Dalkey singer- songwriter told David Hennessy about her new album, Draw the Outline.
Dublin singer-songwriter Sorcha Richardson has just released her new album, Draw the Outline.
It follows her 2019 debut First Prize Bravery, which was nominated for the Choice Music Prize and was an Irish number one, and 2022’s Smiling Like an Idiot.
The album release was preceded by the single Ellen Forever which was written with SOAK and Chris W Ryan.
Sorcha had already given fans a taste of the new material with previous singles Grenadine and Illinois Again.
She is marking the release with some in store performances and signings.
The Dalkey singer- songwriter has amassed over 80 million streams and can count Gwyneth Paltrow and Chloe Grace Moretz among her celebrity fans.
Draw the Outline is a new departure for her in that it moves away from the synthesizers that defined her earlier work.
Sorcha took time to chat to The Irish World on a recent trip to London.
Does this album feel different to you than your two previous albums?
“It feels different in a way.
“I think it’s because when I first started out, I was playing open mics and I very quickly had this idea ‘I need to make more noise. I need to be bigger and louder’.
“I think it’s almost taken me three albums to come back around to the start where I’m actually like, ‘No, I think actually I can make a more intimate, smaller sounding album’.”
Does that suggest a greater confidence?
“Probably.
“I think this is the album that’s most indicative of my tastes as a listener.
“This album is the album that I had the clearest idea of what I wanted it to be before I went into the studio.
“I probably felt confident to make more decisions that were more understated this time around.”
What made you name it Draw the Outline?
“A few reasons.
“If I would get lost in any kind of way, I’d walk down to Ventry Beach which is a half-hour walk from where I live in West Kerry and, depending on the weather, you can see the outline of the mountains across the peninsula.
“That image of the outline of the mountains across the peninsula made things make sense to me in some ways.
“But also it’s an idea of allowing yourself to begin without needing to fully know the destination, not needing to have all the answers in order to set out.
“And also even lyrically, this album is a bit more abstract in places than my older stuff as well and I think I was like, ‘I’m intentionally leaving things a little bit looser in places’.”
Tell us about Grenadine, the first single from the album..
“I started writing that 2 January.
“I was like, ‘It’s a New Year. I’m gonna write an album this year’.
“I think I had just had a few things happen in life that were kind of real adult, difficult stuff.
“There’s a line in the chorus that says, ‘I push the pedal, I make the harmony sing’.
“I sat down at the piano in my parents’ house and I just put my foot on the sustain pedal and without pressing any keys on the piano, it just sort of sung back to me.
“And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s quite beautiful’.
“For some reason, amidst all this chaos in life, that action gave me this great sense of calm so it kind of became a song about naming things that I know to be true no matter how small to just ground myself a little bit amongst swirling and difficult life stuff.
“I think I wrote it as a way to almost self-soothe.
“I wanted it to be the first single because I felt like it gave an indication of a more intimate sound.”
You also released Illinois Again as an early single, where did that song come from?
“That’s a song I wrote after coming home from my first big tour across North America which is something I’ve always wanted to do.
“I used to live in New York and even when I lived in America, I kept saying, ‘One day I’ll drive east to west, I’ll do a coast to coast road trip’.
“We never did it so getting to do that tour was very exciting but I think I wrote that song thinking I was writing a fun road trip song and then the more I listened to it, I was like, ‘This is actually a really lonely song’.
“It became more about doing something you’ve always dreamed of doing and getting to do it with some of your best friends and still feeling lonely in that space.
“When I was writing the song, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that but with a bit of distance, you start to notice patterns in them.
“If I set out like, ‘I’m going to write this fun song about this amazing month that I spent with my friends driving across North America’, the thing that keeps coming to the surface is actually this loneliness within that experience and sometimes it takes writing the song to even understand that you felt that way.”
Why does it feel that way?
“Well I think it gets lonely because you never have time to process what’s happening.
“You’re always in the company of other people and the people who I tour with are some of my best friends in the world but even within that, I think it gets lonely because sometimes you don’t actually get to process it until you come home.
