Letters and Lingo

From Motley.ie: Following the release of their new EP and single Letter to Willow, the trio, namely Saoirse Duane, Karen Cowley and Caoimhe Barry, are swamped in anticipated marketing, gigging and as I found out, planning for more music in the not too distant future.

It’s clear, as I listen to Caoimhe discuss how the new single came to be, that the music making process is quite a mixture of wide spontaneity alongside the band’s personal, intuitive touches.

“Letter To Willow, specifically, has an ultra‐pop feel. It’s definitely the closest thing we have to a pop song. We had a lot of fun in the studio, a really good time. We took a lot of inspiration from Genius of Love and the Tom Tom Club which has a lot of strange percussion sounds and wanted to go with a quirky feel, something synth bass heavy and drum heavy as well.”

The music video sees the trio indulge in their artistic sensibilities. Through fading and blurring compositions and wind machines in full glory, it makes for a subtle edge to a song already very eclectic. Caoimhe discussed how the band imagined the follow‐up visual to this track.“We worked with Simon Eustace and Glen Collins [of Pull The Trigger Productions] and they did a great job, we loved it. We had a lot of failed attempts shooting it that day, trying to get the perfect shots and with confetti canons and it being filmed in slow motion. The actual track that we were singing along to was hilarious! It was a big production too, there was hair and makeup and people taking our orders for food.”

They are bashful and the sense that ego has not replaced gratitude comes across greatly from Caoimhe. She tells me she remembers thinking: “This is class, I feel like Rihanna!”

It was around the time that Karen and Caoimhe starting featuring vocally in Hozier’s music that the band released their first EP The Widow Knows, an era Caoimhe claims sounds aliens to her now: “It was an essence that we were a bit of a hobby band at the time, we weren’t cohesive with a vision.”As an act that planted its roots during its member’s school days, she explains that their togetherness is a completely “natural thing.” She speaks about the opportunities the band never saw coming and the aspirations they had about having a career in music.

“We didn’t!” she says laughing. “We’ve been friends since we were 11 or 12 and when you’re that age, there’s not a lot of people who are mad into music. When you discover something like that at a young age it’s like you wake up for the first time. So to find each other was just great, and while we’re so different as people, [music] is the one thing that’s always kept us together.”

[ Motley.ie ]