Niamh Regan: ‘Cultural venues are vital — they give you a physical space to create community’
Folk artist Niamh Regan is stepping into a very busy November, playing full band shows across Ireland, kicking off with an intimate performance at Other Voices: Home at the Guinness Storehouse on Wednesday, November 13. We sat down with the Galway native to discuss the art of songwriting, the confidence that’s grown by virtue of live performance and the vital importance of cultural spaces.
Niamh Regan is an Irish folk singer-songwriter whose music goes to great depths; lyrically, sonically, and emotionally. Her debut album, Hemet, was released in 2020 and provided the perfect introduction to a reflective artist adept at the craft of lacing the personal with a tinge of universality, creating music that captivates.
“I did a trad course down in UL and I absolutely loved it,” Niamh tells me over Zoom. “I came from a big trad household where it was all very grúpa ceoil, ceilí band, singing ballads. I pursued music until the age of 21 when I decided to become a primary school teacher through Hibernia. I loved it, but the minute I got the piece of paper qualifying me as a teacher, I released my first album, and I never looked back.”
A life working in music is not something that Niamh thought of as a viable career path until she found herself in the throes of it, but she’s clear on the fact that stability is fleeting in this line of work. “I’ve heard people equate a career in music to a gambling addiction,” she explains. “One month might be quiet, but you keep on hoping that something comes along so that when it does, you forget why you were worried. It’s all about the rush.”
Naturally, the success of Hemet yielded quite the rush indeed, as it garnered nominations for both the RTE Folk Awards and the highly coveted Choice Music Prize ‘Album of the Year’. It did, however, set some extremely high expectations for what would come next.
“When you’re writing, you’re existing in your own bubble,” Niamh says, “But when you release your music, you’re opening that bubble up to whoever will listen. It goes from being this very private thing to something that’s extremely public very quickly. It’s a perfect recipe for overthinking.”
Speaking of the discomfort that comes with approaching a second album after such a successful debut, Niamh admits that the weight of expectation and potential judgement was something she struggled with when sitting down to create Come As You Are, an 11-track record that was released this past May. “When you’re putting your work—and yourself—out there, there’s going to be a certain level of judgement,” she says. “That’s just life, but coming to grips with that is tough. As I work on my third record, I’m realising that more and more.”
Niamh’s sound has an extremely intimate quality, in both the melody and the subject matter, and one would be forgiven for assuming that the lyrics that spring forth when she puts pen to paper flow from a deeply personal well of experience. “I find it difficult to talk about a song sometimes because more often than not, it just happens,” Niamh says of the process. “You sit with the page, words come out, and you tinker away at them until you figure out what you’ve said.”
“I only resonate very personally with a couple of lines in a song; the rest is dressed up, it’s art. You hide parts yourself inside this personal thing and add a pinch of salt. I might write about something I resonate with deeply, but that does not necessarily mean that I have a first-hand experience of it. I struggle with my songs and records being perceived as my diary because I am quite private as a person, and having mystery in a song helps. It’s all about interpretation.”
The topics covered across Come As You Are span self-doubt, uncertainty about life’s direction, whether relationships are flourishing in the way you’d hoped, and determining priorities. Its result is an acutely observed journey of an album and evokes in the listener feelings of compassion, yes, but also the feeling of being seen and understood.
“The key thing to any story is empathy,” Niamh explains. “If people listen with an empathetic ear, they’re going to hear so much more and relate to it so much more. Exposure to stories and music from an early age is the key to empathy. It nurtures us to think about ourselves, but also to think about something bigger.”
Niamh’s early forays into sharing her music with an audience took place within the walls of The Black Gate in Galway, a cultural home that’s just announced that it will be opening its doors to great excitement. “I think these cultural venues are vital because they give you a physical space to create a community,” Niamh tells me. “I did so many support slots in The Black Gate, I was going in again and again, meeting people and growing my confidence as a performer. Without that, artists don’t get to figure out what they’re doing or listen to others.”
“We exist all over social media, and have conversations and show support online, but there’s nothing better than being there, making progress together. The Black Gate did that for me; they saw that I wanted to do something, and they nurtured that. They weren’t a label, but they pooled resources together to help it get it over the line. I really believe that Hemet did so well because it came from a place of an awful lot of love and support. If the ingredients are good, the end product will be good.”
In the intervening years, Niamh has embarked on headline tours across Ireland, the UK, Australia, Spain and more. From festival sets to playing support for artists including CMAT, Villagers, John Grant, SOAK, Patrick Watson, Sam Amidon, Cormac Begley, and Sorcha Richardson, I ask whether there’s a standout show or achievement that serves as a highlight, but for Niamh, her career highlight is not so much an accolade as a moment of everything falling into place.
“It’s not so much a gig, but a noticeable feeling of confidence that came with time and experience. It was a confidence in knowing what I needed when I was on stage. It was a moment that made me realise that I know what’s going on. I used to apologise for existing when I walked into venues, and now I know I can do it, and I can do it with confidence. It was the growth marked from my first gig to that point, that’s my highlight.”
Though Niamh is currently in the process of piecing together what will become her third album, November is a very busy live music month for this artist. Her Irish full band tour stops off at Cyprus Avenue, Cork on November 14, Liberty Hall Theatre, Dublin on November 15, and finishes up in Róisín Dubh, Galway on November 16, but kicks off with an intimate performance alongside collaborator SOAK at Other Voices: Home at the Guinness Storehouse on Wednesday, November 13.
“I’ve got a song—‘Record’—at the end of my album that I wrote with SOAK, so it will be really nice to get to sing that with Bridey and a full band,” Niamh says of what we can expect from the performance, which will be live streamed on the OV YouTube page. “The song came at the very end of the process. It has all the emotions that went into the whole three-plus years of the process. That song, in particular, was very cathartic for me.”
Tickets for Niamh Regan’s ‘Come As You Are’ tour are on sale now.
Photography by Molly Keane.
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