Eleanor McEvoy refuses to shake hands with The Irish Times, but it's nothing personal. Her playing hand is recovering from being broken when she was set upon whilst walking the 200-yard stretch from a recording studio to her hotel in London last October. "It was during the mixing stage of the album," she says, not too eager to talk about the attack, but not overly dismissive of it either. "I left the studio at around one in the morning, and I noticed a guy who changed direction when I did. Then I changed direction again, and he followed me. I still wasn't freaked. Then I ran across the road, he chased me and jumped on top of me. He was a wealthy, respectable looking guy - I didn't know if he was after money, or what the story was. We got into a fight. At one point I hit him and that really pissed him off, so he dragged me 20 feet along the ground into a dark side and laid into me - broke my hand and did a couple of other things."
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, the police suggested that Eleanor might need counselling, but she brusquely refused. "About four weeks later, the nightmares started, so I said OK. It's not a big deal; it could have been so much worse. He ran off with my bag. I was lucky."
McEvoy seems too resilient to want to milk the situation for every ounce of publicity she could get; her only regret is that she couldn't play fiddle on her new album. The record in question is Snapshots, an exceptionally socially-minded third album from the singer/songwriter. Aside from the emotional open heart surgery of songs such as Please Heart, You're Killing Me and Did You Tell Him?, topics range from female alcoholism ("still a taboo subject") to eating disorders ("among the saddest illnesses prevalent in society today").
If one was to be grandiose about it, one could call it a concept album that deals with emotional disintegration. "I'm 32 years of age," remarks Eleanor, as if by way of qualification. "So my song-writing has changed quite a bit from my first album. That's obviously a feature of getting older and having, hopefully, a bit more sense, and of having been through the mill a certain amount of times.
"I think I'm looking out a bit more. In a lot of the songs on the first record I was looking inwards in my reactions to things. The second album was somewhere in the middle. On Snapshots I'm looking at other people's reactions, seeing how somebody else would react to a given situation. I'm somewhat more curious about other people. It gets to the stage in writing songs where you don't run out of things to write about - that never happens - but you realise you've written about a particular subject before, so you challenge yourself to write about topics in a different way.
"If anything, Snapshots is a concept album of independence. I was trying to be a bit of a novelist - without wanting to sound pretentious - I was giving myself a bit of liberty this time to make things up, occasionally using composite fictional characters."
One of the songs on Snapshots - More To This Woman - directly refers to Eleanor's time several years back as the unwilling focus of the Woman's Heart phenomenon. "There's more to this woman than a woman's heart," she sings on the song. Does she feel she is still perceived as the core of that, or as someone who has really moved away from it?
"At this stage, it's the latter, but it took a while," she smiles ruefully. "That said, I've actually put the song back in the set. I didn't play it for years, but now I play different versions of it, and they're fun to do. I think I was tired of it, really tired of it. I felt a certain way on a certain afternoon and wrote that song about that particular afternoon. People had this whole mentality pinned on me, but I'm cool with it now. It took a bit of time, though. . ." She realises that, for a while at least, she was the saviour of emotionally hurt women. "The songs on the album might highlight the travails of women in modern society, but it's unintentional; I certainly never ever set out to do that. Yet I am a woman in today's world, so by accident I probably do end up doing just that. I'm very drawn to writing about female characters; again, it's not a conscious thing, but I'm interested by and in female characters."
Eleanor considers herself a feminist (she has read Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir, but, interestingly, not Andrea Dworkin) and her female heroes include wholesale independents Kate Bush and Ani Di Franco. Yet she feels that there is not only inequality on both sides of the divide, but also that "women can let down the cause of feminism as much as men, if not more so. They can do this in lots of ways. Certain women who don't wear make-up - you'll always find that it's other women who comment on it, never guys. It's always women who comment on other women's appearances, whereas a lot of guys generally won't notice or won't care."
Very much aware of the business aspects of her career, Eleanor is cautious about her current standing in the precarious world of popular music. "I get enough from song-writing not to do anything else if I didn't want to - for the moment," she says. She seems grateful to have a New York-based manager who has contacts with other clients such as Hanson, Billie Myers, Bon Jovi and Cher, and is justifiably pleased with Snapshots with its stellar list of session musicians such as Phil Palmer and Pino Palladino, and highly-regarded producer, Rupert Hine. When asked about her own favourite track, she is quick to reply: "Please Heart, You're Killing Me. It was the one song we couldn't nail down in the studio. One night after official recording ended, we had a couple of bottles of wine and we all got a bit twisted. Rupert suggested we do the song, so we piled down to the studio and did it and that is what's on the record. You can hear me slurring my words in some sections of it."
