First Encounters: Marian Quinn and Susan McKeown

Susan McKeown is a Grammy award-winning singer/songwriter/ producer who, after 23 years living in Manhattan, is 'glad to be back in Dublin', where she was born. With a newly acquired degree in Business Management she is starting a business to promote Irish arts and culture internationally

Marian and I met when we were auditioning for a play in the Irish Arts Centre in Manhattan, in Hell's Kitchen. The play was Down the Flats and the late, great Chris O'Neill was in it too. It was a lot of fun. Those were great times in New York. I was living in the East Village, which was thriving with Irish people in the arts. Sin-e was the cafe centre of it all, a place where Irish people used drop in to perform and meet; people like Sinead O'Connor, Marianne Faithfull, Sarah McLachlan. So did Jeff Buckley, whom we thought of as one of our own. I sang there.

Marian used to hang out in the East Village, not least because of Tommy Weir, who became her husband. It was only when the play ended that Marian and I started meeting as friends, having the conversations friends have.

She's a very wise woman and a great listener, a gift that is apparent in her filmmaking. She's very beautiful in the way she sees the world and her film 32A should be seen by every Irishwoman. It's wonderful in its understatedness. I had the honour of singing the opening song, Peggy Lee's Woman.

When Marian and Tommy got married I sang at their wedding in New Paltz; we were outdoors in a beautiful meadow with the sun going down behind the mountains. They wanted Yeats' He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven so I put it to music and sang it. They lived in Brooklyn for a few years, travelling over and back to Ireland. One long visit ended with them settling in Ireland, in Dromahair, Leitrim.

Once, when I was visiting, I decided to challenge myself. So we went surfing. Marian was better than me, could actually stand up and do it. She's very good at setting her mind to things and doing them well. We're the kind of friends who don't talk to each other all the time but, when stuff is going on, we talk all the time. I really rely on her wisdom, the way she looks at the world is inspiring. Also, she's one of a family of five, like me. She has two sons and a daughter; I have a daughter and our girls get on really well. Marian was born in America of Irish parents but chose to do much of her secondary schooling in Ireland and is very Irish. It's fascinating to me that it took a woman born in America to make a film like 32A, which is a very Dublin story.

Now that I’ve moved home America is great to visit but it’s wonderful to be here. I’m glad to be back and proud of what I did in New York. I love mythology and folklore and really missed people. Marian has a different take, her flavour is different. She’s more interested in contemporary Ireland. We share the differences.

Susan McKeown's latest album Belong is "thought provoking and joint swivelling," according to The Irish Times review.

Marian Quinn was born in Chicago, directed the award-winning film ‘32A’ and has an OBIE award for her part in Mike Leigh’s ‘Ecstasy’. She lives with her husband and family in Leitrim, where their Janey Pictures film production company has film projects and a TV series about a powerful Irish American family in development

I first met Susan when we were doing a reading for the play Down the Flats in New York. I would have known her as a singer and probably been to her gigs. I remember being really struck by her, she was so determined and committed, involved with so many things, like rights for Irish emigrants and Morrissey Visas. I operated in a little bubble and was hugely impressed.

She played my posh cousin in the play, to my inner city young one. I remember her ritualistically applying make-up every night, she in pearls and me in lycra and blond hair. We didn’t really become friends until after the play. Sin-e, where people used to hang out, was a cafe during the day and a place for gigs at night; Jeff Buckley played there. I was sitting outside one day when Susan stopped and said “how’s it going?” – innocently, as you would. I burst into tears and told her all about the horrible summer I was having. We were friends from that moment on, hanging out on Sunday afternoons and going to esoteric films across Manhattan. We talked about work and creativity and life and what it was like being a woman.

I worked with her again on a play called Maiden Voyages, by Bronagh Murphy and Honour Molloy. Set in a maternity hospital in Dublin, it was a wonderful experience. Susan played a ghost and sang from behind a screen; she had a character part as well. Her voice was so powerful, so moving. That was about 1993, on West 42nd Street, the first time I played with an all-woman cast. It was great.

When I was single and hanging out with Susan in New York she was my co-conspirator. I confided in her that I liked Tommy Weir; he remembers her cheekily grinning at him from the stage. Tommy and I married and ended up coming back here to live, set up Janey Pictures and work. That was before the internet made the world small so Susan and I lost touch. Then one day I saw a poster for a gig she was playing in Sligo. I went and was at the back of the crowd when she said from the stage, “Is that who I think it is?” A lovely moment!

After that she started coming to stay with us regularly in Leitrim. She’s the kind of friend who, when you don’t see her for months, it’s as if no time at all has elapsed. Her last album, Belong, was so personal; it was her working through things and coming out the other side.

Her depth of knowledge of Irish folklore is huge. I love this because it’s not something I know about. I can’t wait to work with her again. Creativity has a lot to do with our friendship but we’d be friends anyway because we’re suited to one another.

We love what we do; both love our work. I love that, after more than 20 years in America, she’s still a real Dub.

She sang the opening song for 32A. She sang at my wedding and at my mother’s funeral. She’s the soundtrack to my life.