Hotpress Meets Nina Hynes

Nina Hynes’ latest project, Dancing Suns, sees her collaborating with partner Fabien Leseure to create a musical neverland. She conceived of it as a folk story about the end of the world. Intrigued? You should be.

Several years ago Nina uprooted to Berlin and became a new mother in a strange city.
“Initially I just stepped away from the world. I guess because I had Caia [her five-year-old daughter],” she explains. “We had moved to Berlin and Fabien started up a recording studio and was working very hard so I was pretty much on my own. We didn’t have many friends and I didn’t speak German. But I was very happy. I was jumping on trains not knowing where I was going with Caia in a sling, getting out at random stops and exploring. Right as she was born I started to write the songs that were on the album, usually when she was asleep. They had this very quiet feeling.”
Recorded in various locations over a year-and-a-half the album features 27 musicians and a choir.
“It kind of grew from the initial vision that we were going to keep it much rawer,” she says. “The idea I had was for me to sing songs and have it very live with just Sean [Carpio – musician and arranger] and Fabien, Fabien playing piano and Sean playing drums and then having a choir. As we recorded stuff we started to become more elaborate.”
And how did Nina find working with her partner Fabien?
“Terrible! Very hard!” she laughs. “He is a perfectionist and over the years I have become a lot more easygoing. Well no, maybe I’m not that easygoing actually! Compared to him I am! We are both very passionate. We work very differently. We did have a lot of tensions over the two years. Initially it was my record and he was going to co-produce. It became a collaboration when he started coming up with all these amazing ideas musically. So it was very much like being in a band.”
Nina, like so many other artists these days, chose to go the FundIt route. However she needed a little prompting/shoving from another über-talented lady.
“Laura Sheeran invited me to one of her gigs in Berlin and she was asking me about my writing,” Nina explains. “She told me I should do FundIt, she had done the Pledge thing. I was like, ‘Yeah right who would pay for my album?!’ I didn’t think anyone would care or notice. But she was so encouraging. I did it and it worked.
“It took me quite a while to get it together because I was too scared. I didn’t have the confidence. It was like shouting, ‘Invest in me and my ideas!’” she adds. “But when the funding came through it felt like the end of It’s A Wonderful Life. They do care! There was a great feeling of positivity and joy because people were so enthusiastic. It really blew my mind.”
One of the locations used to record the album was a ballroom in Celbridge owned by Marina Guinness of the famous brewing clan.
“It has a massive old ballroom. Other albums have been recorded there. It's a perfect room for acoustic instruments. The room sounds completely gorgeous. The house has an amazing atmosphere too. Marina tends to invite all the right people around and it creates this really interesting place to be in.”
Over the years Nina has released many lauded confections including Creation in 1999, 2002’s Staros, Really Really Do in 2007 and various EPs. Impressively her song ‘Beauty’ was covered by Jane Birkin on a compilation curated by French composer Hector Zazou.
"He's worked with loads of amazing singers like Laurie Anderson and Lisa Germano,” she enthuses. “He got me to write three songs for the album. He got Jane Birkin to cover one and Melanie Gabriel, Peter’s daughter to cover one and I sung the other one. It was great!”
In a live capacity Nina also keeps good company, having shared stages with Roxy Music, Terry Callier, Smog, Stereolab, Cat Power, Julee Cruise, David Gray, Glen Hansard and Damien Rice amongst others. So what was it like warming up the crowd for Bryan Ferry?
“That was in the Point; I played on my own and it was one of the most enjoyable gigs I did,” she remembers. “I played for about 30 minutes. It was a huge audience but they were really respectful and there was great feedback. It was a crazy gig because I'd broken up with my last boyfriend that day and had spent all night crying, so I was kind of drained which was a good thing as I wasn’t nervous. I got to meet Bryan and he was really nice and said he enjoyed the set.”
Looking to the future Nina wants to start work on a film script based on the album and notch up some music placements to enable her to tour.
“I want us to be able to do proper concerts with an orchestra, that’s my dream for the year,” she concludes. “I’d love to do that in cities all over the world, but I always dream big!”

Goldmines is out now. Nina Hynes plays the Pepper Canister Church, Dublin on March 23.