Cathy Davey came close to personal meltdown, but she's stronger and more confident second time around, she tells Tony Clayton-Lea.
It's not often you start a conversation with someone by asking them how do they dream, but when that someone is Cathy Davey - adept, deft purveyor of songs that hang in the balance between light and dark, pitch night and misty day - then it's fine.
"I remember what I dream quite vividly," she says. "They're always stories, fully formed. Sometimes I dream the backing vocals for a new song, and the videos that go with them. My dreams are usually something to do with what I'm working on; I like the puzzle-solver aspect of them."
Davey herself is something of a puzzle; not the Rubik's cube sort, where a twist here and a turn there and a wrench applied just so can create the finished product. Rather, she is something of an enigma wrapped in a conundrum that in turn is hidden in a jewellery box placed in a time capsule. Her sleep patterns are, she says, dreadful. Or used to be. Davey won't pinpoint exactly what eats her up (or used to), but her litany of childhood and teenage travails tells its own story with a troubling blend of dyslexia, hyperactivity, disconnectedness, stress and a curious relationship with the movie The Santa Clause.
"We moved around a lot as a kid," remarks Davey, more casually chatting than explaining, "and I could never sleep over in friends' houses because I had a problem that terrified me as a kid - my body switched off but my brain still operated. Part panic attack, part sleep disruption, I suppose, so I could never stay over when I was a teenager."
What Davey did next is shrouded in the stuff of idiosyncratic lifestyle and a singular approach to creativity. "I was never ever going to do anything else apart from art and music - I don't have the memory skills for doing anything else," she says.
Now in her late 20s, she surfaced several years ago with her debut, Something Ilk, a likeable collection of reasonably identikit songs in the singer-songwriter mould. With a family background gaining an initial flurry of interest - her father is composer Shaun Davey - she quickly retreated from the spotlight through a mixture of nervousness and unfamiliarity with the machinations of the music industry.
She claims now that she simply wasn't ready for the attention, the publicity, the raising of profile, the business, the touring and - worst of all - the gigs. Factor in the debilitating sleeping patterns and you've got a problem. It was, she understates, a "bad cycle".
As Davey sees it, there was nothing about the Something Ilk experience that was edifying: missed opportunities, concerned parents, missed gigs, worried management, missed television shows, frustrated industry personnel. Throwing up became a by-product, sleepless nights the norm, nervous exhaustion an enemy.
FAST FORWARD THREE years and there is clearly something different at work. You can hear it in the new album (Tales of Silversleeve, which is so skittish it could live in a cattery) and you can see it in her face, which looks as if it has been on the receiving end of regular sleep.
"Writing happy music has really helped. It has opened up a lot of good things for me, work, playing live, upbeat songs, uplifting music. It all comes down to doing something that makes you feel good. Playing the music from the last tour didn't make me feel good. Why? I thought it was shite, introspective, self-gratifying, teenage lyrics. And I knew that instantly - it wasn't like it slowly developed. As soon as I had to go out and tour Something Ilk I became embarrassed. And unfortunately, the angsty tracks were the ones that people wanted to hear. I could have played them in a different way but at the time I didn't have that ability to see outside the box. It was a growing-up process, really, and discovering that you didn't have to play minor chords in order to write a song."
She now can't bear to listen to sad music. "Those bloody minor chords - I have to turn them off because I feel instantly sad. The thought of not having to deal with that in the context of the new album is a huge relief. I've reworked Come Over [ Something Ilk's primary radio-friendly tune] as a smoochy lounge-lizard song, and the lyrics that embarrass me in earlier songs I now slur over!"
The change in songwriting technique is also apparent: Something Ilk's output can come across as the work of a student, Tales of Silversleeve's as that of a teacher. How confident is she of her songwriting skills?
"It depends on what you're comparing yourself to. I'm not so sure that you can have confidence if you're comparing yourself to everything that's good. I can compare new songs to what I've done in the past, and say I'm far more confident now.
"Lyric-wise, I'm disappointed sometimes with my laziness, but there is a point where you have to cut off. I'll spend a long time and half a notebook on a song, but not a year. Musically, I'm often disappointed in how limited my songs are compared to what I would consider to be real music.
"The main disappointment for me, however, is that I've chosen a path which leads me to formulaic songs, or songs within a defined structure. It knocks me over that music has come down to three and a half minutes - there has to be more to it than that. Which of course there is, but I've placed myself in a particular realm. I'm confident in my growth as a songwriter, however, but not when I place myself against people I admire. But that's okay, it's quite natural, isn't it?
"I don't see the point in just accepting anything and saying you're fine about it. That's how you make sure you don't settle for less than what you're hoping to achieve."
And what about all the problems the last time around - particularly the vomiting before gigs? "It was a huge fear of performance, but not this time around," she enthuses. "There were more than a few occasions where I'd seriously think, validly in my opinion, that I could leave the venue, take a plane to Spain and sustain myself for a year. Anything to avoid doing the gig! I'm sure I'm not alone in having stage fright. That happened last time around, mainly because certain elements - attitudes towards music, the album, decisions that I hadn't made - weren't right."
These have been rectified now, says Davey (although without going into precisely how). "I had no confidence, basically. Also, I was something other than what some people saw in me from the beginning, which was essentially an untrue vision of me that I certainly didn't see, but which was easier to try to make work than to argue. I never saw confrontation as a fruitful alternative to get on. Now, I see it solves a whole lot of possible future problems."
Cathy Davey plays Auntie Annies, Belfast, tomorrow; Whelan's, Dublin, Monday; RóisíDubh, Galway, Tuesday; Dolan's Warehouse, Limerick, Wednesday; and Cyprus Avenue, Cork, Thursday.
Tales of Silversleeve is released next Friday