Wordsmith Lisa O’Neill paints a vivid image in her music
This feeling is amplified by her live appearances and her determined tics; a jutting of the chin here, a forceful follow though of her arm on a final note there, each one accentuating the notion that here is someone feeling each and every pang contained within those compassionate songs. The question arises of how much of a conscious performance is taking place onstage?
“Well performance is a funny word, isn’t it?” she considers. “There is very much the real person up there. But I am conscious I’m holding the attention of a group of people. Because of this I try not to go on, babble on, or repeat myself, so when it comes to performing those are the things I would take note of and try not to do.”
Clearly O’Neill takes a conscientious approach to her art. This extends to her choice of sometimes surreal and often droll remarks that constitute her between-song chatter. Yet she is wary of the idea that she may be just polishing up the same banter for each audience.
“Repetition is something I don’t like and I think can come into performance and I don’t want it in my performance. And I hate when I catch myself repeating— it’s wrong,” she scolds. “So there’s very much a lot of the moment in my performance.”
She takes a pause and decides performance isn’t the right word. What would she call it? “It’s expression.” With that she knocks any notion the audience is seeing a persona on stage. “I go somewhere else when I’m singing and when I’m in the song and I can become different characters and sometimes there’s a conversation going on; there’s not just one character in the song,” she says. “It’s being in the moment of the song and the idea of the song and also the way I feel on any given day will depend on the performance too.”
She feels it’s not necessarily obvious when she’s in bad form, but suggests that “when I’m happiest the less activity out of me.”
A lot of her songs, she says, begin with an image. Referring to her jeremiad against Bus Éireann No Train To Cavan and its reference to the fox man in a meadow, she says: “It could be watching a short movie for me. I’m watching these images and I am in them and fighting my way out of them or having my say. A lot of songs can be conversations I never got to have.”
Conversations we never get to have; there’s a topic. “And when we have time to think about them they’re perfect the way we have them; we don’t get disturbed. And we get to say things and articulate ourselves the way we like,” she says.
A recent concert saw O’Neill open with a song sung a capella, almost in Sean-nós style. It’s called ‘Red Geansaí’. She reveals: “It is an intimate song and an incident I had with a person I really cared about. So that’s all for now. This one hasn’t been recorded yet and I haven’t summed up its expression. A conversation I didn’t get to have.”
Again? “Again. But I get to kind of have them in ways when I write my songs, and I move on,” she says firmly. And then her attention is caught by another image. “I’m just watching a little blackbird having a little birdbath in the drainpipe behind my bedroom window right now,” she suddenly declares. “It’s very nice.”
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