Valerie Francis: ‘The Kanye West shout out was bizarre’

"He posted the video for Punches on his blog, which was bizarre. It was really strange," recalls singer-songwriter Valerie Francis, about Kanye West's ringing endorsement of a song off her debut album.

“I vividly remember the day it happened because it was Good Friday and we had only put the video up online the day before, so it hadn’t even been there for 24 hours and that happened,” she told Róisín Ingle, presenter of the Róisín Meets podcast.

It is eight years since Francis released the album that song appeared on, Dynamo Slow, which saw her nominated for the Choice Music Prize in 2009.

The next year everything stopped.

“After the Choice Prize I was just wrecked and I wanted to take some time to figure out what I wanted to do,” she said.

The first instrument she ever played was a little red keyboard her father gave her when she was six. She moved onto the guitar soon after and by her thirteenth birthday knew that she wanted to be a songwriter.

After her first album, however, the reality of the music business dawned on Francis and she realised that it was never going to pay the bills on a full-time basis, so she took time off music and went back to college to qualify as a sound engineer.

Now she is back though, armed with plenty of new material and an album in the pipeline, which is due out before the end of the year.

Francis played three of her new songs – Trap, Avalanche and Traverse – on the latest episode of the Róisín Meets podcast. She spoke about her music, growing up with a father who was in the army and losing her mother when she was just seven years old.

To listen to Valerie Francis play those songs live and to hear the conversation with Róisín Ingle, got to Soundcloud, iTunes, Stitcher or irishtimes.com/podcasts

You can catch Valerie live at the RHA Hennessy’s Lost Fridays on 3rd March