Honor Heffernan is returning to her rock roots with a new album that invokes the spirit of 1970s Dublin, she tells Catherine Foley
'Don't mention the word jazz," jokes singer Honor Heffernan, whose new album, The Other Side, is a collection of rock classics, which marks a definite change in direction for the singer.
"My voice sounds completely different singing jazz," she explains, pointing out that she did spend the first part of her career singing rock songs in Dublin throughout the 1970s and early 1980s.
With classics such as Joni Mitchell's All I Want and Leonard Cohen's Here It Is on this album, she hopes that those who listen "will remember those days . . . I think this music will evoke all of that. Dublin was alive and kicking in the 1970s. There was so much music going on."
But she has recorded these rock classics, she says, not for the memories but in order to "channel a different energy, it's getting back to another kind of energy, that energy when everybody went on and you played your heart out. You went right to the place and let the music come from there. You sat into the music and let it take over and that kind of music gives you that kind of freedom."
The Other Side was recorded in the south of France last summer in the middle of a heatwave. It is produced and arranged by Dick Farrelly, with Gavin Povey playing the Hammond organ and Paul Moore on bass. Over a couple of days, there was time to get to know the musicians and "become like a little family". They recorded in "the scorching heat" in a little studio outside Montpellier. There were "crickets all around the studio", which is owned by drummer Neil Conti, of Prefab Sprout fame. The crickets can be heard on one of the tracks, Raining on My Life by Bonny Holder.
Drummer Conti, who mixed the album with Farrelly, "kept the whole thing together, like a conductor holding the rhythm and the timing. It was like seeing somebody holding the sea, like a big octopus, and he kept us moving at exactly the right tempo all the time," recalls Heffernan.
THE 10 SONGS SUM up "a perspective on life", she explains. "I see life as very much something that is out of our control, life happens and we have to adjust to life, and it's very hard for us to adjust but I find if you accept life, and don't fight it, that's what it's about."
After Midnight by JJ Cale, she says, was chosen "because of the fun aspect of the way it felt. We were playing with it in the studio and it just felt real chunky and down-home. You could just see these little guys walking down the road to the rhythm of the music, down in the south. There was something really hot about it."
There's an added poignancy to the album in its dedication to her father, Charlie, and to her mother and sister, Breda and Fiona, who both died in an accident in 2003 in Stoneybatter from carbon-monoxide poisoning. Heffernan's mother always loved to hear her singing rock, recalls the singer.
"When I was a kid, if I heard a song, she'd have to go and learn it and then teach me. She loved rock, she loved the way I sang rock," recalls Heffernan. "When I started singing jazz, she said 'we're only hearing a quarter of your voice' . . . She liked the full-out energy that you got in rock music. She just preferred it. She would be over the moon now to hear the album."
Singing a song involves "going to a deep place inside where you can only work from your feelings", explains Heffernan.
"You can't pretend a song, you have to empathise with the emotions in the lyrics and then you put that into the performance."
She singles out four tracks - Some People by John Martyn, Mountains of Things by Tracy Chapman, God Was In The Water by Randall Bramlett and Davis Causey and Here It Is by Leonard Cohen - because of "the kind of overall spiritual impact of the lyric and the melody and the way the songs run . . . They were very strong, there is a life thing about them. I felt they were a good expression of how I think about life in general.
"The songs all meant a lot. They were songs I knew I could live with and I could relate to. That's very important for any kind of singing . . . They have to take over. I have to get out of the way and let the songs sing themselves."
The collection includes a Joni Mitchell song too, All I Want. "I've been a fan since I was 14," says Heffernan simply. "That song has been in my life all the way through. And it's very much the kind of song that depicts life on the road, like musicians. You are always moving, you are always travelling, from one job to another, from one place to another, the way life is always moving from one thing to another as well.
"I have always considered myself to be a storyteller and I like to let the music and the story take over," she says. "I don't really see barriers and I enjoy interpreting all kinds of stories in their various styles. Perhaps this is the actress in me, and the empowerment found in exploring these various styles is something I have missed."
