Flower Of The Mountain

Countless artists have rocked the one-word stage name over the years, from Aaliyah to Zorro (admittedly, not the best singer but nifty with a rapier), and with good reason too. After all, it’s a big job trying to fit Dido Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O’Malley Armstrong on a jewel case, and who’s going to remember that Björk’s second name is Buomundsdottir? There’s just one thing for budding pop stars to remember: if you’re going to go by a single name, make it a good one.

“I always thought my name was weird when I was younger,” 18 year-old singer songwriter Shaefri tells me, “but I quite like it now. I was named after the Sheeffry Hills in Mayo, which absolutely no-one seems to know exist, even the people who live there! My parents changed the spelling of it, because I lived in London for the first part of my life and they didn’t want people calling me Sheeffry!”
“We’ve lived pretty much half and half since I was six,” she adds, promptly confessing her love for her part-time home of Co. Mayo. “It’s a beautiful area,” she beams.
Still, I don’t imagine little Shaefri was too thrilled about the idea of spending her summers in a sleepy Irish village.
“I was really excited, actually,” she says. “When you’re so small it’s so, so magical being over there in the wilderness beside the sea and obviously I’d never really had that living in London, so I suppose I got the best of both worlds.”
She can say that again. Shaefri’s musical upbringing consisted of half Irish folk, half mainstream pop, leaving her to sound a bit like a trad-raised Adele. Does she remember her first taste of Irish music?
“I must have been really small. Dad would play Christy Moore for us and Clannad, so I’ve been listening to ‘Ride On’ from the cradle! I guess it stuck!
‘It probably would have been different if we hadn’t moved,” she reflects. “All the old Irish trad songs are kind of winding stories and I tried that out with my own stuff, not the style of playing but the instruments and the melodies that old folk has. I don’t think that would have happened otherwise.”
That’s not to say that the young vocalist shuns Beyoncé, Amy or artists like sultry newcomer Lana Del Rey. While Shaefri’s debut EP Venture deals primarily in sweet, melodious rock, there’s plenty of pop hooks and R&B flashes on there to suggest that she’s well capable of taming the charts.
“I started with my producer Lance, we took two or three months of just sitting in this little cottage making demos and deciding what we wanted to do. Then we went in and got it down in three days. It was mad but it was fantastic. I loved it!”
An EP in three days? Has Shaefri always been such an overachiever?
“Well, I failed all my music exams!” she laughs. “But I’ve been secretly writing since I was 13, so I’ve had five years of writing my songs and seeing where I wanted them to go. To be honest, the first load of them were shite. There was nothing to them, they were so bad and I wasn’t any good at piano. I just think it takes a lot of time and encouragement from others. Now I’ve got a firmer grip of what I want to do and who I want to be and I think that my writing will change and is changing already because of that.”
The multi-talented teen wasn’t always so keen to share her music with others. In fact, her dad only found out that she was writing songs when he stumbled upon her MySpace page.
“I just hid it from people. I was being really shy and nervous about it. I mean, you get really established musicians saying, ‘Before we release our fifth album, we wanted to kill ourselves because we just don’t know if it was any good…’ You’re so scared to put yourself out there in case people hate it.”
These days, there’s very little not to like about Shaefri’s genre-hopping pop rock. Of course, even 18 year-old virtuosos have off nights…
“At my first gig I got up and started playing ‘Love Games’. I played the first five chords, got through about three words and said, ‘Fuck, that was wrong!’ Started again, the same thing happened and I went, ‘Oh Shit!’ I was so flustered that I just destroyed the rest of the song. I made a joke about it at the end but I was mortified!”
Meh. I’ll bet it happens to Madonna all the time. Meanwhile, the next stop for Shaefri is a full LP, which she hopes to finish by the end of 2012.
“I’ve got about 20 songs on the back burner and I’m writing more at the moment as well. I have a place at university for next September, so the next few months are crucial to see whether I defer it for another year.”
With all the attention she’s been getting recently, you have to applaud the girl for wanting to take things slow.
“Obviously, anyone’ll tell you that they want to be playing the O2 Arena, and I think that’s a good thing to strive for, but for now, I just want to get an album together that I love and that I’m happy with.”
Sounds good to us.

Venture is available now on iTunes. Shaefri heads out on Irish tour in March and April.