Amy McCarthy - Irish Artist Of The Week

0:00Amy, I suppose first off, tell us a little bit about you. I was born on the west coast of Ireland. My mom's from Kilrush and my other side of the family are from Galway. My mom's family were heavily involved in the arts. I never got to meet a lot of her family. They passed on before I met my appearance. But they were involved in making the costumes for the pantos. And they were very much involved in the five-and-drum bands down in Kilrush. And although I never met them, the music really did translate over to us. So we all say it's like something that's in her bones. Then I suppose when I was growing up, I was in choirs. And I thought myself guitar and then later I'm piano. I was writing from a really, really young age. When I was about 12, we had Christmas concerts in big school. I can do a school for that. My first every time doing that concert, I got up and I played a song that I had wrote for my mother about her parents. Just this 12-year-old girl getting off singing a song in front of the whole school and all the parents for three nights has just blows my mind a little bit and they're thinking back about it to be honest. So I was involved in that Christmas concert every year that it was on in school.

1:03And then I suppose after school, I wanted to do music teaching. But those things didn't happen for me. And that was fine. So I started working as a chef. In that time, I knew myself I always wanted to go back to music. So at 18, I got my first and only tattoo. And that was a music symbol on my hip. And that was basically to tell me to know when the time's right, you'll come back to it. Although these doors have an open free now, eventually you'll come back and it'll open for you. That's kind of where I am now. Before COVID, I got to travel a lot. I left Ireland on my 22nd birthday and moved to the Cayman Islands where I lived and worked as a scuba diving instructor. It's just crazy again. So I've had a crazy life so far to be honest. But in all the time traveling, like I spent about seven, eight years traveling around, I did Southeast Asia, South America, Australia, France. Doing all of those things, there was something that was missing. And I kind of felt like I wasn't being true to myself. And although I was doing things that were amazing,

2:05it was always music that was calling me to kind of come home and to give it a go. So that was always something that was missing for me. And you've got a grace, clear connection, which I actually didn't realise. I knew that you grew up in the west of Ireland. But Keel Rush is only just down the road from us here in Anna's lake. That's it. I do go down regularly still. My auntie still lives down there. Although my uncle Joseph doesn't live down there, he lives up in Dublin and he's a music teacher as well. So yeah, it's just lots and lots of connections. I always say that at gigs, I'll play something like the Fields of Athens Rye, and then afterwards I'll be like, no, from my clear connection, and play something like my lovely Rose of Claire, or you know, Spansell Hill. Who do you look up to now when you're writing and performing in your music? My main influence, and I know she's massive, but Pink was a massive influence for me. When I was travelling south America, I was doing like a kind of meditative journaling thing and decided this crazy idea that I would write a letter to Pink, never with the intention of giving it to her anthem. But it was just how her music,

3:06and especially her lyric writing, was it so subjective like you listen to a song and you internalise it, whatever way you internalise it, and it means whatever to you, but it could be completely different from the point of the artist. And I think Pink does that so well. Yeah, so then I ended up writing her the letter, and by the grace of gods, I don't know how this happened, but I managed to get Golden Circle tickets to see her. Oh, wow. My first time seeing her in the Ordeus, and I got my letter to her. So that is brilliant. How did this happen? This is crazy. My hand writing there in Pink's hand, and that was kind of the start of me, you know, saying, all right, if I could do this, I can kind of do anything. So that was the start of the music stuff for me. How would you describe your style of music? I don't like to put myself into a box, describing like a specific genre. I love, like, solid actors are a massive influence to me. I love a meldame, further songwriting abilities, and just to be able to write a story. Like there's not one person who doesn't listen to the N17, who's from the West Coast of Ireland, and can't relate to that, you know?

4:07And I think that's just like so powerful. I also love artists like Izzy Hale from HaleStorm. She's just phenomenal, like, and her songwriting is amazing. She has a song called The Silence, and it's just every time Goosebumps. So I'm always looking for that when I'm listening to a song, if it, like, gives me Goosebumps, and I can really feel it, like, you know? Your track, Rain, is the reason we are chatting. I suppose tell us a little bit about it, and is there a personal story behind it for you? Yeah, so Rain was kind of conceived through a three-day songwriting workshop, and the prompt with it was listen to a nature sound, and then from the nature sound, just, you know, sit there with whatever instrument or with your voice, and whatever comes out comes out. I tried a few different sounds out, and then I really liked this one, where it was like Rain in the background, and Thunder in Lightning. So that's where the song was born, with the actual meaning of the song. It's really one from the heart, and it's well been stuck in your own thoughts, and not being able to let go of things

