She Moves In Mysterious Ways

“O come here, you’ve really got to see this!”

Perched prettily on an armchair in the Library Bar of Dublin’s Central Hotel, indie-folk starlet Lisa Hannigan is showing Hot Press a rather colourful picture of herself on her laptop. A still from the video shoot for ‘Knots’, the first cut from her soon-to-be-released sophomore album, Passenger, the yukulelee-wielding singer is barely recognisable, covered as she is from head to toe in thick gooey globs of... brightly coloured paint.
“We shot it in a garden in Dublin the other week,” she explains, laughing at the memory. “One take! Myles O’Reilly directed it and he had all these people throwing paint at me and squirting it out of water pistols. I wound up getting a couple of mouthfuls of poster paint. It tastes a bit like wet chalk.”
As she closes the laptop, she confides that she worried that allowing herself to be splattered with paint in the video might have some unfortunate consequences at future gigs.
“I was thinking at some point – because this is how my brain works – that somebody might throw a can of paint at me when I’m onstage, which on the one hand would be really obnoxious with my nice ukelele that doesn’t cost 20 quid from Waltons, like the one we used in the video, but also at the same time that would be an amazing heckle. I hope I haven’t opened myself up to being pelted just willy-nilly.”
It could become a thing at every gig! It’s knickers at Tom Jones, but it’ll be paint thrown at Lisa Hannigan shows.
“Yeah, watch that frock!” she guffaws. “I’ll just need to a get a proper, paint-designated frock for when it happens.”
Speaking of frocks, this afternoon the chirpy, husky-voiced 30-year-old is wearing a dark, vintage, knee-length, polka-dotted number, with a blue woolen cardigan. Hannigan is a pretty cool dresser (actually, she’s one of those women who’d look great in just about anything), but she’s obviously not a Beyoncé-style dedicated follower of fashion.
“No! I like gear, but I know what suits me. Or I think I know what suits me. I don’t care what’s in fashion at all. If it doesn’t suit me, I won’t wear it, and I’d imagine that Beyoncé’s gear wouldn’t really bring out my best points.”
Do people ever give you free stuff to wear?
Her eyes widen at the thought. “No. No… I would love for people to offer me free stuff. Bring it on! But not as yet, no.”
Staying sartorial for a moment, she’s wearing a comfortable looking pair of scuffed black boots. Manolos are definitely not an option.
“I have absolutely no interest in shoes,” she explains. “All summer I tend to wear bloody boots, proper boots. I have no interest in shoes. It’s unfathomable to me that it’s something that people are interested in. I understand that they can be beautiful things but just… no. What are you at, lads? And €400 pairs? I mean, if it costs as much as your rent, I think that’s a point at which to question what you’re doing. Like, you’re not the old lady that lives in a shoe!”

Actually, Lisa Hannigan is the young lady, who will be living in a bus for the foreseeable future. Just a few days away from the beginning of the promotional tour for Passenger, which kicks off with a show in the El Ray in Los Angeles, she seems happy and excited at the prospect.
It wasn’t always that way. Originally from County Meath, she first came to public attention as the beautiful, breathy vocal foil to then-boyfriend Damien Rice, with whom she sang and toured for many years. When their musical partnership ended, she didn’t waste too much time in self-releasing her solo debut, Sea Sew.
Although that album was critically lauded, went double platinum, and was nominated for both the Choice Music Prize and the Mercury Prize, by her own admission the singer was a little wary about becoming the centre of attention after so much time as a backing singer. A couple of years of more or less solid touring have cured those nerves.
“I think there was definitely a time when I realised how comfortable I felt on stage,” she says. “I realised that, ‘God I haven’t really thought about what I’m going to say at this gig’, or ‘can I think of something funny in the intro to this song’, or that bit was really difficult for me and I thought what will I do if somebody shouts something during the gig?’ – that was the strain for me and I realised that hadn’t occurred to me in ages, and the gig is something that flows quite naturally now.
