Sorcha Richardson: "One of the best things I ever did was move to New York – and the next best thing I did was move back to Ireland"

Not long after topping the Irish Independent Albums Chart with her second album, Smiling Like An Idiot, Sorcha Richardson – while driving her partner’s sister, Ellen, to the train station – was faced with the question that very few artists in those early, nebulous stages of a new project want to hear: “So, how’s the album-writing going, Sorcha?”

Ellen proceeded to point out that the singer-songwriter’s first album – 2019’s Choice Prize-nominated First Prize Bravery – was shaped by a time when her “life was changing loads… with leaving New York, and moving back to Dublin.” When writing Smiling Like An Idiot, meanwhile, she had “just started dating someone new”, while the country was still in and out of lockdowns.

“So Ellen was like, ‘Now with this album you’re living in Kerry, and you’re in a very steady relationship – so what is there to write about?’” Sorcha recalls. “And the whole way home, I just kept thinking about that.

“Sometimes you don’t have control over what you write about.”

The interaction ultimately inspired ‘Ellen Forever’, one of the stand-out tracks from the Dublin-raised artist’s new album, Draw The Outline. Following a period of burn-out, the project grew out of a desire “to reconsider how I was writing music,” Sorcha says.

“I toured Smiling Like An Idiot quite a lot,” she tells me. “I had just moved to Kerry, and I spent more time in America that year than I did Kerry. When I’m touring, I have to move into a very extroverted version of myself – and I’m more of an introvert. So after two years of that, I was eager to just hide away for a second.

“I wanted to reconsider the types of songs I was writing,” she continues. “I think I was searching for stillness in the music, because life was feeling so hectic.”

Having time to decompress in West Kerry proved a crucial part of that process.

“It was the first time in a long time that I’d spent a lot of time with myself,” she notes. “I wrote most of the first album in New York. The second album I wrote in Dublin, but still in a socially-intense time. In a city, there’s just so many people – there’s an endless conveyor belt of anecdotes and stories. Not that that doesn’t exist in the countryside, but mine is certainly a quieter life now than when I lived in New York.

“In that quiet, something else rises to the surface – this introspective thing that you’ve never really allowed yourself to hear clearly before.”

Still, she found the album “hard, at times, to write.”

“I would spend all day in my little home studio, and get quite frustrated, and not make a lot of progress,” she recalls. “But then, because I was in Kerry, I would walk outside, down to the beach – and accidentally write four verses. A lot of it was done that way.

“The landscape is so inspiring to me,” she adds. “There was a feeling that I would get, when I would get back to Kerry – and a feeling I would get when I would go on these really long walks or drives by myself. I was trying to capture that in the music of the album.”

Credit: Rich Gilligan

To bring that vision to life, she worked closely with Chris W. Ryan – who, as well as being a member of Robocobra Quartet, has produced records for the likes of Just Mustard, NewDad, Cardinals, and Chalk.

“He’s such a great collaborator,” Sorcha remarks. “I met him a few years ago, when we were both at SXSW. I was trying to find a producer who lived in Ireland that I really wanted to work with. The producer who I made my first two albums with lives in LA – and it’s not super convenient for your collaborator to be across the world! But Chris is class.

“We made the album in December, right in the lead up to Christmas,” she continues. “We were in Black Mountain Studios [in Co. Louth], and it was really foggy and really quiet. And everyone I knew was out doing a pub crawl somewhere. That was kind of perfect – to feel like there was a party going on, and I wasn’t at it. It fit the theme!”

Loneliness and isolation may be a recurring theme on the album, but Sorcha tells me that the community of Irish musicians that surrounds her also serves as a major source of inspiration.

“Some of my favourite albums of the last couple of years have been Irish albums,” she states. “I love the Dove Ellis album, the last Fionn Regan album, and the Maria Somerville album. Ellie O’Neill too. It’s really inspiring to be surrounded by great songwriters and musicians, in a scene that is really supportive and collaborative. I actually wrote with SOAK for two songs on the album. It’s nice to have friends around who you can just send stuff to – and then you end up playing shows together.

“Even seeing The Scratch selling out the Iveagh Gardens recently – that’s class,” she adds. “They’re friends of mine, and I’ve been following them for years and years. It’s so cool and inspiring, when you see your peers achieve things like that. We’ve a lot to be proud of.”

Having moved to New York after secondary school – and spending the guts of a decade there – Sorcha says she’s “really, truly happy to live in Ireland” these days.

“One of the best things I ever did was move to New York – and the next best thing I did was move back to Ireland,” she smiles. “I loved living in New York, but I found living in America very difficult. And you don’t get New York without America!

“It’s a difficult place to live, if you want to be an artist or a singer-songwriter,” she continues. “My drummer who tours with me in America is from California, and he couldn’t believe on our last tour that we had this Culture Ireland funding.”

While in New York, Sorcha studied creative writing at The New School. While that background has clearly carried into her songwriting, could she see herself returning to the fiction world?

“I haven’t written a single short story since the last piece of homework I had to hand in for college!” she laughs. “I honestly find it so much harder than songwriting. It seems like the rules are much stricter – things need to make more sense. And I’m just addicted to music. I was never that way about fiction. I mean, I like it – but I think if you’re going to do it, you’ve got to be obsessed with it.”

Her obsession with songwriting, thankfully, has gone nowhere – with Sorcha revealing that new ideas are already forming in the wake of Draw The Outline.

“I’ve been writing quite a bit,” she nods. “I think making this album unlocked something. I felt a bit stuck before it, and I wanted to shake things up. I feel like I was able to do that – and it’s actually allowed me to write in a new way, that feels a bit freer.”

• Draw The Outline is out now. Sorcha Richardson's headline tour brings her to Empire Music Hall, Belfast (November 4); Gleneagle Club, Killarney (5); The Academy, Dublin (6); and The Savoy, Cork (8). See her full list of tour dates here.