It hasn't always been plain sailing for singer- songwriter Emmett Tinley, but the ex-leader of the Prayer Boat is putting faith in his new album, writes Tony Clayton-Lea.

Saying something like "play with me and I'll halve your wages" isn't the most appealing call to arms for prospective musicians to hang out with an established singer-songwriter.

Emmett Tinley is fully aware of this; formerly of the much-critically lauded Prayer Boat, Tinley is a long way off from being the iconic standard-bearer of the Irish singer-songwriter. By virtue of his journey from the drifting Prayer Boat (eventually scuttled by a mixture of diminishing returns and a music industry not knowing what to do with them), Tinley has little or no connection with the scene that has spawned the likes of Damiens Rice and Dempsey, Paddy Casey, Declan O'Rourke, and so on.

Lengthy spells in America and Europe from the mid-1990s onwards - trying to sell the Prayer Boat to flummoxed A&R types - meant that he avoided the spawning grounds of Whelans and the like. It also meant that many didn't know who or what he was when he did return to Ireland to play sporadic, almost guerrilla-like gigs. Diminishing returns kicked in yet again, and for a while Tinley withdrew his slim frame, his dashing D'Artagnan-the-musketeer looks, and waited.

Of course, people who keep an eye on people such as Tinley wondered where he was and what he was up to. It transpires that fate and the record industry were to blame for the gradual re-emergence of the singer.

Towards the end of the 1990s, as the Prayer Boat were spluttering to a halt, they self-funded an album called Polichinelle. Distributed by Setanta in the UK, the record picked up a cult following that failed to halt the demise of the band.

By this stage, Tinley was in Amsterdam, linked to Setanta for a solo record. As luck would have it, however, copies of Polichinelle had found their way to New York, where it was enthused over by an employee of Atlantic Records. Who, they wondered, were the Prayer Boat? Cue a phone call to Setanta supremo Keith Cullen, who in turn told Tinley the news: Atlantic wanted to see Emmett Tinley. Like, now, if he doesn't mind.

"So Setanta very kindly relinquished me," Tinley concludes this part of his tortuous record company fairytale. "I went to America where Polichinelle was released by Atlantic. I did a few solo tours on the back of that in the hope that momentum for the record would build and then the Prayer Boat would regroup, but then September 11th happened and all bets were off."

A month later, Tinley received word that Atlantic wanted to sign him as a solo act. "And here I am with Attic Faith," says Tinley of his recently released solo debut album, "which took about two years to make from start to finish."

He seems relieved to have got to the end of this chapter of his life; the underlying tone is that, despite the means to the ends, there is only so much fecking about a body can take. And, you know, he implies, life goes on - Tinley's ringlets have filaments of grey twisting through them, and a toddler is in the family picture these days; things happen, he shrugs, when you're waiting around to be discovered, to be given album and publishing advances.

It's all very well, however, living the life of a working artist in New York and Amsterdam on your own time and borrowed cash; what keeps someone such as Tinley going through the ups and downs? "Meaning something to people, however small that number was," he replies. "It meant I was doing something valid. I wasn't going to stop writing, but I've had to rethink in what capacity am I going to be a songwriter, how far is it going to go, what sort of life am I going to get out of it.

"The end result of that is I know I'm always going to be a songwriter, because I have something that means something to some people - very intensely. And there's something good about that. That's what kept me going."

Tinley is putting a brave face on what has been a career compiled of a sequence of mishaps, misdemeanours, enforced circumstances, casual serendipity. Careers such as his, he agrees, are littered with bad luck and even more bad timing. It's just the way it goes. He says he's not easily demoralised (and he's certainly not a "sensitive" musician), but at the same time he did make a decision to not feel the need to write all the time.

Therein lies the curse of the creative mind - to always feel it has to document the moment. Perhaps it's good to do that sometimes? "Everything in moderation in art is probably not a good thing," Tinley posits, "but it should swing back and forth between intense perceptions of the world and just allowing life to go by. I have occasionally hung out with people who see meaning in everything, and it drives you nuts."

Now based in Ireland again (north of Dublin, an M50 journey away from his original base of Blessington, Co Wicklow), Tinley refuses to be contained by anything close to the country's and capital's singer-songwriter scene.

Biographical and geographical details alone (he was born in America and he feels possibly more at ease in parts of Europe than Ireland) make him an Irish guy with little connection to the auld sod. He's a singer-songwriter at heart, he implies, but he hears more in his music than just the sound of a lone voice and an acoustic guitar.

He reflects on his stop/start career and comes to the conclusion that no one person or thing is to blame. "No one thwarted my career by putting out a record in the wrong country with a wrong picture on the album cover," he says. "You put the music out there and there's not much you can do about it one way or the other. It's a very complicated business, the music industry, and being talented is a small part of the equation."

But it's a business, he agrees, which means in a strict QED way that mediocrity sells. "I'm fine with that, too," Tinley nods, viewing the clouds overhead and seeing a silver lining, "because some mediocre band's record sales has enabled me to be signed by Atlantic Records."

Ambitious musicians who want their wages halved are advised to form an orderly queue right now; mishaps, misdemeanours, enforced circumstances, and casual serendipity notwithstanding, Tinley seems poised for take-off.

Attic Faith is on Atlantic