“That little sidestep into the middle of the stage was a massive distance in reality, and when I realised that I wasn’t afraid of that anymore, that was a big moment. It’s such a nice feeling! Once you get to that point you can really enjoy it, then you can play. But if you’re gripping on by your fingernails then it’s hard. I don’t know how many of the initial gigs I enjoyed, thoroughly, because I was so bloody fraught.”
It helps, of course, that the new album is so good. While she remains fond of her debut, she knows that she’s made a giant leap forward as a songwriter with Passenger.
“Sea Sew was the most honest record I could make at the time,” she admits, “but I look at it today and there’s a certain sense of wanting to appear happy and confident. I wanted it to seem as though nothing bothered me. On this record I made an effort to be brutally honest with myself and I don’t know whether people will listen and realise that. But for me this record is much more honest.”
Sea Sew was recorded and produced in just a fortnight. Incredibly, Passenger was recorded in half that time. Keen to capture as live a sound as possible, she and her band, together with American producer Joe Henry (who counts Elvis Costello, Ani DiFranco, Solomon Burke and Loudon Wainwright III amongst his previous clients), shacked up in Bryn Derwyn studios in Wales and made the record in just seven days. Add a day of strings and horns in London and that was basically it.
“I just don’t have the patience for the two-year recording process,” she says. “People don’t really do that anymore anyway because the money isn’t there, but I just could not be bothered to sit in a room and listen to somebody hit a snare drum 45 times.”
Presumably you’d done a lot of rehearsals and prep before going into studio?
“Well no, we sort of demoed things and we spent a lot of time arranging the record as a band and then I would send those demos to Joe, but intriguingly we didn’t really talk about the sound of the record at all. I suppose there was a trust between us that was unspoken. It was only the night before I went over that I thought, ‘this could really be quite an expensive mistake’.”
While they didn’t all make the final record, she and the band wound up recording more than two songs a day.
“We did a couple a day – and we had a few spares as well,” she explains. “His way of recording isn’t the drummer going in and doing his takes, and then the bassist comes in and does his, and so on. To me, it’s insanely tedious, and patience is not a virtue that I’ve been blessed with. Joe’s way of working is that he wants to capture the sound of us sitting in a room playing it.
“Everyone had a space in the room and we got nice sounds because we took the time to do that, but then we just kind of played all the songs four or five times, and Joe would be sitting on the other side of the glass listening. I think playing it for him gave a focus to it, it wasn’t everyone trying to not mess up their bit and go along with the click, we had none of that stuff. We all just played together to try and make him feel something and create a performance as opposed to trying to make a perfect thing. And we’d play it a few times and he’d say ‘Yeah I think you guys should come in and have a listen’ and then that would inevitably be the take that we would use. It was a pretty tidy process.”
Why record in Wales?
“I wanted us all to go down a rabbit hole together, just let’s go and have this one focus for a week instead of doing it in town. You know, where everyone goes home at the end and goes to the cinema, and goes to a gig, and you just live your life, and it’s your day job. I kind of wanted us all to have this adventure together, so I wanted somewhere we could go and eat and sleep in. Of course, there were money constraints – there was one place in Ireland that we just couldn’t afford – but this place was just 20 minutes off the boat.
“It was recommended to me by my friend David Kosten, who did the Bat For Lashes album there, and I really like Bat For Lashes. It’s in the middle of a national park, a really beautiful old mad creaky place. I just got a good feeling about it and so everybody came and we had our meals together, it was just a really quite cosy experience. And it being a couple of songs a day, there was a lot of red wine and whiskey in the evenings and leisurely lunches. Next time it’ll be done in an afternoon!”
Many of the songs deal with relationships, romantic and platonic, past and present. Of the album’s title, she says, “I think with Passenger I’m thinking about what you carry with you in life, so the record is about all the passengers you take with you I suppose.”
Some of the ideas for the songs began germinating during a trip to Brooklyn.
