I first heard Avril sing one night on a beach in Sligo, and I was blown away. She has an easy, gentle way with melody, and her direct delivery flecked with moments of intense intimacy heightens the emotion in her songs. There are occasional traditional Irish music inflections in the way she ornaments some vocal phrases, and her guitar style echoes the British folk scene, both old and new.
I convinced her that we should work on her first EP together, as she did not have a band and I could hear a world that her songs could inhabit that would need some extra instrumentation.
DESCRIPTION
I first heard Avril sing one night on a beach in Sligo, and I was blown away. She has an easy, gentle way with melody, and her direct delivery flecked with moments of intense intimacy heightens the emotion in her songs. There are occasional traditional Irish music inflections in the way she ornaments some vocal phrases, and her guitar style echoes the British folk scene, both old and new.
I convinced her that we should work on her first EP together, as she did not have a band and I could hear a world that her songs could inhabit that would need some extra instrumentation.
Check out some sample audio clips in the TRACKLIST.
Our first step was to talk about where we wanted to go with Avril’s demos, identify any artists she liked, and go through the recordings by those artists in detail to plot a strategy for recording. Avril had some songs that she had written on guitar, others on piano, so we picked a mixture as the best representation of what she does.
We started by recording new “demo” versions on my system so we could chop them up, analyse tempos, and craft the final demos for recording. We worked on the songs’ structures, crafting very distinct sections where no real distinction existed previously. This is common with singer/songwriters as they have to operate within the dramatic confines of what a single guitar or piano can do, and we wanted to reach past that where possible. Many times it was a case of me coming up with a new guitar sound, synth patch, bell noise, or whatever, and letting Avril off to explore melodies, basically see what would happen. We also focused in on overly repetitive chord patterns, substituting new ones in paces to add unexpected subtle changes in colour.
All of the drums, guitars and vocals were recorded in Bay Studio, Wicklow. We tended to split the days, doing some guitars in the mornings and vocals in the afternoons. This way Avril wasn’t singing for more than a couple of hours at a time, and we could hop from room to room to do guitars or vocals as we saw fit. The drums were performed by Paul Lally, an amazing jazz-trained drummer who really brought a new dimension to the tracks he is on.
With primary recording finished, there were still other things to go down. Some synths and pianos were recorded in Bay, and then back in my production studio we recorded in any remaining synth lines, bass, and other “treats for the ear”. We would take away mixes, live with them for a while, and see what needed to be altered, added, or removed.
Once finished we went to the very talented Fergal Davis for mastering.
