Niamh Regan: Why she turned away from teaching to become a singer
Niamh Regan's new album Come As You Are is released on Friday, May 31. Picture: Molly Keane
Niamh Regan thought she had it all figured out. Married and qualified as a teacher, she saw a safe, predictable future ahead of her. But then, in 2020, the plaintive collection of folk songs the Galway artist had recorded in her downtime became a word-of-mouth success, and she had the opportunity to go into music full-time. Her new album, Come As You Are, tells the moving story of what happened next.
“It was a rough patch. Much was down to me. And the change in our lifestyles. Before I put out the first record, I was getting ready to get into full-time teaching. Steady Freddy, kids all that stuff was what was on the table. Then the album came out and all that went away,” she says from her base in Kilrickle, a small village near Loughrea in Galway.
Hemet, her debut, is named after the hometown of her California-born husband, Wesley Houdyshell. They met when Houdyshell randomly googled her and asked if she could help him arrange Irish shows for his band. From there, one thing led to another.
The reviews for Hemet were unanimously positive. The LP went on to receive nominations for the Choice Music Prize for Irish Album of the Year and for the RTÉ Folk Awards.
The record’s breakthrough caught Regan and her husband unawares. On Come As You Are, Regan explores the push and pull she felt between her artistic ambitions and her desire for a simple, drama-free life.
The lyrics are unflinching. ‘Hard enough to say it/ doesn’t mean it’s complicated,’ she sings on 'Long Haul', a stark rumination on relationship angst. But there is love, too. “The moment I left you, I realised there was more to this miserable life of mine,” she sings on 'Mortgage' – a tender-hearted portrait of marriage and its challenges (including getting on the property ladder).
It makes for a stunning listen – illuminated by Regan’s clear, expressive voice and material rooted in the Joni Mitchell/Carole King confessional songwriter milieu. These are also subjects we can all relate to in our own way: who hasn’t reached a crossroads in life and agonised over which direction to take?
“It was a transition that should have been really lovely. It was more of a shock I guess. There’s a lot of that. Being a married woman in the music industry – I was putting a ticking time-bomb on myself and there wasn’t necessarily all that pressure. It’s about communication and all that jazz. I was exploring some of those ideas.”
The other transition came from the realisation there was now an audience for her work. Going from obscurity to the spotlight was an adjustment, and her self-confidence suffered.
“It’s the typical stereotype of the second album being quite difficult. There is definitely an element of that. ‘Oh, I can’t believe I’m doing a second album’. The wonderful thing about this adventure is that I made all the money from making music and got to put it back into music, which was exciting. I was also feeling very nervous about it all. I went into my head too much. I wasn’t expecting people to like the first one the way they did.”
She was gripped with anxiety. “Suddenly I had the pressure of, ‘oh gosh, what if they don’t like this one?’. I think that is typical enough. Come the third year of writing this album I started going a little bit easier on myself and writing again for myself. That’s how I started [as a songwriter]. And that’s how I will keep going. It took me a while – two years, to be precise – to get over myself and get back into enjoying making music for music’s sake.”.
Not every moment on the LP is personal. The opening track, 'Madonna', is about the epidemic of violence against women in society (“The night they found her dead”). The lyrics don’t offer answers – instead, they question our attitudes towards gender-based violence and why it remains such a scourge.
“That’s definitely what I was going for, with all the questions. That’s my biggest fear as a songwriter – to have a song that sounds preachy. I’d rather always leading with the idea.”
So far, so good for the new album, with early reviews including glowing words from Uncut: "There’s a touch of Laura Marling in her voice, something of John Martyn in her intonation and Nick Drake in her guitar picking, the influence of everyone from Jeff Tweedy to Josh Ritter in her crafted storytelling.”
There is an ongoing debate about the state of modern songwriting. Should artists conjure an air of mystery in their work? Or is it better to follow the examples of Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo, whose writing is hyper-specific?
Regan has toured with country-influenced pop writer CMAT and shared festival bills with artists such as Lisa Hannigan and Talos, so she has experience of songwriting in many incarnations. She can see why people gravitate to Taylor Swift and the breadcrumbs about old boyfriends scattered through her material.
“It’s almost decoding things and stuff. Which is cool and it’s a bit of fun as long as it’s healthy boundaries. I don’t know if poor Taylor Swift has much healthy boundaries going on for herself, the way [people] are dissecting things to a forensic level almost,” she says.
“If people are getting fun out of it, why not? If they are really enjoying it, as long as the artist is enjoying it. What I’ve learned is that you might think the song you’ve finished, you tell everyone this is what it’s about… Nobody wants to know about that – they want to take their own meaning from it. That’s where the fun is isn’t it. It’s a very personal thing. You have to give the song away once it’s done.”
- Come As You Are is released May 31. Niamh Regan plays Cyprus Avenue, Cork, November 14