“Well I thought that I would go there and write loads of songs in the way you imagine would happen, so I went there for a while by myself and ended up not writing anything, but writing it subsequently when I came home. But when I was there, it just seemed ridiculous to be sitting in and noodling on the guitar, so I ended up walking the streets and going to galleries and shows and bloody dancing in the nip, the kind of thing you find in New York.”
You were dancing in the nip? Do tell!
“I was watching the dancing in the nip,” she laughs. “You know, it’s very modern. So I wrote the songs when I got home. I think being by myself for that long, and it not being the most friendly of places made me realise that when you’re on your own, you’re really on your own. People don’t start chatting to you during lunch, they really don’t. It was a very solitary existence but not in a wholly negative way. I’m quite happy pottering around on my own.”

Lisa also visited her mother’s west Cork homeland for inspiration. Still, most of the lyrics were written – or at least started – on the road.
“It’s only the kernels of them that are written on the road,” she corrects, “and maybe I sort of finish them off at home when it’s quiet, but it definitely informed the songs a lot, being away and that sort of weird misty nostalgia that you get when you are away from home. It sort of focuses the mind really on what isn’t there and things from the past and places that are far away.”
The opening track on the record is actually called ‘Home’ (“Home, so far from home/ so far to go/ and we’ve only just begun”). She was inspired to write it after reading the novel Skippy Dies by talented young Dublin author Paul Murray.
“I started writing the song and had the melody and then I was reading Skippy Dies which I just loved. It’s about a boarding school and the boys are 14-year-olds. I found the atmosphere really heavy. He’s such a brilliant writer, and you really kind of have that weird feeling of being a teenager again, that sense of frustration and confusion – and that weird mix of confidence and not knowing anything, the confidence of not knowing anything actually is probably what it is! And that sort of transition, that change of being quite innocent, you do lose something that you don’t get back, that you have to lose in order to go anywhere.
“‘Home’ is sort of about that loss of innocence, and definitely reading that book made me feel that quite keenly. It’s really odd, I’ve never had that happen to me before, reading a book and writing a song from it, it was more the atmosphere that it created. But yeah, I must say that to your man… I’ve never met him, but yeah. Actually, I think they’re making a film of the book. If Neil Jordan wants a song for the soundtrack – call me!”
Most of the songs seem to be about relationships...
“Yeah, I mean they’re all sort of about different relationships and people, some are about friendships and... that sort of thing.” She stops and laughs. “I’m being very cagey, aren’t I? Sorry! I just think you kind of ruin it if you say that this song is about something really mundane that happened, it puts it in this banal little box – it’s just a thing that happened, and then there’s no spark of magic to it. So I don’t really want to go into the specifics because I just think it’s boring.”
Even so, I got the strong impression that ‘Little Bird’ was about the ending of your relationship with Damien Rice (“When the time comes, and the rights have been read/I think of you often, but for once I meant what I said”). She shifts mock-uncomfortably in her seat. “Em… right.”
You’re not going to tell me, are you?
After a pause, she replies, “Well, yes it is, but I don’t know if that illuminates anything about it. It’s a snapshot in time as well. The trouble with songs when they’re about something, is that they’re about something at that time, and people take it as gospel that that’s how you think forever, ad infinitum, which is not necessarily the case. But that one when I wrote it, it was really hard for me to write and really hard for me to sing for a long time, but I think it was important for me to write it. I think I needed to.”
She confesses that it’s probably her favourite song on the album.
“I feel very comfortable with ‘Little Bird’ as a song. I don’t think it’s a mean song or a brutal song or a happy song. It feels quite… quiet.”
Although their romantic relationship had dwindled out some time earlier, her professional relationship with Rice ended in tears when he fired her from his band just minutes before a show in Munich in 2007. A distressed Hannigan fled to the US the following day, and last we heard had refused to speak to him ever since.
