pages of the reconstruction
Some folk crow about artistry, others are too busy doing to waste time talking. In conversation, Julie Feeney delivers a line from a one-man show about the Kerry-born Antarctic explorer Tom Crean who, suffering from frostbite, with bits of his body turning black and threatening to fall off, was compelled further into the icy wastes by a vision of his mother barking: “Get on with it!”
This becomes a running joke and motif of our talk in the Odessa Club one Tuesday afternoon in May: ‘Get on with it!’ delivered up close and in your face, like a possessed Peig Sayers. The effect is startling.
Feeney, who looks a bit like she could play the lead in a version of Medea scripted by Beckett and filmed by Derek Jarman, has made getting on with it into an industry as well as an art. A multi-instrumentalist ex National Chamber Choir vocalist, composer, “movement actor”, model, lecturer, student of psychoanalysis and possessor of three Masters Degrees, she’s currently scoring a piece for performance by a Dutch classical ensemble, while preoccupied with dozens of details about the packaging and presentation of her video for the single ‘Love Is A Tricky Thing’ and its parent album ‘pages’.
Brightly lit but intimate and accessible, ‘pages’, the follow-up to the Choice Music Prize-winning debut 13 Songs, is a wee masterpiece. It also differs from its predecessor in that it makes good use of articulate but direct speech of the heart. The words were written in the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, the artists’ retreat in Annaghmakerrig, Newbliss, Co. Monaghan. She later recorded all the vocals in her house, and conducted the orchestral parts in a six-hour session at the Irish Chamber Orchestra studio in Limerick. That’s lot of pressure for one day’s work.
“I don’t know why I always put myself in an exposed place,” she says. “Maybe you free yourself from the shackles, running away to the edge. It is kind of weird to have the whole thing pinned on six hours. But you see, you have to, cos it’s eight grand, and that’s it, under your fingers. When you record an orchestra in a day… my engineer said it was somebody had taken out a bag of tricks and there was like a dove flying – all these things causing him great problems.”
Feeney says she “thought herself to death” while conceptualising the new record, but one hears little overthinking in these complexly arranged but simply written, moving songs.
“You’re right,” she concedes, “what I wanted to do was take out all the thinking, and make it very raw in one way. I know what you mean – it’s not brain music. I wanted to make them useful songs. I really wanted people to be able to relate to what I was saying, and I really did not want me to be in it. I wanted to say, like, ‘God, I’m really thirsty,’ and for someone to go, ‘Yeah, I know exactly what that’s like.’ And I suppose through all the six weeks of going through the words, I wanted to take out anything that was indulgent. I have this picture of all the pages…”
She takes out her mobile phone and selects an image of her desk in Annaghmakerrig. For all the chaos of the creative process, it looks as ordered as a medieval calligrapher’s nook.
“I didn’t do the social thing in there at all,” she says. “I’d do these really intense stints of starting at three in the afternoon and I’d go until maybe 11 or 12 the next day and sleep for a few hours. I had my own time clock, and I wasn’t interested in meeting anyone. Lovely people, probably really fascinating, but it just wasn’t what I was there for.
“But most of the orchestrations came after. I always start with manuscript, with ideas, write them all out using Tonic sol-fa. So I had collections of musical motifs, some of them were fully orchestrated, and I had the words that I’d filtered out of all this random stuff, categories of thoughts, so it was like: apples, oranges, black shirts, red boots, earring, hand, hand on mouth, long hair, coffee. And I found that, ‘Wow I’d a lot to say about coffee there. And a lot to say about earrings. And glasses of water. And I’d nothing to say about biscuits. God, I thought I thought lots about biscuits but I don’t…’”
There’s a wonderful quote variously attributed to Karl Weick, WH Auden and EM Forster: “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?”
“That actually sums up the whole thing. I wanted to know what I had in there. So I ended up tearing up all these pages to put them into different piles, rewrote them into little prose essays, and then I discovered, ‘Actually you’re not that profound at all – you’ve only been talking about X amount of subjects!’”
But they’re important subjects. The songs on ‘pages’ are warm but pragmatic. They also evoke the anti-romantic idea of the artist as a creature of service. In short, these songs have a job to do.
“That really is the thing,” Feeney says. “A few times in your life you might get this spiritual kind of thing, it was a feeling that I got at the beginning of 2008, that I wanted to be good to other people. And it sounds really weird and stupid to say it, but I wanted to just comfort people instead of being annoyed about them, and I don’t know where it came from, but I felt compelled to express this.”
Hence songs like ‘Grace’ and ‘Impossibly Beautiful’ that celebrate imperfect beauty over the idealised version, that praise ordinary love over impossible romance, and ultimately, make the listener feel less alone.
“I wanted that, yeah. I touched on it on the last album but I didn’t know where it was coming from. And luckily it was tested in 2008, because personally I was very challenged, something that we all go through, and I was like, ‘Hang on now, if you have this grace and you’re going to be great to everybody and you want to give all this, put your money where your mouth is. What do you think now?’ So that actually is the third song: ‘What good is grace if I don’t use it?’ It’s not just a hat you can wear. It can be really hard.”
Presumably, just as old Leonard came down from Mount Baldy bearing the tablets of stone that became Book Of Longing, that feeling of service drew her to the monastic environment of Annaghmakerrig in the first place?
“It really did, because it was a rotten, rainy auld February in March. And people were like, ‘That’s really hardcore.’ It is kind of hardcore. You have great plans about making something and stuff happens that throws you off, but if it’s really, really there, if you test it and that impetus and that essence still comes out in what you want to write, it’s a relief.”
Like Mrs Crean said. Get on with it.