Growing up in the tiny Irish village of Ballyporeen with a population of 500 people, singer-songwriter Gemma Hayes as a young child thought country living to be quite boring.
As a way of alleviating the monotony, she would spend time playing the piano. With seven other siblings and a father who played keyboards in a local band, Hayes was exposed to the vast world of music at an early age.
She later enrolled in the University of Dublin and began skipping classes to play her roommate's guitar. Hayes eventually left school to pursue a career in music. She worked at a launderette by day and performed in Dublin clubs by night.
If you had to describe Hayes' music, it would be a mix of the raw, unpolished elements of rock with melodic lines common to folk music and unique instrumentation that seems to float around on its own throughout her songs.
Wy: You are the youngest of eight children. Are any of your siblings also musicians?
Hayes: The rest of them are musical, but they've decided not to take it on as a career. So in that sense, I will be the only one in the family who went ahead and did something with it.
Having a parent who is a musician, how do you think that has affected your musical path?
It's a funny one because my dad played the keyboards in a funny little band in which they all looked like country musicians. They called themselves "The Hillbillies," and played waltzes and fox trots, so I wouldn't like to think that it left that big of an impression on me, but I think that's where I got the mixture. I tend to mix my music. It's not one or the other and I think I maybe got that from my dad.
Many critics have compared you to Liz Phair, Joni Mitchell and Beth Orton, and maybe you listen to them, but I'm wondering what other kind of music do you like?
It's the way of the world that I will always be compared to other females. Bands like Mogawi, Wheat, Nirvana and My Bloody Valentine are the bands that have always stayed with me. There is just an intensity and a raw thing to what they do that just blows me away. There are people like Joni Mitchell who are just amazing at what they do separate of their sex. When her name comes up referring to influences, some people say I sound like her and I just think, 'Yeah right. Only in my dreams.' This is no joke but I had heard that I was being compared to Liz Phair and I kept saying, 'Who the hell is this girl?' I picked up a magazine the other day and there she was on the front cover. She's somebody whom I've definitely heard of, but I have absolutely no idea what she sounds like. I've never heard her voice or her music.
I read somewhere that you don't consider yourself a natural entertainer. You recently toured with Counting Crows and many would say Adam Duritz (lead singer of Counting Crows) is the quintessential entertainer. Did you learn anything by watching him on stage?
I was envious when I watched him perform. It comes so easy to him. He's such a warm person who just opens his arms to thousands of people and makes everybody feel comfortable. Watching Adam Duritz perform, he was just so professional. If they had a crisis on stage, he covered it up. It's one of things that I can look at and think, 'God I'd love to be like that.' I couldn't take anything from him because it has to do with his personality. It is nothing I could learn. He just has it, whatever that little factor "X" is, to be comfortable on stage.
So how do you approach the stage?
I think being an entertainer, it's a talent that people don't talk about enough. People talk about music but it's an amazing thing to be an entertainer. Sometimes you have a musician who is forced into being an entertainer and it doesn't suit them. The thing is, I have my good days and my bad days. I approach stage as something where I get up and play my songs, and I'm slightly uncomfortable with the attention, but at the same time I put myself there. It's this constant battle of loving it and hating it and being nervous and really enjoying it at the same time. I wouldn't call myself an entertainer, I would call myself a performer. There is a difference.
The album represents this shift in themes from day to night with a change in the music. The differences between night and day in terms of a setting for creativity, what is it about the night that allows for a different flow of ideas than that of the day?
I write most of my stuff at night, even the stuff that ended up on the record as the daytime stuff. Nighttime for me is just a magical time. It's a time when people start to open up a little bit more. I think people let go of that daytime way of thinking with dates, times and meetings. I also love that feeling of working on stuff and feeling like the world is mine for a few hours because everybody else is asleep. Just that sense of quietness in the world, I find it really inspiring. I actually find it really hard to write during the day because it's just too cluttered, too many thoughts, the kind of practical logistical thoughts and not kind of real thinking.
Your approach to music is interesting since you rely just as heavily on instrumentation as you do on the lyrics to evoke feelings. Were there times when it was hard for you to put lyrics to parts of a song where you thought words might clutter the music?
Absolutely. There are a lot of rules about writing songs that I just ignore because for me music is probably one of the few things left in this world that is totally free if you let it be. It has no boundaries. For me, the melody is what inspires me to write lyrics in the first place. I don't write lyrics cold on a piece of paper. I need a melody first and then it creates a mood in my head which makes me think of something which makes me write. Sometimes the melody is too strong and putting lyrics on top of it takes away from it. So what I do is try and not dilute it but turn it into a more concentrated form.
Like the song 'Tear in My Side'?
Yes. I took one line and just repeated it. The line means so much to me because I and a lot of people in the world suffer from panic attacks. It's about that intense feeling you get and how you can't control it. It just means so much and the line is so potent that I just didn't want to use anything else. A lot of people said, 'God, Gemma, can you not think of another line? That thing just goes around and around.' But this is it, this is what I wanted to say. I wanted it to keep going and going and going until you nearly want to pull your hair out, and all the while the music is like smashing against this line. I don't think it's a comfortable song, I think it's quite awkward. I just love it for that. It's like giving birth to an ugly baby.
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