Almost two years ago, in an astonishingly brave, honest and revealing Hot Press interview with this writer (conducted in the same room we’re sitting in today, as it happens), an emotional Rice proclaimed his undying love for his former lover and musical muse, stating that, “I would give away all of the music success, all the songs, and the whole experience, to still have Lisa in my life.”
Did you read that interview?
She blushes slightly.
“I did, yes. It was very nice. He said some lovely things so that was nice to read, but weird to read in a magazine. Very odd. So much time has passed, things obviously change over time. But yeah, I did read it. I had to with the amount of people saying, ‘Have you seen this?’”
Did you speak to him afterwards?
“We have been in touch, yeah. But I don’t really want to say any more than that.”
The impression is that they’re reconciled in the complicated sense. Still, she’s wearing a Claddagh ring with the heart pointed inwards, a reference to her relationship with comedian David O’Doherty.
Does she want to talk about it?
“Oh Olaf, I’m a closed book! You know me! I’d rather not talk about that because you know…” She flutters her eyelashes demurely and laughs. She’s a smart and sassy flirt, with a good sense of humour and a lot of class. It’s easy to see why anybody would fall in love with her.

One of the album’s stand-out tracks is a mournful duet with Ray Lamontagne called ‘O Sleep’. Its genesis is an interesting reflection of how a writer like Lisa works.
“I’d just heard Dr. Ralph Stanley’s version of ‘O Death’ on a Robert Plant documentary,” she explains, “and I was really taken by the idea of addressing something intangible. Around the same time, I went for a walk in Sandymount and was singing into my phone. Then I stopped in a café and took one of their paper bags and wrote all the words on the back.”
How did the duet with Lamontagne come about?
“I met him a few times, working with Damien, and he’s really nice. And when I had the duet I thought I would love to work with him, that he’d be at the top of my list. So I asked through people so that he could say ‘no’ easily, but he said ‘yes’. He hadn’t even heard the song and he said ‘yes’, which was very nice. So he came and did it on that one day of overdubs we had, and yeah, it was great. The moment he started singing, it was exactly the way I had heard it in my imagination. His pipes are just insane. Brilliant.”
The comparitively light and humorous ‘Safe Travels (Don’t Die)’ finds Hannigan exhorting an ex-boyfriend to avoid accidentally killing himself (“Don’t swallow bleach out on Sandymount Beach/I’m not sure I’d reach you in time, my boy/Please don’t bungee jump or ignore a strange lump/And a gasoline pump’s not a toy”).
“It was the last one I wrote before recording,” she recalls. “It was only the week before we went recording and my friend just always signs his texts with ‘Safe travels, don’t die’. I had the chorus and melody and, you know those lovely Edward Gorey drawings? These characters with awful deaths befalling them in strange, myriad ways. Somebody gets smothered under a rug, just these wonderful, wonderful…”
Gory deaths?
“Yes, exactly! Just the purity of the sentiment of it, when you care about somebody you just want them to look after themselves. Just don’t get into ridiculous scrapes and japes, please. I care about your well-being! It’s so silly but so simple and pure. It’s not romantic, it’s just quite pure. These sort of gory-like deaths…I had lists of horrible ways, and I had to cut them down.”
Did she ever meet Amy Winehouse?
“I didn’t, no,” she says, shaking her head. “I thought it was terribly sad. It’s just such a waste. It must be really hard if you’re Amy Winehouse to ever get out of that trap you’re in, because even with her having the best of intentions, I’m sure you’re just surrounded constantly by people that want something else, and if you’ve got unlimited funds and means to do that, and an unlimited amount of people that are trying to tempt you into it, it must be an incredibly difficult trap to escape from – and obviously she didn’t. Did you hear her Tony Bennett duet? It’s on his new record. There’s film of them doing it and she just sounds brilliant, and looks brilliant. She’s such a proper singer and there’s not many of them around – it’s a great shame to lose somebody like that.”
Did you see the car crash footage of her last ever concert in Belgrade?
