Saint Sister: On their debut album, touring and Irish identity

It’s 2pm in Brooks Hotel, and Saint Sister have already been busy. They’re fresh from supporting Hozier at an intimate show in London’s Koko two nights previous. They’ll be off again shortly for an extensive tour in America, before a homecoming show in the Olympia Theatre in October, another homecoming show in Morgan MacIntyre’s native Belfast, then one more (for good measure) in Gemma Doherty’s hometown of Derry. That won’t be the end of it. They’ll be touring throughout Australia, Europe and the UK as the winter kicks in, finishing up just before Christmas.

Is that it? Covered? Ah yes, then the album. Saint Sister on the cusp of releasing their magnificent debut album, Shape Of Silence.

For MacIntyre and Doherty, it wasn’t always apparent where Saint Sister was going to take them. Conceived back in 2014, the collaboration came about when the pair left Trinity College and found themselves without any immediate career direction.

“When we first met, we were relative strangers,” says Morgan. “Our first time playing together, I don’t think we knew whether it was going to be a band, or whether it was just me asking Gemma to accompany me at a gig. We didn’t have a conversation about it, we just naturally came together – then held onto each other for dear life! A lot of it came down to just thinking, ‘Right, I’ve got someone here who’s willing to sit in a room with me, and someone who I can play songs with – so I’m just going to keep doing that.’ That felt like the only purpose at the time.’”

Did they imagine the tours? A Saint Sister album one day?

“We had those dreams and aspirations,” says Gemma. “I’ve been playing music my whole life, but I knew nothing about the music industry or what it takes to actually be a musician, especially when you’re doing it yourself. I hadn’t released music like that before.”

Gemma had a trad background, while Morgan had found success as a solo artist in Belfast and Dublin. When they began Saint Sister, their individual careers seemed to fade out.

“I knew of Morgan as a successful solo artist,” says Gemma. “I was trying to study music in college and sing in choirs, and I was spreading myself very thinly without focusing on anything. I’d been hoping to move into the composition world, but that was intimidating, because I didn’t really know anything about it. When we started playing together, I stopped everything else, every choir I was in, because it just made sense. I took all those influences with me and put it into our music. I said ‘Let’s put all this energy in one place.’”

The result of their efforts has seen Saint Sister emerge as one of the most acclaimed acts in modern Irish music. Their 2015 Madrid EP was alive with possibilities, giving us a proper introduction to their unique atmosfolk sound – encompassing subtle, heart-on-sleeve lyrics, traditional Irish sounds, sparse, haunting electronica and Gemma’s harp-playing.

Flash forward a year and they were being called ‘Best Irish Band’ by the readers of The Irish Times. From there, they were propelled towards a supporting slot with Lisa Hannigan, which saw them tour the length and breadth of Ireland; a place on the bill with The National at Sounds From A Safe Harbour in Cork; various industry events at Eurosonic and SXSW; and major festival appearances in Ireland and beyond. When Hot Press last saw the band, at All Together Now in August, they played in front of possibly their biggest ever audiences. Word was spreading.

ARC OF THE ALBUM

With all the acclaim came the need to release a full body of work. Shape Of Silence was recorded in Kerry, with their long-term co-producer Alex Ryan (of Hozier’s live band) at the helm. Morgan stresses that the “trust” element was crucial with Alex, especially for an album which shows the duo at their most experimental musically, and their most exposed lyrically.

“Then the arc of the album is that of a two person relationship breaking down, with the songs becoming more fragmented in the latter half,” says Morgan. “The first song on the album, ‘The Beginning’, is that feeling of when you first meet someone. You’re light-headed. You’re conspiratorial. You’re talking to them all night and filling in all the blanks getting to know them. And I think that interested us, especially working as a duo, because we were examining what it means to define yourself in relation to someone else. Then that gets broken down as the album goes on, and the ideas become less ‘you and me’ and more ‘you vs me’ or ‘me vs everyone’. They’re much more lonely.”

Most people will be familiar with previous tracks like ‘Tin Man’, ‘Madrid’ and the sublime new releases ‘Twin Peaks’ and ‘You Never Call’. But these songs slide comfortably into the album’s theme. The inside jokes and spritely nods and winks of ‘Twin Peaks’ (“See you later alligator / I am cold-blooded and shy”) give way to suspicion, isolation and the impossibility of knowing someone on later song ‘Madrid’ (“I’m glad I don’t know / Where You Go / Where You Go / When you’re lonely”). The final track, ‘The Mater’, relates a gloomy, final separation over a sparse arrangement.

“That last song is one of my favourites,” says Morgan. “Neither of us would ever shy from emotional vulnerability in our general lives. I’m quite an emotional person. I love to cry. That feeds into what we write about. We don’t intend to write sad songs, but I feel like I’m more creative when that’s how I’m writing. I remember sitting on a bank of grass and all the lyrics for ‘The Mater’ just came out. I feel like with the last song I’m articulating everything that I’ve been trying to articulate throughout the album. That’s when I thought, ‘That’s what I’m getting at. All those notions, they’ve been reaching a head with this.’”

Interestingly, the duo also talk about “yearning for an intangible sense of Irishness” with this album. Both Gemma and Morgan stress that growing up in Northern Ireland – no matter what your background – and moving to Dublin, meant having to confront ideas about identity, culturally and musically.

DIFFERENT BACKGROUNDS

“It’s something that we didn’t really talk about with each other for a long time,” says Gemma. “Then we talked with a friend recently about how we both came from this other place. We grew up with different backgrounds, but there’s something shared there. When I first moved to Dublin, I played a lot of classical music, but I also played a lot of traditional music. That was defining my relationship with music. I’d be doing the trad sessions and the folk sessions and I had this romanticised vision of what Dublin would be. That was a big part of my life for a while. Even when I go home, there’s still that internal struggle of wanting to feel Irish and wanting to feel like something that you’re not. In the North, there’s a different feeling about Irishness.”

“That idea of longing to be Irish and expecting to come to Dublin and it be full of ceilis,” says Morgan. “I had that too. And I felt like if you’re in the North and you’re from a certain background you wear your Irishness on your sleeve. And I felt like I’d be lacking because I didn’t play GAA growing up or anything like that. So I had to make up for time lost. But it wasn’t the case. I had to learn that Irishness isn’t this uniform thing.”

A song on the album, ‘Tir Eile’ (Other World), is possibly the most explicit reference to this idea.

“That song wasn’t necessarily written about being Irish,” says Morgan. “But it’s a very confused song and it’s about what it means to be free. I had a woman named Karen Kirby translate the words of the song into Irish and we chanted them in Irish in the background. With this one we were asking, ‘What does it mean to be free?’ What does it mean to be from the North and have this idea about Irishness and Dublin? What does it mean to have a sense of Irish identity?”

The release of Shape Of Silence is an obvious career highlight for the Saint Sister. Are there are any other moments they look back on particularly fondly?

“Touring with Lisa Hannigan,” says Morgan. “We learnt so much from her and she was generous with her time and advice. It was a baptism of fire. We’d never done a month on the road before, especially with someone we really admired, but she made it all so easy.

“She also taught us a lot about, for example, what it means to be a woman on stage. She navigates that so well. That sense of holding your ground and never annoying people but never being a pushover. And for a while I think the two of us were just so afraid of upsetting people that we’d say yes to everything. But seeing Lisa know herself so much made us realise, you don’t have to say yes to everything. We took all that and learnt from it.”

Shape Of Silence is out now. Saint Sister kick off their Irish tour at the Olympia, Dublin on October 11. For the full list of dates see saintsisterband.com