Some people write lots and lots of songs I don’t, really. I write a few and then it takes me ages to finish them. I always get to half of the idea. Some songs come really quickly and they’re fully formed, but lots of the time you get a bit of something and then it’s hard to get it to a place that you are happy with it. You’d much rather start new ones rather than finishing off the ones you have.”
In fairness, she has many distractions, not least of which are her four sons – aged from four to 27. “Yeah, apart from the fact that I’m not incredibly prolific or whatever, we have four children so there is the odd meal to be cooked!” she laughs. “They’re all still living with us. The 27-year-old will be gone pretty soon but at the moment we’re all there. I love to have them around so it’s no great hardship. And two of them are adults, so I don’t have to clean up after them or anything.”
As if motherhood wasn’t enough, her parallel career as an actress also takes up a lot of time – occasionally, at least. Having made her screen debut in Alan Parker’s The Commitments in 1991, she has gone on to appear sporadically in further movies, theatrical productions and such hit TV shows as The Tudors, Dexter and Downton Abbey.
Although she’s been quite successful, she still views herself primarily as a musician. Acting is something she does, while singing is something she has to do.
“That’s what I do, yeah,” she affirms. “That’s how I see it, but that’s just because music is a huge part of the fabric of my life. My mother says she can’t remember a time, even when I was a tiny child, when I wasn’t singing. I wouldn’t spend a day without singing even if I’m not gigging or something, just singing to myself or learning a song or listening to music or whatever. Whereas when I’m not acting I don’t think about it. However, it’s not that I don’t enjoy it. It’s another form of storytelling and is very enjoyable.
“But it’s not like I’m turning things down every day or anything,” she continues. “I suppose I am kind of choosy in some ways. I don’t do anything I think is shit. I’m appalled by some of the things I read, how bad they are and how bad the parts for women are. Increasingly it’s getting better. Sometimes I wouldn’t be able to do something because it’d mean that I’d be away for too long. I try and not be away for more than a fortnight. Even gigging, I sort of do guerilla gigging, gig for ten days and then go again for ten days and you’re sort of able to keep it all balanced if you do that. And once again there are some things I wanted that I didn’t get.”
Although most of her acting work has been for the big or small screen, theatre is what really excites her. Unfortunately, it’s also much harder to make a commitment to a play.
“I haven’t done a play for a really long time. That’s just logistics. The last couple of times I’ve been asked, you know you have to make a long commitment of 16 weeks or something, including the rehearsal period, and I always had one or two gigs dotted around so I couldn’t commit. It’s not like you can take a night off. So logistically I haven’t been able to do it. I like it, the live part. It’s like a gig, you get one shot at it and it resolves in the one period of time. I go to the theatre all the time. I find it so incredibly stimulating. The standard in Ireland is just amazing.”
Back to the new album. Easily her most mature, accomplished and confident work to date, Sing does exactly what it says on the tin. Ably showcasing Maria’s vocal and lyrical talents, it features three duets amongst its 10 tracks, with Damien Rice, Paul Brady and John Prine, respectively.
The notoriously reclusive Rice readily agreed to sing on the title track. “I think they all knew that I had chosen the songs particularly for them, for what they could offer for the song. I just knew that ‘Sing’ would sound good with us singing on it together and I sent it to him. So we went out and recorded it.”
Did you know Damien beforehand?
“Yes – it’s Ireland so everybody knows everybody if they’ve been around for any length of time,” she smiles. “I knew that he would listen to it because I know him. But also I know that he and Paul Brady and John Prine are extremely particular about what they do. As are we. And I knew that they wouldn’t agree to sing on anything that wouldn’t move them or didn’t connect with them in some way musically.”
While she’d met the legendary Prine once before, she didn’t know him personally. Even so, he readily agreed to contribute to the lovers’ call to arms ‘Yes We Will’.
“I met him years ago at the Cambridge Folk Festival,” she recalls. “A session started in a bar, we started singing and playing and I could see him over at the bar eyeing us up. Just seeing could we really play and sing, or was there just too much drink taken or what was the situation. So he stood there listening for a few songs then he came over and joined in. He didn’t remember that. That was a really, really long time ago.
