Rachael Lavelle was quite young when she noticed something about herself, although it was only recently that someone else pointed it out to her.
“Someone said to me the other week that I speak in the same register as other people yawn,” she says, laughing, over a cup of tea in a Dublin cafe that’s quiet before the lunchtime rush. “I always remember thinking that my speaking voice was really strange. It was much lower than everyone else’s. And then I went to a singing teacher, and I was singing for soprano. I was, like, ‘Where can we meet in the middle?’ So when I started writing my own music I was able to explore my voice in a different way.”
The Dublin musician has just released her excellent debut album, Big Dreams, which has been several years – or in fact, several decades, as most debut albums are, in a sense – in the making. The 30-year-old, who didn’t start writing songs until she was 20 or 21, was born to be a musician, although she didn’t realise it until she was in the midst of a degree in sociology and Italian at Trinity College Dublin. Lavelle’s grandfather Michael Coffey cowrote Ireland’s Eurovision entry in 1967, If I Could Choose (sung by the showband star Sean Dunphy and beaten into second place by Sandie Shaw’s Puppet on a String, FYI), as well as a musical called Carrie, both with the playwright Wesley Burrowes, of Glenroe fame.
“I grew up on Disney musicals, really – that was my introduction to music,” Lavelle says. “But I remember going over to my grandad’s house, and he was an amazing pianist. He’d play all of the Great American Songbook music: Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein. He was all about melody, so I think that really had an influence on me growing up.”
Still, it wasn’t until she took part in a musical while on her Erasmus year in Italy – it was a translation of the 2001 satirical comedy Urinetown – and sang in an Italian choir that she realised she wanted to be a songwriter, “even though I had never written any songs at that point. I just had this crazy feeling in me that I had to do this.”
After her undergraduate degree, Lavelle did a master’s in music and media technology that she says completely changed her trajectory and her approach. “But then, afterwards, I didn’t write any songs for three or four years,” she says. “I think my mind was just blown or something. I was, like, ‘Wow … There’s so much more to do.’ And also, I think because I was academic, I was thinking a lot about everything. And I thought that everything I made was really bad.”
Big Dreams eventually began to take form while Lavelle was on an artistic residency in Lisbon in 2017; she has been tinkering away at it since, holding down random jobs as a receptionist and in a perfume shop in the intervening years. She has also composed for some short films and still works as a funeral singer – the latter makes sense when you hear parts of Big Dreams, with its elegiac, otherworldly quality.
She has also attained one-to-watch status thanks to a promising 2015 EP, Superman, and her 2017 single, Perpetual Party, which caught the ear of Conor O’Brien. He invited her to sing on Full Faith in Providence, a track on Villagers’ album Fever Dreams. It is a beautifully woozy marriage of their off-kilter idiosyncrasies.
Much of Big Dreams has a hypnagogic quality, Lavelle’s dusky, full-throated vocals coiling around the snap of electronic pop, piano-led ballads or songs nodding to her compositional background, like Gratitude. Occasionally it strays into Beach House territory – no bad thing – while she cites influences that range from Joni Mitchell and Björk to Debussy and Ravel. Her lyrics, and some of the song titles, were inspired by “just living on the internet”; some of the song titles were taken from self-help videos and supposedly inspiring lifestyle influencers, which explains songs like Let Me Unlock Your Full Potential and Eat Clean.
“I have a very weird relationship with the whole self-help thing because I really hate it and it really annoys me, but I also love it and I’m so curious about it,” she says, laughing. “Maybe it’s just the stuff that I’m googling, but it’s so in my face all the time. All these influencers, I’m so curious about all of that. And I just think it’s great material to draw from: ‘Let me unlock your full potential’ and ‘eat clean’. It’s, like, how do you navigate the world when you’re trying to find yourself? And will you ever find yourself, anyway? But I’m in the songs too,” she points out, smiling. “In fairness, it’s all about me.”
By the time the title (and closing) track rolls around, it may seem like you’re hallucinating – but, no, that really is the voice of the woman who announces the stops on Dublin’s Luas tram system. Lavelle got in touch with Doireann Ní Bhriain once she realised that the song required a narrative voice that was not her own.
“Originally I’d been using a text-to-speech voice, like the Irish version of Siri, but obviously for licensing reasons I wasn’t able to use it,” she says. “The voice was so important to me, because it felt like the glue of the album in some ways. But one day I was on the Luas and I heard her voice, and it was, like, ‘Okay, light-bulb moment: she’s perfect.’” Lavelle drafted an email and agonised over sending it for months, but Ní Bhriain responded positively. “I loved working with her; she’s so nice and was really patient,” the singer says, grinning. “And obviously incredibly good at what she does. I’m very grateful that she said yes to being on the album.”
[ Tony Clayton-Lea reviews Rachael Lavelle’s Big DreamsOpens in new window ]
Big Dreams, she says, was a long time in the making; there were moments when she felt it would never be finished. Just last year, she says, she felt that it wasn’t right and had to rip it apart and restitch it to make it feel more like hers. As is befitting of an album released as winter nights encroach, this is a record to hibernate to.
“I want people to feel like it’s like a little hug. But also entertaining. It’s like a little piece of … entertainment? No, wait!,” she says, clutching her cheeks in mock befuddlement. “Let me answer that again. That’s bad.” She takes a deep breath. “I want people to be comforted by it. And I’d like people to listen to it from start to finish, because it was very much written in that way.” She nods again, more sure of her answer this time. “And, really, I just want people to enjoy it.”
Big Dreams is released by Rest Energy; Rachael Lavelle tours Ireland throughout November and December