5:07even though you have to to move on. Kind of struggling in that rebirth. I have a line in it that says, my compass is broken, I can't find myself at all, and I think that line perfectly explains the feeling behind the sound, like just wanting to be found, but feeling like you're kind of trapped in the rain. But also Rain comes along, and it washes everything clean, so things get like a rebirth. Being a songwriter, you must have, like, ice was grace, like, unze imagination, but does it come naturally to you? I think so. I think my ability to put myself into somebody else's shoes, and just look at their situation without bringing in any of my own personal thoughts or reflections, and just understanding that the world is so different for everybody, and nobody can see the world, the way somebody else sees the world, because of their experiences. And the more people that can be accepting of that, and the more people can be kinder towards that, I think the world would be a much better place, and that's something I really want to emphasize with my songwriting. It's about inclusion, and just that we're all here for a blink of an eye,

6:09and also, like, let's just accept it, and try our best to make each other happy, and understand it as best as we can. I stumbled across your TikTok one evening after a book in this interview with you, but we're going to just go into social media just for a little bit. How important do you think it is for an artist nowadays to have a social media presence? So social media, I love it, and I hate it. I do think it's necessary. It's a good free platform, I mean free, as far as, you know, you can get your videos up on there. It's a good platform to be able to show yourself to others, but the problem I have with it is if you think of social media and the internet as a big, massive picture, when I go on social media, I am one pixel on that huge picture. So trying to be seen with everybody else who's trying to be seen can be quite difficult, but it does give you a ground to be promoting yourself and to show what you're doing to everybody else. I also don't like how it kind of takes away

7:09from the creative process because you release a song and then you have to make these videos where people are going to be, you know, kind of funneled into your web pages through it. And I feel like you get such a dopamine hit from the instant gratification when you release something that it really kind of, like it's very draining to try and answer everybody's queries and get back to everybody in a timely manner. I love it and I hate it at the same time, if that's an acceptable thing, you know. I mean, other artists have said to me, like it's genuinely like a full-time job trying to manage their social media. It's absolutely crazy to know, like if you think you've like everything all the tees crossed and the eyes started and then it's like, oh no, you've missed this step. Yeah! But it's good too, like, and I have come into contact with a lot of other artists through it and I've found a lot of support through it. So it's not all bad, like there's definitely good things from social media as well. What has been a career highlight for you so far?

8:11So I'm still a little baby with my career. I started releasing my songs, I think it was two years ago, just about maybe three years ago. So me getting stuff up on the streaming platforms was kind of what I was focusing on. And I had to find the right producer, I had to find the right musicians, and that took me a long time because finding people who you really trust and finding people who are on the same pages, you have the same passion that you have, that was something that was really important. What does the rest of the year look like for you? Can we expect maybe an EP anytime soon off, yeah? Yeah, and of course. So I have two more songs that are kind of in the pipeline at the moment. Like I was saying earlier, I don't time myself to genre, so you can expect kind of Anatan. In the direction of where the songs are going to, where there's going to be a pop song or a rock song, or even then maybe a ballad or something that's Irish influenced. The two songs I have coming up,

9:12one is called Sunrise, and that one is in our family, we got some not so good news about one of our members. So this song was helping me to come to terms with the fact that you know, life happens and life finishes. It's just my way of coming to terms with that. So that song is called Sunrise, and that's going to be the next one I believe, and the one after that is going to be a song about Buzz Aldrin. That's a funny story, too. So I was doing another one of these songwriting courses, and we got a letter as a prompt. It didn't say who the letter was from, or who the letter was going to, but it was basically this person who had this idea in their mind that they wanted to go and colonize another planet. And so I wrote the song, it wasn't called Buzz Aldrin at the time, but I wrote the song. And after we had revealed all of our songs to each other in the chorites, the woman presenting it said, look, that's that that letter was actually from Buzz Aldrin to one of the senators in America. And I was like, no way.

10:13I'd actually met Buzz Aldrin in the Cayman Islands when I lived there, because he came scuba diving with us. I was like, what? How did this happen? Or I don't know, it's just so funny, things seem to just fall into place so beautifully sometimes. Yeah, so that song is basically about being unconditioned and having the mindset that you can do whatever you want, no matter what happens in the world. And it's kind of something similar to like, job pick Murphy's, a little bit of Timothy. Yeah, so looking forward to that one. And I suppose finally, where can people find you on social media if they're looking to stay up to date? So you can find me on Instagram. Instagram will be the main one. And I'm on Facebook as well. And you can find me at Amy McCarthy official.