Talent Show

By Joe Kavanagh

Julie Feeney makes me sick. There I said it, and although I thought it might, it actually doesn't make me feel all that much better by saying it out loud.

The reason that Julie Feeney makes me sick is not because her music makes me nauseous, as her genre-melding music manages to sound incredibly appealing whilst practically defying description; the sign of a truly talented artist.

It is certainly not her appearance that make me feel ill because she is beautiful, so beautiful in fact that she has worked as a professional model.

While other music stars often make me want to vomit or even break things due to their downright stupidity, selfishness and vacuous nature, Julie Feeney induces no such emotions in me because she is supremely intelligent, generous of spirit and one of the more cerebral people in music today.

Instead, the reason that Julie Feeney makes me sick is a combination of all of the above because, you see, Julie Feeney is what one might term a supremely talented overachiever, whose dizzying array of gifts make me feel very ordinary indeed. Less than ordinary in fact.

Award-winning songwriter, composer, model, scholar and even an accomplished athlete, Julie Feeney has flown about as close to perfection as one human has any right to, and, to make matters worse, she now returns with an album that only confirms her immense talent; one that should be enough to announce her to the entire world.

Raised in Athenry, County Galway, by her school principal mother, Julie Feeney's early years were very sheltered by her own admission, as she was taught to appreciate the value of learning from a very young age.

Coupled with this acute appreciation for knowledge was a deep and abiding love of music, but unlike most children, whose earliest encounters with music range from pop to purple dinosaurs, Feeney fell in love with classical music, and her earliest musical memory is of hearing Haydn's 'Surprise' symphony for the first time at 4-years-old.

While she also harbored ambitions of being a magician and missionary as a child, it was music that grew to become the biggest love of her life, as she began picking up and learning musical instruments the way others might learn card games while growing up.

By her mid-teens she was an accomplished musician and scholar, honing the former skills as part of the Galway Youth Orchestra and furthering the latter aptitude by leaving to study music and psychology while still only 16-years-old at University College Cork, where she would eventually achieve the first of her master's degrees.

It was also during this time that she embarked on a part-time modeling career, working both in print and on runways, in order to help fund her time at university.

A devoted student of classical music, she also made her mark as a musician, composing a piece while still a teenager that was considered sufficiently good enough for a performance in the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London.

Her scholastic career continued at Trinity College Dublin, where she attained another master's degree, this one in media technology.

It was also during her time in Trinity that she began performing in public for the first time, appearing at various venues around the capital with a full band, but she immediately ran into some difficulty as she tried to reconcile her classical training with the more contemporary band format.

She has since claimed that her efforts failed to please either side, and shelving her live ambitions, she instead dedicated herself to working on the arrangements for each song, while dividing the rest of her time between singing professionally with the National Chamber Choir, and working on a remarkable third master's degree, the latest one in education.

She eventually began recording her new compositions in her own tiny bedroom studio, even going so far as to play all 11 instruments on the album.

Continuing to tap into her vast reserves of ability and determination, she designed her own artwork and launched her own record label, Mittens (named after her mother's favorite cat), in order to release the album that would eventually become known as 13 Songs.

In her capacity as her own manager, she also sent copies of the album accompanied by hand-written letters, to anyone that she felt might listen to it, and if she heard that anyone in the Irish media was interested in it, she immediately jumped in a taxi and personally delivered a copy to them before they could change their mind.

The entire undertaking placed her under an immense financial strain, forcing her to acquire loans in creative ways, such as telling the bank that she needed to replace her windows and instead plowing the money into an album that she fully believed in. She did not have to wait long for vindication.

Within weeks of its release, critical praise began being heaped upon an extraordinary record that challenged the listener, even as it drew them in with its charming allure, as it drew immediate comparisons to the likes of French chanteuse Camille, Joanna Newsom and Bjork.

Ireland's foremost music magazine, Hotpress, proudly declared: "With this debut album Julie Feeney announces herself as the most intriguing female voice ... to come out of Ireland since Sinead O'Connor ... for sheer originality, courage and raw talent, Feeney deserves to soar above and beyond even the merely excellent."

Others were quick to follow, with UK publications such as the Guardian, Observer and Daily Mail, all bowled over by her talent. Even the venerable New York Times was moved to call it a "charming, urbane and dreamy record."

The praise reached something of a crescendo when she walked away with the inaugural Choice Music Prize, (Ireland's equivalent to the Mercury Music Prize) and a cheque for some $14,000.

Of her victory, she claimed: "The money was gone within three hours. I paid off my Visa card and paid for a batch of CDs to be manufactured. It gave me enormous validation, but you don't know whether everyone's going to love your music and it's going to be commercial. I can't imagine what it would be like to be No 1 in all the charts. I think I'd prefer to be a little bit more elusive."

More importantly, the victory and all of the attendant hoopla was enough to secure her a global deal with Sony/BMG.

As you might expect with one so driven and talented, the three years since her victory have seen her embark on a seemingly boundless array of project, such as scoring and conducting a commissioned orchestral piece for the BBC, writing and producing a series of CDs aimed at teaching music to children, lecturing in education and appearing on various radio and television shows.

It was not until last year that she finally got around to beginning work on her follow-up, spending five weeks in utter isolation in an artistic retreat in County Monaghan, where she conducted a "distillation" process, as she sought to connect with something pure from deep inside her consciousness, something unprejudiced and utterly free of convention.

In her own words: "I wanted to put myself to the test. I wanted to reach that stage where you actually come to the essence of what you're feeling. And I didn't want to have any word on the album that was superfluous."

Her subsequent thoughts were eventually jotted down as essays, then transformed into poetry and eventually converted into song lyrics, before she returned to her Dublin home and spent the next four months working on transforming the songs into orchestral arrangements.

Seeking to retain the immediacy and soul of the results, she spent a single day with the Irish Chamber Orchestra, where, in one marathon session, they translated her compositions into reality.

In stark contrast to virtually every other album out there, there are absolutely no use of midi of any kind on the self-produced album, with only the vocals added afterward, giving it a remarkable freshness and organic nature.

Released last week, Pages, and lead-off single, Love Is A Tricky Thing, are nothing short of remarkable, with the former already a prohibitive favorite to be Irish album of the year, according to virtually any publication that has had the chance to review it.

Although it has drawn comparisons to the likes of Kate Bush and Stina Nordenstam, any attempt to define Julie Feeney is to do her a disservice, for she is one of Ireland's truly original artists.

While I might be more than a little jealous that this much talent could possibly exist in one person, I certainly hope she gets the recognition that she truly deserves because, in all seriousness, she is fast becoming a treasure that all Irish people should be proud of.