After falling out of love with her guitar, a Co Kerry retreat rekindled the songwriting spark, Gemma Hayes tells Tony Clayton-Lea
It's official: too much work can transform you from a bright, sparky, interesting and exciting person into a gibbering, drooling idiot. If you're a rock critic it might be difficult to distinguish one state from the other, but if you're a successful, Mercury Prize-nominated singer, feted from Fethard to Florida and back again, it may prove to be something of a problem.
Ballyporeen-raised singer Gemma Hayes has experienced the highs and lows of adulation and alienation, has endured the tough slog of touring, of singing on stage when she'd rather be somewhere else, of having to give away her beauty secrets to people who didn't have any of their own. A couple of years ago, when the success of her debut album, Night On My Side, got too much to bear, Hayes retreated into a cocoon of her own making. She put down her guitar - the instrument was no longer a comfort to her, but rather a leech - and stopped writing songs. It wasn't so much a classic case of too much, too soon, too hyped (her debut was as finely wrought a first album as you'll hear) as too overworked, too stressed-out, too used.
"Writer's block" is, says Hayes, something of an overblown term to describe what temporarily stemmed her creative flow. There's a more simple way of describing it: "The fact is, I was tired."
She doesn't look tired right now, as she sits in Dublin, fresh as a newly plucked daisy, straight off a flight from London, drinking tea from a mug and tucking into a Twix bar.
"I remember being exhausted after a particularly tough year, and I put the guitar down, not really wanting to see it again," she says. "I wasn't sitting down thinking I couldn't write - I just didn't want to. I began to get worried because I had no interest in picking up the guitar again. Playing songs and guitar are the only things I know, and all of a sudden I don't care about it? I was jaded, and somewhere along the line I fell out of love with it."
This is the kind of admission that doesn't come too easily to people with a creative bent. Rarely, they will allow the admission to seep out that the ideas just aren't there, the thrill has gone, the fun of it has turned into a chore - and yet they continue to work in a void for reasons too obvious and financially advantageous to outline.
Hayes, however, decided not to play the game. The first year away from the hustle and hassle of making a quick buck witnessed an unspecific and guarded Hayes being busy "doing other things". Writing songs still wasn't on the agenda.
"Then the second year came along, without having written anything, and people were looking at me strangely," she continues. "Then, when I tried to pick up a guitar, I wasn't too sure what to write. And whatever I did write, I felt it wasn't any good - I suppose it wasn't from instinct but more from the head."
Hayes rightly baulks at the term "writer's block"; it denotes or is indicative of, she implies, a form of breakdown, creative or otherwise. Perhaps, then, she merely suffered from a lack of creative interest brought on by severe exhaustion?
"Fair enough," she says, nodding. "Or maybe through an overload of music?"
THE CREATIVE SPIRIT, however, refused to die. Despite panicking slightly at the speed with which time ticked away ("people would ring me to let me know there was no pressure about me not coming up with songs - but that was pressure, because they were reminding me!"), Hayes slowly gathered her thoughts and her belongings, and moved to a rented holiday house in Co Kerry. There, during the winter of 2003/2004, she "went for walks, read books, watched television, picked up the guitar tentatively, almost starting all over again. And it came back slowly".
According to Hayes, the "Kerry thing" worked because her small world was enveloped by silence. She'd sit in the house, pick up her guitar, and hear every chord she picked out "because it was played to a backdrop of nothing. Music coming from silence - there's something to it; it's really peaceful and calming. Nothing else seemed to matter".
The results of her Kerry retreat are to be found in her forthcoming album, The Roads Don't Love You. For all the time spent waiting and worrying for it to arrive, the listener is instantly reassured by a collection of words, melodies and arrangements that reference the subtle balm of Joni Mitchell and the sonic ambience of My Bloody Valentine. Recorded in Los Angeles, a place where Hayes initially felt out of her depth ("I didn't like it at first - it's a silly place with pockets of intelligence"), the record astutely blends strategically placed stabs of self-expression with a solid commercial nous.
Did the time away mean she felt she had to compromise in order to make up for lost ground?
"I'll never compromise the music," she says. "But then it's not like if I had my way I'd be writing abstract sounds. I like melodies and sweetness, and I've got loads of ideas of what I want to do in the future, things I know I can't do now. Like, I would love to record on a boxy little acoustic guitar, with some strings, and do a really slow album.
"But that's for a stage when being played on the radio isn't a priority. Now, my priority is to get played on the radio."
Things have changed, Hayes intimates. Coming up to the release of her debut, she says - tapping her second Twix bar on the table for emphasis - she wanted to control how people viewed her and her music, and how it was brought out into the world.
"I was trying to do everyone's job," she says. Now she realises that everything is in the lap of the gods, and if people don't like her new songs and don't want to play them on the radio, then there's nothing she can do about it except play the gigs and hope for the best.
She's definitely a glass-half-full type of person, she adds. Clearly, life is easier for her these days. Having less of a burden to carry around gives her more time to do what she does well, rather than doing little bits of everything slightly less well.
And another thing - she's not the Queen of Miserable, as she is so often portrayed.
"I get to vent a lot of my melancholy and negativity through my songs," she says, smiling. "So when I'm living my life, I'm cleansed."
The Roads Don't Love You will be released on Virgin on Oct 28. Gemma Hayes plays The Savoy, Cork on Mon; Dolan's Warehouse, Limerick, on Tue; The Village, Dublin, on Wed; TF Royal Theatre, Castlebar, Co Mayo next Sat, Oct 22; and The Limelight, Belfast, on Sun, Oct 23