Noelie McDonnell to Come Alive

Date Published: 05-Nov-2009

Turn on any radio station these days and it’s likely that you’ll catch yourself humming along to The Big Release, the first single from Noelie McDonnell’s new album Come Alive. The high-energy, addictively catchy song was chosen by Today FM’s Ian Dempsey as his Single of the Week and has also been featured on a range of programmes on RTÉ and local radio stations. Featuring superb saxophone playing from Hugh Fielding, it’s certainly a song that crosses genres, and Noelie laughs as he says that his father was delighted to hear it on Brendan Balfe’s RTÉ Radio 1 Show on Sunday.

Meanwhile, Noelie and his band performed live on the Ian Dempsey Show on Monday – three tracks from Come Alive were played on the Ian Dempsey Show that day.

Things are going well for the Tuam man who will perform a matinee concert in Galway’s Town Hall Theatre this Sunday at 3.00pm to mark the launch of Come Alive, which was recorded over a seven-month period between Austin, Texas, and Toronto, Canada. It’s Noelie’s third album and sees him continue to develop as a songwriter, with lyrics that are simple and insightful, frequently containing a lovely turn of phrase.

His music is classified as folk/rock, or alt rock and that’s probably the most accurate way of describing him, but it’s too narrow. Noelie’s influences range from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen to John Prine, encompassing Townes Van Zandt, Bob Dylan, Guy Clarke and Steve Earle along the way, but his voice is most definitely his own, and very definitely Irish.“

All those people sang songs that were simple and story based and local. The story element would be important to me,” he explains.This is Noelie’s fourth year as a fulltime singer/songwriter. Before taking the great leap he worked as a secondary teacher in St Pat’s secondary school in his native Tuam, where his subjects were English and History. But he says that while he liked the work and got on great with the students, he just knew teaching wouldn’t be his life-long profession.In fact, he knew from very early on that singing and songwriting was where his heart lay. He began playing guitar at the age of 12 and “picked it up pretty quickly”.

“If you could play three or four chords you could also play a full song,” he explains. And growing up in Tuam, being a musician was not unusual. “It was a perfectly acceptable career,” recalls Noelie. “Before I was around there were the showbands – a lot of them came from Tuam – and then there was a band called Blaze X who had a single in the Irish charts and opened for U2. And when I was a bit older, there was Too Much for the White Man and they were also in the charts.”

Then, in the late 1980s and early 1990s the Saw Doctors stormed the music scene with anthems such as N17 and I Useta Lover, and the Stunning were also riding high in the charts. They were another influence as their drummer, Jimmy Higgins, has family links with Tuam.“

As a young lad, you’d see these guys on the street that you’d seen on TV the night before and they’d all say hello and encourage you.”

Their encouragement fell on welcome ears – Noelie was in a band at the age of 13 and in 1991 his group took part in the legendary West’s Awake gig in Tuam which featured the Saw Docs, the Stunning and members of the Waterboys as well as a host of local talent.Noelie was writing songs at this stage too, but, while he was happy to play music, he was far more reticent about this aspect of his creativity. “I wasn’t confident about showing them to others,” he says, adding that he overcame this shyness when he lived in Galway.“

There were songwriters’ nights [in local pubs] and I used to go along them and I started playing.” That was nerve wracking initially, but the feedback was positive.

“When you play for other people you don’t know whether it’s good or not, but people liked them,” he says of the songs. “Then I was asked to open [gigs] for people such as John Martyn and John Spillane,” he says, praising the gig organisers and music pub owners who supported him in those early days.

“It brought me to a bigger audience and I was playing with people who I really respect.”

His debut self-titled album released in 2005 got an excellent response and its opening song, Stars was also picked as Ian Dempsey’s Song of the Week on Today FM.In 2008, Noelie won new fans with the wonderful single, Nearly Four, written about his nephew, which remained at No.1 in the iTunes folk chart for six weeks. The album that song was taken from, Beyond Hard Places saw Noelie being hailed by The New York Post as a startlingly good new Irish talent’. It spent two months in the iTunes Top 10 folk album charts.

The world isn’t exactly short of singer/songwriters and, so it can be difficult to get a break, says Noelie, who says that “a lot of it must be down to luck”.

Ian Dempsey has been a fan since the beginning and that has been a huge help.

“He and his production team seem to like what I do and I’m lucky in that because he has a popular radio show.”

But, while luck is important, it’s not the only factor. “If you are dedicated to something, there are ways of making it work for you.” And when it comes to dedication, he has earned his stripes.

His music and his personality have led to him getting support from a variety of sources from the Saw Doctors to American folk legend Greg Brown. It was when he supported Brown during the Iowan’s show at Campbell’s Tavern in July 2008 that Noelie unwittingly laid the groundwork for this new album, Come Alive.

Brown subsequently invited Noelie to open up on some US dates which lead to the Tuam man playing at the International folk conference in Memphis, performing with the elite of Americana including Anais Mitchell, Devon Sproule and Jess Klein among others. After that, he went to Austin, Texas, to start work on Come Alive at the Aerie Studio with producer and engineer Mark Addison. Noelie finished the recording with musician/producer Don Kerr (Ron Sexsmith, Rheostatics) in Canada at the end of this summer.

America has been an important outlet for Noelie’s talent and he goes there twice a year, performing for a few weeks each time. He’ll be returning in February and August, and doing some shows in England in December but in the meantime he has a series of gigs lined up at home to promote the album.

“I want to get as much publicity for that as I can and pick up more fans. If you get people along to the gigs, they tend to come back.”

Noelie McDonnell plays the Town Hall Theatre at 3pm on Sunday and tickets are available from the venue, online at tht.ie or by phone at 091-569777.