Dublin born, Brooklyn based singer/songwriter Sorcha Richardson first hit our Radar back in 2015 with the release of her critically acclaimed ‘Petrol Station’ and we’ve been hooked ever since. With the release of track ‘Waking Life’ and about to embark on tour with Imelda May, we caught up with Sorcha to find out more about her career, music, life, future and of course, FAULTs.

You’re about to set off on tour with Imelda May, excited?

I can’t wait!  Rehearsals have been so much fun. I’m excited to travel with the guys in my band. I’ve played in Cork a handful of times but it will be my first time playing the rest of the cities. And the venues are incredible. Some of the nicest in Ireland. I can’t wait to see Imelda’s show too.

Do you find your songs take on new meaning and experiences when you perform them live to a crowd?

Yeah there’s a few in the set that feel extra special to play live.  Waking Life is one.  I wrote it when I was feeling a bit dissatisfied with life and so it feels very triumphant to play it to a room full of people.   There’s another song in the set that isn’t out yet, which I wrote about leaving Dublin for New York and the consequences of that decision on my relationships with the people I left behind here.  That’s a special song to me anyway but it has an added weight when I perform it in Ireland.

You’ve been performing for many years now, what’s been your toughest hurdle to climb in your progression as an artist?

I used to have such bad stage fright and I really didn’t enjoy performing because of it. All throughout school I played the drums in bands and never ever thought of myself as a singer.  So when I moved to New York and decided I wanted to sing these songs I’d been writing, I felt so vulnerable to be at the front of the stage with a microphone rather than at the back behind a drum kit. It took a lot of really bad gigs to get over that fear. And it still comes back every now and then, usually if I haven’t played a show in a while. But now I really love performing, especially the full band shows. They kind of just feel like a party.

Waking Life touches on hope, dreams and the realism of “life isn’t always how we planned it” and lyrically it’s very cinematic “flowers dying in the kitchen” “wrapped your fingers around my bleeding heart like branches overgrow” – would you say the visual aspect of lyricism enters your mind much when you song write?

100%. Writing songs is so visual for me  It’s almost like I’m watching a moving in my head as I write.  Sometimes I’m trying to capture that visual and translate it into words. Other times I’ll know that a lyric feels right because of how vividly I can see it in my head.  Even when I write about very concrete memories, it’s like they take on an altered, distorted shape in my brain.  Like a reimagined version of events that’s almost as vivid as the real thing.

Is it hard to find inspiration when you’ve got such a unique artistry or do you just find it in places outside of simply the realm of music? 

Sometimes I just don’t feel that creative. But there’s lots of things outside of music that inspire me – a lot films, books, photography. I like reading and watching interviews with musicians or writers, even if they’re not talking about music. It’s just fascinating to me to hear different people’s turns of phrases.  There’s times when I’ll be on the train and overhear a snippet of a stranger’s conversation and that finds its way into a song.

You’re Irish born but you’ve lived in NYC for a while now, do you still feel a close connection to Dublin as home, see NYC as home or neither and feel slightly displaced in both?

Dublin will always be home.  Even spending these last few months here has been amazing cause I’ve been able to have a bit of a routine that feels like normal life rather than coming home for a 2 week holiday.   New York feels very much like home too but I don’t feel anchored to New York in the way that I do with Dublin.  It’s always felt like a very transient place to me.  People come and go a lot. It sometimes just feels like everybody’s passing through.

Right after moving to New York I had this feeling like I was in some kind of no-mans land between the two places.  I had a life in Dublin and a life in New York and they felt really disconnected from each other.  And it felt like the longer I was away from home, the bigger the gap between them would come because I was adding more and more weight to my life in New York and less and less to my life in Dublin.  But in the last 3 years or so, a lot of my Irish friends have also left home, (a good few for New York) and are friends with my New York friends and so the two worlds have kind of blended into each other.  It feels less like I’m displaced in both and more like I’m part of a generation of young Irish people who have all done the same thing.

You’ve mentioned that birthdays are a time where you reflect and reanalyse your wants and goals, what will you be hoping to achieve for when your next birthday roles around?

It was my birthday a couple weeks ago.  I want to have a better party next year.  This time around I had my friends come to my house and then I made a rash decision to go to a bar in the city centre that just resulted in everybody getting separated. In hindsight we should have just gone to the bar on my street.   So I definitely want to have a better party next year. I also want to tour more. I’d be down to live pretty nomadically for a year. Maybe also be making something that resembles an album.  I should also learn to parallel park because driving around Dublin and not being able to parallel park is a nightmare.

 

What is your FAULT?

Not knowing when to leave the party / leaving my phone at the bar