Lucia Evans on her new single 'Holding Onto The Fire': “We all have the capacity to forgive, but it’s human nature to still want an apology"

During the course of our conversation, Galway-based Zimbabwean singer Lucia Evans feels like a distant though immediate friend, as though her voice is a comforting hand on my shoulder. Sporting new platinum blonde hair, she takes her time to respond, never too eager to say just anything for the sake of having something to say.

“To make a long story short, I had been through a few tough breakups,” she starts without hesitation when I ask about the inspiration behind her upcoming single, ‘Holding Onto The Fire’. “I think whenever you’re misrepresented in a way and you don’t get an apology, there seems to be no other thing left that you can say to the person…there’s something about an apology that brings closure. Without it, there’s no closure, so you’re just sort of left hanging.”

The singer-songwriter’s voice is golden, saturated with warmth. On the track, her vocals evoke a hypnotic quality. She pulls you gently into a liminal space where a sense of honesty shines through.

“I mean, I wrote it in November of 2020, so in the depths of Winter in the middle of the pandemic, contemplating life as you do. It just really wrote itself, and I know that’s a desperate clichè but within an hour it was all done. It’s funny, I was listening to the original voice note last night and I thought, ‘Oh my god, I can hear myself trying.’ Trying to play the piano and sing and not cry all at the same time.”

Listening to her talk, it’s not surprising she’s an artist capable of writing such eloquent lyrics in the shape of a heartbreak ballad. Warm and amiable, she’s hardly the sullen narrator of a lyrical, woman-wronged saga.

“I’m really lucky to be in a beautiful relationship now, but it’s funny because I wrote that song after I had met him, which was so weird. I was like, ‘Oh God, this doesn’t jive at all with current life,’” she laughs. “But I guess in that moment, I was questioning whether I was ever going to recover from all of that stuff and the reality of the situation is it’s a moment in time. Like any song, it represents a particular period. And then you get to do a bird’s-eye view and realise yeah, looking back, that sucked. But it’s all going to be okay.”

There’s an element of wistful hope to Evans’ musical composition, which she also wrote herself. “I think it’s sad, but I suppose living on the other side of it, I can say that yes, there is hope.”

She lands on the irony of the creative process: distilling temporary feelings as you transmit them into a piece of time that will live beyond the moment it's born at. It’s a strange art form, producing eternal touchstones out of our inanely human emotions.

For Evans, songwriting was a remedy of sorts. Creating a song about the wounds leftover from a painful experience helped her to find some semblance of closure. “It was super cathartic. When I heard the first mix a few weeks ago, I felt the exact same again and all of those emotions came up. But it gets easier. This is the thing: it gets easier over time,” she tells me, seeming to know what people around her need to hear. “It is a form of therapy, in a sense, deep-diving.”

Her natural empathy extends into her love for performing live, which the singer has continued to do around Ireland since her rise to fame in the early ‘00s. “There’s something about eyeballing an audience and getting that immediate feedback. Sometimes, the challenge is in persuading people to believe that you’re really on their side and there’s no degree of separation,” she says.

“At the end of the day, we are communicating. I love the idea of being able to communicate as opposed to commanding an audience. There’s a difference, there’s such a difference.”

She laughs openly, without concern, when I ask her what made her move to Ireland from Zimbabwe, where she was born and raised. She tells me a quick story: it all started when she was in a cabaret girl band. “We used floppy discs for the backing tracks – this is how old I am!” she jokes.

After meeting a friend in the band from Ireland, Evans took off and ended up in Galway – and never left. Well, not really. “What’s quite funny is, I started in Galway City and I’ve become more rural. I never thought that would be the case because I thought I was a city girl who loved the hustle and bustle! But there’s something about being out in nature that is really conducive to writing and having good headspace. I love it out there.”

Like most young people who move to a foreign city, she might have been looking for something. Something she found in the city’s music. “I kind of landed and thought, okay, I need to sing. That’s all I want to do. At the time, there were so many live bands in Galway but very few had females fronting so I ended up kind of falling into a jazz band – don’t ask me the name,” she warns, half-joking.

“It was a baptism of fire because it’s that whole system of not looking for something, maybe hearing it, but not paying attention to it until you have to.”

When she went on the Irish singing contest You’re A Star in 2006, a younger, uncertain Lucia Evans could never have imagined the outcome. “I didn’t want to do it. I had auditioned years before, and was super young. The feedback wasn’t super positive, so I figured I must not have been meant to do this,” she reveals. Her ex-husband convinced her to take a second leap, and she agreed to audition once more under a single condition: he couldn’t tell anyone.

“Because if I auditioned and fell flat on my face,” she thought, “nobody would know. I could come back to my little environment and feel safe again.”

Her words are a testament to the irony of fate. I wonder what would have happened if she had listened to the people who made her feel like music was something she should steer away from, rather than driving directly into the possibility of a collision.

Her television and live performances initially drew in a stream of lasting success, with close collaborations from artists like Sharon Shannon, whom she still works with regularly. In 2013, Evans was selected as the lead vocalist for Heartbeat of Home, a blended dance show which toured the U.S., Canada and China.

In 2015, divorce led to the singer-songwriter taking a break from the music industry. Which didn’t last long, as soon after Evans took to the stage with Irish country music star Nathan Carter to perform for the Pope. Now, after collaborations on projects with other artists throughout the years, she’s ready for the navel-gazing process of putting out something of her own.

“It was always music. Always,” she tells me. “I come from a generation where you grew up encouraged to have another plan if you were someone with artistic passions. That might still be the case today, but it’s something I tried my best to run away from.”

In the days leading up to her single release, I ask about her ‘normal’ routine. “It’s that constant battle for independent artists between the seasons when you’re creating and then the seasons where you flip the thing on its head and look at the business side,” she answers. “That’s really where we’re at.”

She always returns to music to keep her grounded through it all, though. I ask her about her current rotations, and she gets a little giddy sharing her love for Laura Mvula, Janelle Monae – “She is off the chain” – and Emily King, who she says would be her dream duet partner. “‘Remind Me…’ That song is always a happy place for me.”

She’s confident and poised, but that’s not something Evans needs to hear from me or anyone else. There’s a clear line between the doubtful young singer who stepped up to audition for a televised singing contest – not once, but twice – and the self-reliant force she is today.

“There’s a very different woman presenting her art at this particular point,” she admits, not only referencing her new hair.

Lucia Evans is no amateur in the art of waiting for inspiration to strike rather than forcing it to come up before it's ready. Though her discography is a quick flip-through, she views her work as a collection of moments in time. Now, she’s hinting at the completion of an era.

“There is a body of work,” she confirms, then retracts. “I am torn between doing an EP and then a full album, or just doing a whole album. I think because I’m old school, it will be a whole album with a few releases before then.”

However, she’s absolutely certain about wanting to get back out on tour.

“I’m excited at the prospect of people seeing that I write my own music, I arrange my own music. It’s a bit of a balancing act for me. It’s about not being afraid to be authentic, showing up as who I am, really, even though there’s mad blonde hair involved and sometimes some crazy clothes.”

Lucia Evans' new single, 'Holding Onto The Fire,' is out May 27. The track was mixed by Cian Synnott of Windmill Lane and mastered by Richard Dowling at WAV Mastering, Limerick.