From publishing to performance

CAREER CHANGE:Motherhood for Ciara Sidine meant stepping back from her career in publishing – but it also gave her space to fulfil her ambition to become a singer songwriter, writes ARMINTA WALLACE

WE ALL KNOW HOW to make it in the music business. You get on to the X Factor, you get a new hairdo and new make-up and – whoosh! You're famous. It's a pretty dismaying scenario: but here's the good news. It's not the only way to make it in the music business. You could, alternatively, work as an editor for a publishing company for years, have two kids, get on with ordinary stuff and ignore the musical talent you've been told you possess since you used to sing at family gatherings as a child. Until, one day, the talent boils up and bubbles over.

That's what Ciara Sidine did. Now she has released a CD, Shadow Road Shining,which features a dozen of her own songs – including a single, Take Me Down,which has been getting a healthy amount of radio play.

The album has a laidback country feel and her voice is gorgeous. Not only that, but she worked with some first-rate musicians: Steve Wickham from The Waterboys, no less, on fiddle; Justin Carroll of the jazz trio Organics with his trademark Hammond organ; Conor Brady on guitar, percussion and producing.

Still, Sidine confesses as we sit in the Shelbourne Hotel sipping coffee, she couldn’t feel less like a celebrity. “I’m not used to doing interviews. I feel like I’m babbling obsessively about myself,” she protests. She isn’t: but it would be good if she could explain how she made the leap from sippy cups to the Sugar Club.

“For me, music coincided totally with motherhood,” she says. “So there were a couple of years where everything stalled and I stumbled around the place half-blind from lack of sleep and trying to hold down the day job. When my youngest daughter turned one, I came across Imro which runs courses in collaborative songwriting. Well, not really courses. They bring people together to collaborate on songs.”

The chance to spend four days working on songs with other like-minded musicians was, after years of work-home/crowded-house living, was like a breath of fresh air. “All that free time to do nothing except make music! The four days felt like a fortnight. I made a pact with myself after that. I had gone part-time at work since having the kids, so I created one afternoon a week where I paid a childminder and got down to music. Just to do music – whether creative, such as playing and writing songs – or administrative. All the things you have to do to try to bring out an album.”

Singing had always come naturally to Sidine. Theirs was the sort of Irish family where everyone can sing – and frequently does. "The first song I was conscious of learning was the little ballad My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean. And Red River Valley. I've always been drawn to old-style American music. I remember learning that at school and weeping from the sense of loss."

In a broader sense, though, music was something she enjoyed too much to want to work at. “It gave me so much joy – and I didn’t want to enter the world of pain that is the music business,” she says.

In her late twenties she picked up a guitar and started to mess about with it. And – maybe because she wasn’t too tied-up in self-conscious ideas about “image” and “genre” – she began to see how the music worked, from the inside. “It sounds a bit facile, but I realised I could make melody,” she says. “I hadn’t understood what a simple thing melody was, or how most songs actually just sit around three or four chords. That’s good enough to make most of the music that we connect with. I was strumming chords – it was a U2 song, actually – and then I put my own melody to it. And I thought, ‘Okay that’s how it works.’” It sounds easy – but it isn’t.

“I hate songwriting,” Sidine declares. “No. I don’t. But I find it very challenging. Singing is easy. Songwriting is work. There’s a moment, when you’re writing a song, when something clicks into place and the essence of the song becomes clear to you. But mostly, when I set about writing the song, I don’t know what that is yet. I’m sort of digging for it. And while I’m digging, it takes over my brain. I wake up in the middle of the night with words swirling around in my head. I’ll be driving the car, the kids will be screaming in the back and I’ll be going, ‘Oh, please . . .’ And then the moment comes where you go, ‘Oh. So that’s what that bloody song’s about. That’s what it’s asking to talk about.’ And after that it’s pure pleasure.”

Sidine is certainly a pleasure to listen to. If you like the Robert Plant and Alison Krauss album Raising Sand or anything by Emmylou Harris, you'll be on the right musical wavelength for Shadow Road Shining. Hers are old-fashioned songs, full of words such as "lonesome" and "mercy" – which is, she says, the whole point. "I wanted to connect into an older tradition. I wasn't really trying to rewrite the book. At the same time, I want my songwriting to feel fresh, and to have resonance in my own life."

One aspect of her new life is that she has had to change her name. Such is the way the music industry works nowadays that you just can’t afford to get into a Googling war with another singer. “My full name is Ciara Considine,” she explains. Being the daughter of the writer June Considine (and niece of the novelist Dermot Bolger), she really wanted to keep her own moniker. “But then I met a guy called Steve Averill. He’s credited with giving U2 their name. And he said, ‘Why don’t you just drop the first syllable and call yourself Ciara Sidine?’ And after all the anguishing over it, the moment I did that I felt really liberated – I think because of the years in publishing, where I never spoke about my music and kept it completely separate. Here was a new thing I could step into. And I’m happy to be the new me.”

Now she’s getting ready for her big night at the Sugar Club in Dublin. Will she be nervous? “Terrified. I sang with Sinéad O’Connor, Camille O’Sullivan and Eimear Quinn at Joe O’Connor’s Ghost Light gig at the Abbey earlier this month,” she says. “To stand up on stage at the Abbey, with all the history that’s there – phew. I never imagined I’d be standing on that stage. But then you do it, and it’s just the same as singing a song in a pub. In fact it’s easier because you have a captive audience – and you don’t have to get the drunks at the bar to shut up.”

So far, at least, she has no regrets about making her musical break for the border. “If you have a talent it’s quite easy to just keep it to one side and not mention it to anybody,” she says. “But as you get older, it sort of burns inside you. As I got older I felt increasingly that it didn’t matter what the outcome might be – I just had to give it a go. Now I feel that it would be an incredible thing for me if, by making music, I was enabled to keep making music. That would be an incredible success, in my book.”

As for her kids, they’re quite happy to have a mum who’s as adept with tracks as she is with track bottoms. “Most of it passes them by, to be honest. I mean, I start singing and it’s, ‘Give us a break, mum’. It’s not from whatever show they love on telly. But when I brought the CD home my elder daughter – she’s nearly seven – was reading the credits on the record, and she saw at the end that it was dedicated to herself and her sister. It was actually the first moment that I felt I had achieved something, because she just beamed. She looked really delighted. And I really did feel proud then.”

Shadow Road Shining is available on iTunes; it will be in record shops from the beginning of May, Ciara Sidine plays the Sugar Club, Dublin on May 13th