“I think it’s maybe also when you do something that you’ve always dreamed of doing, you have this idea of what it’s going to be like and then it’s never exactly that.
“Or maybe you built it up too much in your head.
“I loved that tour.
“I had the time of my life but I also think maybe sometimes being a solo musician, there’s a weird sort of pressure that you have.
“It’s literally my name on the venue door.
“And the whole time you’re always missing things and there’s always stuff at home that you’re away for.
“And when you come back from an amazing experience and you try and explain it to people who weren’t there, it’s just an impossible thing to do and it’s even impossible to hold on to the memory of it yourself.
“I think it’s a mix of all of those things.
“It’s allowing yourself to be happy and lonely at the same time and try and make sense of those two things, I guess.”
As you say you are a solo artist, it’s not like you’re in a band and experiencing it with bandmates. It must be isolating in that way..
“I think so.
“Say if we play a terrible show in Chicago or something, I don’t think people are going to be leaving being like, ‘That drummer was crap’.
“Even sometimes I wish I hadn’t used my real name but I did and it’s too late now, but there’s no degree of separation and sometimes I find that a little funny.”
I wanted to ask about Ellen Forever. Is it a love song?
“Sort of.
“Ellen is a friend of mine who is, I would say, the most truthful person I know.
“I had a conversation with Ellen when I was in the middle of making the album.
“I was being a little bit avoidant and I was just struggling to make myself sit down and write so I was distracting myself a lot.
“Then I met Ellen and Ellen in ten seconds sort of said, ‘You live in West Kerry, you’re in a long-term relationship, you’ve made this your third album so you’re in a place in your life where you’ve kind of figured a lot of stuff out. So what are you writing about?’
“And to me that was the most confronting thing somebody could have said.
“I think also somebody telling you that you’re doing very well or that you have your life figured out are actually quite spooky things to hear.
“I drove home and I just thought about that over and over and over again so I guess really that kind of became a song about somebody telling you that.
“It’s sort of my way of saying like, ‘Well how much of myself do I want to share? How much of myself am I willing to share on this album?’
“And if I start to pull back the curtain, is everything just going to spill out? And am I okay with that?’
“That’s kind of what that song is about.
“In some ways the idea of that song is very central to the album.
“I want to share and I want to feel understood but I also I don’t know where to draw the line on that.
“So yeah having a friend who can only tell the truth is sometimes a good, if not slightly unnerving, reminder of what it is to actually be honest.”
It brings us back to what we were just talking about because as you say, you’ve called yourself Sorcha Richardson and it’s the question of how Sorcha do you want to be, isn’t it?
“Yeah, it is.
“I want to be understood and not even just on a public realm, I think it’s an age old question of when you meet people, ‘I want to be honest with you and I want to be myself with you but then if I’m too much myself, is that too much for you?’
“It’s quite existential that one, I think.”
Tell us about Dog’s Best Man. Is it a song about your dog?
“It’s not about my dog.
“It’s about my neighbour’s dog who I was really scared of.
“I can’t even name the dog because I don’t want to start beef with the neighbours.
“Our neighbours have this dog and there’s this walk I used to love to do and I would always pass their house and every time I would pass the house, the dog would get more and more and more aggressive to the point where I started to have really bad vibes with this dog.
“So then I started writing this song about the dog but then I was like, ‘Actually what is that dog saying about me?’
“Maybe in all the ways that I’m giving out about this dog, this dog could be like, ‘Who is this person who keeps coming past the house?’
“It just started making me think about who gets to tell the story, who gets to have the narrative voice and then also all the ways in my life in which like I’m not actually that great.
“It’s kind of a song about fear and who we become when we’re scared and why that sometimes brings out the worst of us.
“There’s a line in it that says, ‘Teddy’s going to shoot to kill’ which is another dog, my friend’s neighbour’s dog and my friend was upset that her neighbour’s dog got a name check in a song before she did.”
You come to the UK on tour later in the year, do you always like coming over to London?
“I have so many friends here that it feels in a way like another hometown show.
“I love playing in London.
“Annie Mac does a literary thing at the London Irish Centre which I played.
