Independent woman

Following the staggering success of ‘A Women’s Heart’ and the veritable industry that it spawned in the early ’90s Eleanor McEvoy spent most of the decade trying to shed the folksy image the song conveyed. After being signed to Geffen Records by Tom Zataut (who also signed Guns & Roses), McEvoy and her band embarked on a heavy touring schedule that repeatedly brought her across the States and Europe. Albums like her eponymous debut on Geffen, the appropriately named follow-up What’s Following Me and and last year’s Rupert Hine-produced Snapshots, showcased McEvoy as a contemporary rock songwriter and performer to be reckoned with.

Successes followed, notably with songs like ‘Precious Little’ which was a top ten radio hit in the US, ‘A Glass Unkissed’ from the same album was featured in ABC Television’s Clueless while another song, ‘Whisper A Prayer To The Moon’ was featured in the Pierce Brosnan film, The Nephew.

However, McEvoy didn’t make the huge commercial breakthrough demanded by a multinational company like Sony and she parted company with the label last year. McEvoy’s fourth album Yola is released on her own label, and she plans to licence it for release in Europe and The States. About to embark on a 17-date tour around Ireland she speaks in positive terms about gaining more control of her career.

“Don’t get me wrong there are fantastic things to be said for being signed to a big label,” she says. “They’ve given me the money and resources to work with great producers and great musicians and to record in beautiful buildings with lovely furniture. I was lucky, I never had the archetypal A & R nightmare with some guy coming into the studio saying ‘I don’t hear a single there’. I’ve never had that kind of interference.

“But there is another side to it that is so immoral,” she continues. “The fact that they own your master-tapes even ten years down the road is so wrong. And the long delays are another thing. The quickest I could make an album on a major label was like every three years. I would lose my reason if I had to continue like that. This album was started on 1st March and it was in the shops in 4th May.”

McEvoy reckons she’ll have few problems getting her new album heard to a world-wide audience, even without the might of a major behind her. “David Gray is a classic example. He was in exactly the same situation as me. He made three albums for multi-nationals which got him nowhere then he does it on his own and it’s a huge seller.”

Yola is inspired by the time she spends in Wexford where she has a home “It’s a Wexford focused record. When I think of an album like, say, Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks, I think of the music and then I think of the cover. When you’re the artist you think of say, Ridge Farm Studios or wherever it was recorded. Yola was a dialect common in South East Wexford in the nineteenth century. I used to go for long walks and I noticed some signs written in this strange language. I asked some of the locals and they said that it was ‘Yola’ a kind of blend of Middle English with Anglicised Irish.”

Meanwhile McEvoy plans to tour less frenetically than she has in the past.

“We’ll stagger the release over the next few months. It’s coming out here, in the UK and then the US. We’ll just take it stage by stage. I’m in a weird position at the moment, I’ve never done that much work in Ireland and now I’m doing 17 dates which is the biggest tour I’ve ever done in Ireland.”

Yola is distributed in Ireland by RMG. Eleanor Mc Evoy is touring Ireland throughout May