“Yeah. My friend was playing with her, one of the guys who played trumpet on the record, he said he was doing rehearsals and he was a bit nervous about it. So when I saw there was footage up it was like, ‘Oh, I’ll see how Joe’s thing is going’. And... (pulls aghast face)... who knows what went on? I cannot imagine Una (Molloy, her tour manager) letting me go on stage like that. Even after filling me with 14 cups of coffee, she’d be saying ‘This isn’t happening!’ But maybe she felt fine 30 minutes beforehand and then something kicked in. Who knows?”
Has she ever been drunk on stage?
She shakes her head. “I don’t drink before a show. There was one incident years and years and years ago. I think it was in between the gig and the encore, I’d had a puff of a joint, we were in Amsterdam I think, and I remember coming out on stage and thinking (whispers conspiratorially) ‘this is great’ and just singing away, singing away, and then this little thought just sort of floated across my mind thinking ‘Was that note a little bit flat there?’ and then continuing to sing while thinking ‘I think that note was a little bit flat... God, was it flat?... oh no, it was flat...I hope nobody noticed...”’ and still singing and this awful spiral of doom occuring. I couldn’t wait to get off the stage and it put me off it for life. It really did. I don’t know how anyone would even attempt it. It’s not a good combo for me.”
As a self-released artist, is she bothered that everybody steals music through the internet these days?
“I don’t know,” she shrugs. “If you can get something for free instead of having to pay 15 quid for it, especially now when 15 quid is a lot. I wouldn’t give out to anyone for it, although the way that the world has made people buy water is a very interesting thing, how you can add value to something that didn’t have value? If Ballygowan could take over the music industry, we’d all be doing a bit better! (laughs) Obviously, you want to make a living from doing what you want to do, but I’m very well paid by doing it and as long as people keep coming to gigs and things, I’ll be okay.”
Though some artists don’t particularly want to be forced out onto the road...
“I’m sure there are artists who really hate it, but I’m very glad to be on the road, I’m very comfortable there and we’re sort of a home in ourselves, a family as we travel. So I don’t feel as lonely as I probably would have before.”
Thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, at least it’s easier to stay in touch when you’re away from your family and friends.
“Yeah. I do all that. I quite like the old Twitter. It took me ages. I had no idea what people were going on about, but it’s nice. There’s something quite natural about it, bizarrely, isn’t there? It’s like people in a bar, just sort of chatter. I had a moment there last week where I thought I had made a terrible error. James McMorrow had tweeted saying, ‘Just listening to the new Lisa Hannigan record’ and I sassily tweeted back saying ‘Oh I hope you like it James’ and then in brackets, ‘ALL OF THE SONGS ARE ABOUT YOU!’ and then he didn’t write back for nearly three hours. And he had loads of other tweets in that time. And I just thought ‘Oh my god…’ but he sassily replied eventually, but yeah that was a hairy moment. How much sass can Twitter take?”
It’s all about the tone...
“Exactly. Especially if you’ve got Irish people and American people and UK people - it’s a very different tone that everyone uses, and it’s difficult to get irony across anyway, especially if people aren’t necessarily expecting it. I do quite like it, though. Once James wrote back to me, I relaxed and felt alright. That was my first dipping my toe into internet sass, and it sort of worked!”
It’s almost time for Passenger to take off. Is Lisa looking forward to heading to the US this weekend? She claps her hands and laughs gleefully.
“Yes! Actually, I hope to be doing some recording with T Bone Burnett. The Chieftains have their 50th anniversary coming up, amazingly, and I think I’m singing a song with them, and T Bone Burnett is doing their record, so I’m kinda losing my tiny mind about that a bit! And then we’ve got like 17 gigs I think. I’m all over the shop.”
Well, safe travels – don’t die!
Lisa Margaret Hannigan, an indie-folk starlet who’s soon to blossom into an international star, smiles broadly.
“Thank you! I’ve had a few people say that to me recently. It’s quite nice.”

Passenger is out now on PIAS.