“Actually I did that right as I was in the middle of making the album.
“Annie asked me to come over and do that so that was a nice little break to play a couple of songs and then go back to writing and stuff.
“The London Irish Centre is class, I love it.
“I guess I’ve just always had so many friends here and I think Irish people really show up for Irish shows in London as well.
“You really feel that.
“And then obviously London’s just a great city and there’s such a rich musical history that it’s fun to pop over.
“On this album I came over and did a bit of writing with people like Hugo White from The Maccabees and Carey Willetts.
“I would sometimes come to London and write and then take everything back to West Kerry and put it through the album lens.
“It’s become a more important place for me to come every couple of months.”
After growing up in Dublin, you spent years in New York and are now based in Kerry, what brought you to Kerry?
“My partner is from Kerry so that’s kind of the main reason.
“But when we were in Dublin, we used to go to Kerry probably once every two months maybe and I remember we’d have this feeling, we’d be leaving Dingle and driving up to Dublin and I never once had the feeling that I was happy to be leaving.
“The more time we spent there, we were like, ‘Why don’t we just make this the base?’
“And I’m still in Dublin all the time because you have to be but it’s an amazing place to live.”
What is it like to have celebrity fans like Chloe Grace Moretz and Gwyneth Paltrow?
“It’s a fleeting moment where you wake up and you have 400 notifications and you get a dose of panic and then you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s because Chloe Grace Moretz shared my song’.
“It’s just surreal, I suppose.
“It’s the type of thing that makes your auntie or somebody be like, ‘You’re doing really well’.
“It’s a thing that translates your trajectory for certain people.
“It’s nice for people to like your music whether or not they have lots of Instagram followers.”
You were a drummer when you started playing in bands. Did you always know it was music for you?
“Yeah, I think it probably was always going to be music but it just took me a while to accept that that was what I really wanted to do.
“I tried other things.
“I went to college for creative writing but I would rush through my homework and then spend all my spare time making demos whereas everybody I was in class with was spending all their free time writing short stories.
“I think I have that passion but I only have it for music and it just took me a while to want to be a singer but I think it probably always was going to be the music.”
You spoke about open mics in New York, do you think you would have got there had you stayed in Ireland?
“I think I would have.
“It just might have taken me a little longer to get comfortable.
“If I stayed in Ireland and I made friends with people who wanted to be in a band and somebody else was happy to be the singer, I think I probably would have just been a drummer.
“But I just had this feeling of urgency to do it and I couldn’t find people to be in a band with and I loved more than anything writing songs.
“I think I would have got to it eventually but the anonymity of being in a new city, being in a city as big as New York and also being in a place like New York where everybody is kind of backing themselves, it kind of gives you permission to do that in a way that I don’t know is the same culture in Ireland.
“We’re not as confident in ourselves sometimes maybe.
“I think that’s growing in recent years.
“But when I was 18 and I moved to New York, I would sometimes show songs that I had to friends in school and everybody was really encouraging of it.
“There was just a freedom when I got to New York.
“I would send my demos to my friends in my dorm in college and then I’d come home and I’d hear a song that I had blaring out of someone’s window and I think that gave me so much confidence.
“I just think it would have taken me a while in Ireland.”
We spoke about this album being different, does it feel like a reset perhaps?
“It feels like redirecting the needle a little bit.
“I really liked my first two albums but I almost felt like this was an album that was missing from my discography in order to understand me as a songwriter.
“Looking at my first albums I was like, ‘What album haven’t I made yet?’
“What I think will actually really represent me is this one which is more of a singer-songwriter album.”
Draw the Outline by Sorcha Richardson is out now.
Sorcha Richardson plays Lennox Street Grocer in Dublin on Saturday 12 September, Plugd Records in Cork on Sunday 13 September, The Commercial in Limerick on Sunday 13 September, Banquet Records in London on Monday 14 September and Rough Trade Denmark Street in London on Tuesday 15 September and Poblacht in Galway on Wednesday 16 September.
Sorcha Richardson tours the UK and Ireland in November.
For more information, go to sorcharichardson.os.fan.
