Willow talk

With her slim build, long straight hair, quick darting eyes and rapid-fire way of talking, you can tell Jenny Lindfors has a mad metabolism and a brain with a lot going on.

Sure enough, the first album by this Dubliner-with-a-Swedish-dad exudes the kind of emotional intelligence and high vibration you’d expect from the confident and articulate singer-songwriter who created it.
Featuring 12 excellent songs in the folk-pop vein and produced by Lindfors herself, When The Night Time Comes is beautifully modulated, with the kind of well-timed shifts in tempo that create a journey for the listener. Straight-up vocals, guitar, banjo, percussion and a smattering of well-placed cello and piano are the record’s simple ingredients; no fancy decorations are required to bolster Lindfors’s musical talent and songwriting skills.
Lindfors describes what she herself wanted to avoid with her first album.
“I’ve been in so many situations where I’ve seen singer-songwriters and I’ve enjoyed the intimacy and then I go and get the album, but when I listen to it I feel completely alienated by it because of the production.
“A lot of the songs on the album are the ones I’ve been gigging around Ireland for years, the ones people really like. ‘Fearful Things’ is my own favourite. It was about a really hard time in my life. One of my favourite things about being a songwriter is that no matter how bad the situation is, something good can always come from it in the form of a song.”
Lindfors tends to write about human relationships, but doesn’t limit herself to the romantic-love variety.
“I find that human relationships are so fascinating and complex and can really fuck things up,” she says. “They can be very blind and very stupid and they can also be incredibly beautiful. But there’s a lot of stuff on this album too about letting go and not caring what people think.”
Lindfors cut her teeth musically in her teens, playing in Dublin-based bands for years before moving on to develop her own work. She’s part of a musical collective called The Happy Gang, a loose grouping of eight or nine musicians who pool talent and resources and generally hang-out, support and inspire each other.
“I love the collective,” Lindfors says. “I feel really lucky to have them. We’re flirting with the idea of all moving somewhere in Europe together in about a year’s time.
“A lot of the people in the group would be extremely spiritual, then a lot would be extremely cynical, and that’s what makes it work as a collective, because there’s all sorts of different balances. And we’re really, really close, and it’s very obvious when someone’s ego gets the better of them, and we all make each other aware of it and check each other.”
Which are you, spiritual or cynical?
“I’m split down the middle. For a long time I was very cynical and now I’m trying to make it more realistic. You kind of come in and out of it; you can have months where you’re feeling unbelievably connected to everything; you’re not eating meat and you’re not drinking and you’re levitating in your seat, and then sometimes you’re just on the piss and hating everything. You go through cycles.”
In the opening guitar of ‘Night Time’, the first track on Lindfors’s album, Neil Young is immediately present. It sets you up for what’s to follow.
“You can hear that real West Coast folk stuff coming out in my music,” says Lindfors; “Crosby Stills and Nash, bands like Spirit, but mainly I suppose growing up it would’ve been Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. Really jangly harmony pop from the ‘60s I loved, adored. Now I listen to everything from The Ramones to Patti Smith to Miles Davis… I love everything now. So I’m broadening out of that sound per se, but at the same time, that is the thing that formed me when I was 11 and 12, and learning G, C and D. It was all folk stuff, that real gentle stuff.
“I’m writing and recording my next album at the moment,” adds Lindfors, “and I’m getting really into rhythm and percussion. I’m taking drumming lessons, learning basic Afro-Cuban ryhthms. It’s really hypnotic and meditative. So that’s a whole new world that’s opening up to me. I’m getting really into African music. Ridiculously so. I really want to go there. That’s high on the priority list.”
When The Night Time Comes is out now on Penatacle Records.