“I found a way to send him the song. It was amazing, he listened to it and phoned me one day. I always think it’s the kind of phone call that, if it was in a film, you’d be on the Hill of Tara or in the middle of the ocean, on a spiritual retreat or something. I was in the supermarket! In Superquinn up the road from my house trying to bash chocolate biscuits out of children’s hands and stuff!
“And the phone rings and it’s him. I couldn’t believe it. He said, ‘I love that song’. I think I knew that he would like the sentiment of ‘Yes We Will’ because it’s about staying in love. There are millions of songs about falling in love. Very few about staying in love. I knew that he’d been married a long time as well and thought that he might like the sentiment. He did. He said he was coming to Ireland a few months later so we threw our microphones and stuff into the car and went to his house in Kinvara and recorded with him and it
was amazing.”
She’s been married to Kennedy for almost 25 years, pretty impressive given the myriad temptations of their respective careers. What’s their secret?
“Well, Kieran says the secret of a successful marriage is to be absolutely terrified of your wife!” she guffaws. “So I don’t know about that!”
Paul Brady guests on the Spanish-influenced ‘Hola Luna’. “Paul is very particular about what he does. The interesting thing about him is his voice. I mean he is an incredible guitar and bouzouki player. However, his voice has an exceptional quality. He has quite a high voice and I have a deep voice. I thought the mixture, the texture, of that would be interesting.
“We went to his house once to sing and then he came to us where we were recording as well. It turned into something completely different than I had planned. He took off and started doing this incredible Arabic yodeling. That became the whole thing of the song for me. It totally changed what I’d been thinking and became something new. It’s great to work with other people – they pull something out of you.”
As we speak, Maria is in the middle of a small tour of Irish islands. It’s really a warm-up for a more intense tour of the UK and mainland Europe in the coming months (Sing is her first album to get a release outside of Ireland).
“Physically we don’t really spend much time apart from the kids because it just doesn’t work,” she explains. “For the last few weeks we’ve being trying to have a pathetic attempt of a family holiday which is dragging our children around the country and getting them to help us with gear and sell CDs and things like that. That’s all we could do this year. We didn’t have any other options, so we sort of have three gigs and three days off. It was a bit of a struggle. We were trying to get the swimming in or the leisure and make sure we were building memories for them, summer memories while doing the work. That’s the way it had to be this year.”
While she and Kennedy are quite nomadic by nature, she says that their children keep them grounded. “Doing what we do, trying to make a living from music, certainly does get more stressful as you get older, but I think that’s life in general. You get a bit more fearful about things as you get older and it’s just because you have a family, isn’t it? We’re just total gypos the pair of us. We could easily travel around and live on our wits and eat porridge. You can’t expect your children to do that. They haven’t asked to be born. You have a duty to do your best by them.”
Despite her presumably lucrative acting work, finances are always a struggle for any independent musical artist. The funds to record, release and promote Sing were mostly raised through the PledgeMusic website, where fans helped pay for the album in return for autographed artwork, handwritten lyrics, live performances or – in this case – Maria jumping out of a plane wearing a t-shirt with your name emblazoned on the front.
Nobody signed up for the plane option, which was on offer for €10,000. She insists she would have done it.
“I definitely would have if somebody had paid up, but – fuck! – I’d have been terrified,” she laughs. “Someone did pay for a private gig and we are going to do one of those. Most people paid in advance for the album. There were a few funny different little things. We got special requests from people which we were able to do, which was nice.”
Although she’ll be Sing-ing for the foreseeable future, she’s already planning the next album. Having previously written a collection inspired by the work of Chuck Palahniuk (Mutter was based on his novel Diary), her next project will most likely be based on the writings of acclaimed Irish author Kevin Barry.
“I’ve little bits of ideas that are percolating at the moment, she says. “I’ve been inspired by Barry’s novel, City Of Bohane. I read it a couple of months ago and, oh my god, the characters! And it’s so incredibly vivid and the description of everybody’s clothes! You know they’re wearing these dirk belts, knives…these words some of which are made-up, which you’re sure that you’ve been using or reading forever. The characters are just so vivid to me. Girly, the old woman, is like a Miss Havisham, but so fucked-up. I’ve been really inspired by that and am starting to write songs about them. I don’t know where that’ll go, but I’m quite excited about it.”

Sing is out now on Mermaid Records. Maria Doyle Kennedy plays Vicar St. on September 29.