Draw-ing the Outline: hmv talks to... Sorcha Richardson

Your new album, Draw the Outline, is out in September. How does it feel to finally be putting this body of work out into the world?

It feels so good. This is my third album, and I almost feel like every time I finish one, it's not that it's hard to imagine doing another, but making an album feels like a big creative undertaking. It's such a huge amount of work, and you spend so much time on it that I always think, in the process, that you can never imagine it will be done, and you will be happy with it, and you'll be ready for people to hear it. To be at this point now, where singles are coming out, and I feel really good about it, is just... yeah, it's almost quite freeing or something, you know?

This record has been described as a sort of "recalibration" rather than a retreat. What does that distinction mean to you?

I think for me, this album is probably the most reflective of my tastes as a music fan and listener. I thought about this album quite differently from my previous albums; I considered how I wanted it to sound a lot before I went into record.

A lot of it was trying to shed expectations and shed these so-called rules that you sort of… You know, when you write and release music for a number of years, you sometimes can accidentally draw a set of boundaries around yourself. This album feels smaller and more intimate, and maybe a little more understated than the previous stuff, but in a way that I feel really, really good about. It's sort of about rejecting this idea of having to be really entertaining, and actually, I want an album that people will want to listen to over and over and over again and have a long relationship with.

You moved from Dublin out to West Kerry before making this album. Did you notice an immediate shift in your creative headspace when you changed environments?

I kind of did, yeah. Where I am in West Kerry is really rural, and it totally changed how I wrote. It was the first time in my life I've ever lived in the countryside because I grew up in Dublin, then I moved to New York, then I moved back to Dublin. So I'd always been in and around a city.

Because I'm someone who typically writes a lot about my own life, and because my life looks quite different in West Kerry than it did, for example, when I lived in New York City, it kind of just meant that the things I was writing about... initially, I actually found it quite hard to write because it made me have to turn the focus inward a bit more, which I think personally I was maybe a little reluctant to do. I would write, and then I'd be like, 'I can't do this, so I'm gonna go for a walk.' And I'd go for a walk on the beach. Then, on a two-hour walk on the beach, I'd come back with loads of lyrics written that I probably couldn't have done when I was sitting down at my laptop with my guitar. There's a lot more about the natural world on this album.

For a fan picking up the record for the first time, how would you describe the overall sonic landscape?

I feel like it's a singer-songwriter album, but with a really great, tasteful, classy band around me. It's mostly acoustic guitars and vocals, but with pianos and quite a bit of woodwind on the album. To me, there's a calmness to it and sort of a comforting kind of deep breath… that's the feeling I was often chasing as I was writing.

The opening track, 'Sea Pink Moon,' captures that perfectly. The instrumentation in it, and the way there's an ebb and flow to it, is quite indicative of how the album feels.

There is a distinct, quiet tension throughout these tracks. In an industry that often rewards making a lot of noise, was it a challenge to trust those minimalist, quieter moments?

I wouldn't say it was a challenge, but it was something that I needed, like, sometimes I find being in the studio can feel stressful because you're committing to things forever. There were a few times when Chris [Ryan], who I made the album with, would say, 'You know, this… You told me this is what you wanted to do.' So I needed Chris to sort of remind me that it was okay to make those choices.

The most exciting music when I was writing and making the album was stuff that was smaller and took up less space. The bigger I tried to make some of the songs, and the more I tried to really hammer a message, the less truthful it felt, or the less weight it had. Going smaller meant they took up more space.

Was there a particular song where you had to actively strip things back to let that quiet do the work?

Yeah, 'The Video', the one I wrote with Hugo White [from The Maccabees]. We didn't really decide until the day we were recording it that it was going to be such a small song, and it's the last song on the album. I kept trying to convince myself that it was this big single, but it just never wanted to be that. Now I'm so happy that I trusted the process. Maybe on an earlier album, I probably would have really tried to make that a bigger song, which would have been a little bit forced.

'Ellen Forever' is another song. Initially, it was a small acoustic song, and then somewhere along the way, I made a demo that was really loud and noisy. It's funny to look back at those versions from what feels like a moment of madness, but I think you have to entertain those kinds of creative impulses and then decide what makes most sense.

Does it feel different to perform these deeply personal tracks live on stage compared to when you're writing them alone?

Yeah, by the time I get to perform them on a stage, I understand them so much more than I do when I'm writing them. Often, writing them gives me a kind of closure. When I'm writing them, it's like I'm searching in the dark for something, whereas when I'm performing them, I have 20/20 vision. I usually just feel proud that they exist.
I love performing 'Illinois Again,' that one's really fun. 'Dog's Best Man' is another we've performed once that was really fun. We've never performed 'Sunshine Season,' which is kind of a deeper cut on the album, but I hope we can put that in one of the sets because I feel like that will be a nice one, too.

How did the actual recording process unfold with Chris Ryan? Did it come together quickly?

It wasn't that long, to be honest with you. Chris has a studio in his house in Belfast, so I went up there for like a week, and we recorded all of the vocals and the guitars; lots of them are live takes of vocals and guitars together.

Then we went to a studio just outside of Dundalk called Black Mountain for maybe five days and brought in the band. We brought in David Noonan from Just Mustard to engineer, which was really great. We did all of that literally at the end of December; I think our last day in the studio was December 23rd. It felt very much like everybody else I knew was in Dublin at Christmas parties, sending me videos from the pub, and we were up in the mountains making a kind of peaceful album. It felt quite fitting for the process. We finished the whole thing in maybe two or three weeks.

When fans get their hands on Draw the Outline, what is the ideal environment you hope they listen to it in for the first time?

I would say maybe by yourself on a walk through the West of Ireland but I understand not everybody's going to be able to listen from the West of Ireland! If you can see a body of water, I feel like that would be great. The Atlantic Ocean, a river, a lake... even a rainy day, maybe, would be fine.

What's next on the horizon for you?

We're doing an Ireland and UK tour in November, which I can't wait for. And then next year, we're going to hopefully be doing a lot more touring as well. I'm just excited to play them live, excited to play headline shows in places I haven't done in a little while, and meet people who like the album.

Sorcha Richardson's third studio album, Draw the Outline, is out this September. Photo Credit Rich Gilligan.

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