`Great," observes Sinead Lohan with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, as she pauses to consider the contents of the past half-hour of conversation. "Me talking about me." It's hard to tell whether she's amused or dismayed by the notion, but one thing's for sure: she'll be doing a lot more of the same from here on in, for this slim, serious singer-songwriter with the soft Cork lilt and the headful of tiny plaits is said to be hovering on the very cusp of fame with the release, early next month, of her second album, No Mermaid. She looks a lot younger than her 27 years. As for what she sounds like, don't ask me, ask Q magazine: " . . . the understated strength of her voice is ideal for evoking fragile relationships where easily bruised lovers tread water in a sea of emotion. Better yet she seems, quite naturally, to create extended lines of melody that cradle those words with uncanny elegance and no sign of strain or even of manufacture . . . "
Heady stuff for an artist who is, by her own admission, a product of the Irish music education system. As a child, music touched her only obliquely through piano lessons and the stories her father used to tell about playing bass in a band. In those days she was a reader, not a singer - but when she went to secondary school, everything changed. "I studied music for my Leaving Cert and it's a really interesting course. I used to go and see the symphony orchestra playing. I just loved it. I loved the world that it opened up for me." When she left school she enrolled in a VEC music management and production course in Cork. "It was the first year they ran it, so I didn't really know what to expect, but I learned a lot there. They were very supportive and encouraged people who were leaning towards performance - that's where I did my first gig."
It all happened very fast after that. She finished the course in June and by August was recording the songs which would eventually become her debut album, Who Do You Think I Am. And all the time songs were pouring out of her in a great rush - once, she wrote three in a night. She smiles at the memory of it. "I can't do that now. At that stage I was just singing everything I wrote; I think I have a better filter system now. I discipline myself much better. But two of those songs made it on to the first album, and I still play one of them. They're not that bad."
But how do you discipline yourself to write songs? Does she have a method, or does inspiration just strike? Is it the same every time, or different? "It seems to be different, but mostly when I'm thinking of songs it'll just be somewhere here" - she pats her chest - "some sort of repetitive rhythm thing. Like yesterday I was in the car sitting outside a shop and the flasher things were on, repeating and repeating, and I was just sitting there and I didn't realise I was starting to hum something. That's the way. I use washing machines, trains, stuff like that. Anything that can get you into a trance, that relaxes you."
Who Do You Think I Am was recorded over two and a half years in a recording studio in the house of the guitarist Declan Sinnott in Cork and she talks about it, now, as if it were an event from another life. "It was very successful as Irish albums go; it sold a lot of copies; and I'm here now because of it. It was a learning process for both of us, because Declan had just built the studio at that time. He's a very strong character and a brilliant guitar player, and if he hadn't recorded the album - well, it's hard to know what you would have done if you hadn't done such and such. "But by the time the album was signed up by Dara Records, a lot of the songs were old to me and I was a bit weary of it all. I was growing up at the time, as well; I mean, you change an awful lot between 18 and 22. And now I'm 27, I have a new bunch of songs and a new producer and an album in my hand that I can say, well, this represents me better."
It was partly the success of Who Do You Think I Am, however, that gave Lohan the clout to get to New Orleans last summer to record No Mermaid with producer and long-time Daniel Lanois collaborator, Malcolm Burn. It's a long way from Cork to New Orleans - so did the lazy, hazy southern states vibe affect the new album at all? "Yeah, it did, I must say; the heat, and the place. I mean, I'm kind of laid back anyway and Malcolm is laid back. We were all laid back. If we'd been any more laid back, we'd have stopped. But although it's laid back in New Orleans, it's productive. Everything gets done."
The notoriously difficult US market seems to be at Sinead Lohan's feet. Last August she appeared at the Newport Folk Festival with Joan Baez, who has since recorded two of her songs, No Mermaid and Who Do You Think I Am. "I was never a Joan Baez fan, really - I mean, she wasn't around when I was young," says Lohan, whose formative musical influences were more along the lines of Top of the Pops on Thursday nights with The Police and The Jam. "But she's a nice woman, very calm, very majestic - in fact, I played in San Francisco about two weeks ago and she came along - so it's nice that she's so supportive, in her own way."
And what did she make of Baez's versions of her songs? She gives a mock shudder. "Ugh: that question! I think - well, it's hard for me to judge because nobody has ever recorded any of my songs. I think she did a good job on No Mermaid and then on the other one - I prefer my own version."
Like the album from which it is taken, No Mermaid is a dreamy, allusive affair which owes more to literary influences such as Lewis Carroll than to The Police, The Jam or other successful contemporary Irish songbirds like Sinead O'Connor or Dolores O'Riordan. Lohan, who has discussed recordings, awards and celebrities and her own rise to fame without so much as raising an eyebrow, becomes positively animated when she talks about Lewis Carroll. "Even now I read his collected works. I like the way he's able to go into different worlds in the same place; he's like a magician, there's an illusory sort of lifestyle in his writing and that's the kind of frame of mind I feel closest to.
"A lot of my writing is very subjective. I'm not writing about events, I don't have big political messages or anything - it's really my observations of human nature and the way people change. It's very hard to take my songs and say what they're about; it's more to do with an atmosphere, with layers and layers of ideas. Sometimes the words by themselves don't really matter. It's like taking a feeling and trying to put it into a three-minute melody so that when you hear that song, it will evoke that feeling in yourself. "No Mermaid is sort of about two people in one person, and the conflict that people have to work out between the side of them that has no qualms about diving into the water and the other side that is reluctant and afraid. A lot of the songs are about relationships, I suppose, and a lot of them are about me, as well, and all the different mes." Which, I think, is pretty much where we came in.
Sinead Lohan plays the Olympia Theatre tomorrow night. Her new album, No Mermaid, will be released on August 11th on Grapevine Records.