NYC Woman

It’s been a hectic eight years for Laura Izibor. Since she won the RTÉ 2fm song contest in 2004 at age 15, the Dubliner raised on a diet of Aretha Franklin, James Brown and Phil Lynott, has won a Meteor award, scored a major record deal, released a hugely acclaimed album, Let The Truth Be Told, moved from Dublin to New York and then to London where she is now based. And then there was that acting/singing role in the US hit TV series One Tree Hill. Little wonder she felt the need to take a break.

“I took a lot of last year off,” she explains, on a visit to her home town. “From the outside it might look strange to do something like that but I started out very young and from around the age of 16 I was constantly touring, opening for people and doing various gigs all over the place. I left school quite young and it has been full-on ever since. I felt really worn down by the end of the promotion for the album. We had to do it in so many different territories and in America especially, they bloody work you until you can’t work any more.”
Her social life suffered the most during that period. “I felt I’d missed out on having a bit of a normal routine, like being able to hang out with friends at the weekend. I really missed all of that. Don’t get me wrong, I did loads of things that any 18 or 19-year-old would think, ‘Yeah, that’s deadly’ but ironically I craved something else. So last year, I got to do that, which was mainly spending time with family and friends.”
The time-out also yielded some new songs. Laura’s latest release, The Brooklyn Sessions Vol. 1, is an EP featuring three new tunes recorded in the hip New York borough with her touring band. “I got some great new material. It took it back to basics with just me and the piano,” she enthuses. “Moving out of New York was the best thing I could have done for myself and definitely the best thing for me musically. Because when you’re in the pit of it all, people aren’t shy of telling you who you should be and what kind of sound you should make. And at the time I didn’t realise that I was a real people-pleaser. I thought I had my own mind but it was really affecting me – all these opinions. I had to get out of there.”
Arguably, her best-known song is ‘Shine’ which has featured in several radio ads and drawn three quarters of a million hits on YouTube. “Funnily enough, in America ‘From My Heart To Yours’ was the hit. For the rest of the world it was definitely ‘Shine’. It’s gotten so much airplay even members of my own family would say, ‘Look sis, you know I love you dearly but I’m so bloody sick of hearing that song.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I know, I’d be sick of it too’ (laughs). The great thing about that song is when you do a festival or something where you don’t have your own fans, once that comes on everyone erupts and says, ‘Hey I didn’t know her but I know that song’. I see it on the royalty statements. My mam looks at them and goes, ‘Wow, they play it in Brazil!’”
As a matter of interest, what on earth do they make of a black Irish girl singing American soul in the US? “They didn’t know what to make of me sometimes,” she laughs. “Often at gigs the first words I’d speak on stage would be, ‘Yes, they do have black people in Ireland’ and everyone would laugh and it would kinda break the ice. But it was cool. I was a novelty I suppose.”
Her acting career was, she says, a surprise, the One Tree Hill thing happening out of the blue. “I really didn’t think I could do it. I’m not an actress but when they let me sing one of my songs I thought ‘Why not?’. It was a great experience and it brought me a whole other audience from all around the world.”
Does she have any future plans to appear on the small or even the big screen?
“I have an agent in the States and she’s always sending me stuff. After One Tree Hill I realised that you have to be really excited about doing something. I’d love to do an Irish film actually, something independent and quirky. The bigger glossy things in America are more limited, in that they always want you to do it their way. Even something like Intermission would be a lot of fun, but who knows?”

The Brooklyn Sessions Vol. 1 is out now on Atlantic Records.