Maxine Linehan: Cork-born singer creates a Christmas album in Vermont

Raised in Crosshaven, the US-based singer says she wanted her songs to reflect the fact that many people have mixed emotions about Christmas, not least as it always reminds her of her late parents back home

Thu, 10 Dec, 2020 - 20:30

Ellie O’Byrne

Her home is in the snowy winter wonderland of southern Vermont, but singer Maxine Linehan always keeps a place in her heart for Cork.

Linehan, now celebrating two decades of living Stateside, was raised in Crosshaven and retains close connections to her home town, despite having built her Broadway musical career in New York. It was a late blossoming for the red-haired chanteuse, who had pursued a career in law up until the age of thirty, she explains.

“As much as I wanted to pursue the arts, it wasn’t encouraged in my family as a secure career, so I moved to London and studied law,” Linehan says. “I joined a firm that moved me to New York. I had suppressed the arts for a long time, but you get to New York and the vibrancy of the arts is all around you. It made me realise that it’s absolutely my calling and my passion.”

As a girl, Linehan had been bitten by the performing bug while in secondary school in Coláiste Mhuire in Crosshaven; her earliest memories of musical productions are in Cork.

“My picture was in The Examiner for my first ever role,” she says. “The Irish Operatic Repertory Company did The Sound of Music and I was one of the Von Trapps. We did a photo shoot on the steps of Le Chateau: I was in my uniform because I came straight from school. That literally was the beginning of my story on stage. I remember being very upset because I wasn’t cast as Liesl; as a teenager I looked like I was 12 so I was cast as Louisa Von Trapp and I was very offended, which I think is really funny. I didn’t want to take the role.”

When Linehan finally traded the security and perks of a corporate career for the perils of building a music career from scratch, she was spurred on not only by the heady atmosphere of the Big Apple, but also, she says, by the diagnosis of both her parents with terminal illnesses.

Her father was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, while her mother struggled to get a diagnosis for what was eventually discovered to be Pick’s disease, a form of Alzheimer's.

They were still living in Crosshaven: hundreds of kilometres away across the Atlantic, coming to terms with her parents’ diagnoses led, Linehan says, to what she describes as a life-altering moment.

"You realise that any day it can be over, that you never know what life has planned so you have to make the most of today. I realised I had to do what was right for me, for my life.”

Linehan’s father, Patrick, finally succumbed to MND a decade ago, shortly after her wedding to songwriter and producer Andrew Koss, with whom she now has two children, aged ten and seven.

Maxine Linehan's album, This Time Of Year.

“I’m so incredibly fortunate to have this wonderful life and my incredible family, but it is at Christmastime that I think about the joy my parents would get out of seeing my children and it’s heart-breaking for me and it always will be; it’s a huge sorrow in my life.” A

n immigrant’s tendency towards nostalgia for all things connected to home during the festive season is, Linehan predicts, going to be heightened this year due to ongoing Covid-19 related travel restrictions.

Her heightened awareness that Christmas can be bittersweet or downright difficult for many has inspired This Time of Year, the Christmas album she’s just released; it’s an album that balances classics like 'The Perfect Year' from Sunset Boulevard, or 'Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas' with songs penned by Linehan and her husband, songs that serve up more nuance than the saccharine sentiments frequently found on Christmas albums.

“I didn’t want to become a part of that traditional holiday music; that’s not what we were trying to do with this album,” Linehan says. “Knowing that this year was going to be very difficult for a lot of people and that a lot of people were going to be separated from family, people who may have lost loved ones over the course of this year, we really wanted to acknowledge that.

“This year, we’re forced to stay home and that’s going to make people look inwards: the response so far to this album has been that this is the holiday record for this year because I think a lot of us just need a good cry. I think it’s important we’re allowed to do that.”