On a sunny spring afternoon in a hotel not far from her parents’ Dublin home, Ailbhe Reddy sits at a table, stirring her tea, laughing about how dumb she was at 25. “In a way,” she says, “writing lyrics is kind of the most amazing snapshot you can give yourself of what you used to be like. But it’s also horrifying.”
Such is her ease in deriding her former and present self that she reveals she hadn’t been this embarrassed since recording a whisper track — a production technique, devised originally from heavy metal, where the track’s lyrics are whispered and matched up to provide textural layering — where she had to sit in a large, darkened room and whisper the words, “I’m going to watch you,” to her producer.
“You come across so many experiences as a gigging musician where you’re like, ‘What the f*** just happened?’” she smiles. “I live with Connie [the Irish artist Constance Keane, who performs under the moniker of Fears] and she texted me recently saying, ‘Why is being an artist so humiliating?’ And you know what? She’s absolutely right.”
Reddy grew up in Terenure, Dublin, the youngest of four. She began writing songs at 16 (“they were obviously dogshit”) before her mother came into her room and threw a Leonard Cohen lyric book on to her bed, saying that if she wanted to write, she should learn from the best.
Her musical journey started by way of the school drop-off; her older sisters, nine and eleven years her senior, battled with their matriarch for CD privileges en route. “There were fights over Don McLean and Blur most mornings,” she says. “They usually met in the middle and settled somewhere with Bowie or Queen.”
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She continued writing throughout her school and university years, studying the Irish language before pursuing psychotherapy (“songwriting is essentially therapy”) as a back-up. “I may be an optimist, but I’m also a realist,” she says.
It has been three years since Reddy released the achingly intimate Personal History, her debut album that went on to be nominated for album of the year at Ireland’s Choice Prize alongside
Pillow Queens and Róisín Murphy. It built her reputation as a songwriter and saw her sound evolve by incorporating a full band, expanding the live set and performing at Glastonbury and, more recently, a number of intimate gigs across London and North America.
It’s something she has juggled while holding down a job, something she’s committed to speaking about so as to not disenfranchise her colleagues in the industry. “Right now my job is gigging and touring and doing press like this, but for a long time I’ve done studio work as well as work in cafés and retail and reception work,” she says.
“I’m very lucky in many ways and my parents have been supportive but you have to be honest about what it’s like being a musician. I’ve never been someone who equated taking a part-time job as a step back. It has been really good for me because I think it’s good for you as a solo artist to do things that aren’t entirely focused on you.”
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Her most recent gig at Musicmaker, the instrument shop on Exchequer Street, Dublin, allowed her to work with other musicians while also contributing. “I was able to write down lyrics on blank receipts when I thought of them and also pay my way to then record.”
Sad girls are hardly a new idea in indie music, such are the complexities of girlhood. Young female singer-songwriters are often spoken about in hushed tones, citing angst and feminism as their crutches, but many have a keen command of irony that will often dissever the lyrical sentiment from the melody.
Reddy is one of those writers, playing with locution and refrain and creating hits that unfurl differently each time you listen to them. The idea of an easily consumable narrative of sad-girl lyrics might seem suspicious if the music wasn’t undeniably good.
Written and recorded between January 2019 and October 2020, Reddy paired up with the producer Tommy McLaughlin, who also worked on Personal History, to co-produce Endless Affair, relishing in the opportunity to maintain the raw spirit of her debut while highlighting development and growth in confidence.
Throughout the record she provides a space for herself to move on, citing several reasons linked with personal growth, while simultaneously tapping into our need for company as well as our need to be alone. It struck a chord, with airplay from BBC Radio 1 as well as coverage from the magazines Uncut, Rolling Stone and Dork (not to mention a remix of her track Walk Away by the producer Elderbrook).
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The record’s cover, a scene one might imagine Hieronymus Bosch would have painted, has piqued interest too. “I paired up with the photographer Ruth Medjber, who is amazing, and she encouraged me to ask friends to be on the cover,” she said. “We had pints of Guinness after every take.”
At 31, Reddy came of age in the era of shuffling playlists and loosely membraned genres when the boundaries between rock, folk, hip-hop and electronica began to lose meaning. By nestling hooky jams against hushed acoustic meditations she seems to take an unencumbered view of what an indie album should be.
The title of the album comes from the track Shitshow, in which the first line finishes with “endless pitiful affair” — Reddy thought it would be unhelpful to include the word “pitiful” if it was going to sell. In Endless Affair she confronts the ideas that haunted her, including a series of personal queries: Motherhood, for example, seeks to honour her mother and all the mothers in a lilting, pace-shifting ode that is both reflective and forward-thinking, much like motherhood itself.
It’s a fitting end to a piece of work that she closed at the end of her twenties, but it’s also an acknowledgment that, whether musical or emotional, curiosity, infatuation and indeed, optimism are almost always uncertain states.
Endless Affair is out now. Ailbhe Reddy plays Whelan’s, Dublin, on Fri and Sat; whelanslive.com
