Singer-songwriter Susan McKeown doesn't fit easily into categories, either artistically or as an Irish emigrant in New York. But her dusty alto has led her down many a road that she might not have travelled at home, she tells Siobhan Long.
Broad brushstrokes - mercifully - are no longer enough. The Irish abroad conform no more to the cardboard cutout image that once defined their lives to those they left at home. Whether their progress from two- to three-dimensional reality is due to the dubious delights of telecommunications, or to our own new-found cultural diversity, forcing us to widen the lens, is a moot point, but the times they most certainly are a-changing. And Susan McKeown rides free and easy on the back of these cultural cross-currents, catching their mood and direction like a swimmer who knows instinctively when to duck and when to dive - and when to keep a safe distance from the surf.
McKeown's reputation as a singer- songwriter has been carved out steadily over the past decade. Her dusty alto has coaxed her down many a road in the US that she suspects she might never have travelled at home. The media have labelled her music as everything from "acoustic rock" to "Celtic fusion" and jazz, and she's opted to seize those schizoid corrals and make the most of them.
Whether writing music alongside Lúnasa for the Marina Carr play, The Bog Of Cats (staged in San Diego with Holly Hunter in the lead role); producing a suitably misty Celtic theme for a Jaguar ad; or gathering together children's folk songs or Scottish labour tunes, Susan McKeown manages to stretch and bend parts of her cerebrum that many musicians never discover, so hell-bent are they to carve their initials in a font and style that will guarantee airplay in an increasingly homogenised broadcasting environment.
And now she's off again, having just completed recording work on the New York Times documentary, Portraits of Grief, to be transmitted on the US Discovery channel on September 11th, with an accompanying album to be released by Sony at the same time.
"Things have happened for me in New York in all kinds of ways that I never expected," McKeown says, with a wry smile. "I think of myself as a songwriter and as an interpreter of Irish songs, and I know I do even more Irish music because I'm there. As a songwriter, I've done most of my writing in New York and I think the place makes me much more open to what's going on in the world."
Musing about changes she sees in her home town of Dublin, McKeown admits: "I'm not so sure that I'd be so productive if I was still living here. There's something about waking up in New York: the energy is so vibrant and I feel so at home there, and so inclined to run with ideas I get - and you get a lot of response and encouragement from people around you.
"With Portraits of Grief, the film-makers were looking for a singer who would sing a lament - although they didn't call it that at the time. So I picked two verses from some old laments that I researched. One was a verse from 'Úna Bhán', and the other was from 'Mo Bhrón Ar An Farraige' from An Duanaire [Poems of the Dispossessed], which had a lot of loss, grief and longing in it. Very simple, but very apt, I felt."
Manhattan has been McKeown's home for the past 12 years, and the terrors of September 11th haven't dulled her enthusiasm for life in the US, though she does bemoan the lack of serious media analysis of the hows and whys of September 11th.
"Most Americans wouldn't even be listening to National Public Radio or even watching public television. Sometimes I'll just go and read the Guardian or The Irish Times online, or I'll visit www.fair.org, which is a website that specialises in giving you the other side of what's happening in the news, the story behind the story - like the American bombing of that Afghanistan wedding on July 2nd. I had to hear about that first from my father from home. I turned on the news and there wasn't a mention of it."
She was on the road when the Twin Towers news broke. And like anyone whose homeplace has been violated, her strongest instinct was to get back as quickly as possible.
"We wanted to get home straight away. When I came back [to New York], the atmosphere was incredible," she recalls. "The streets lined and lined with all those missing posters. But you know, New York started to recover after a few months, and many people there do question more what's in the news, and are more likely to protest foreign policy decisions than in the rest of the US.
'They're a very diverse community, and New Yorkers have always felt that the reason they love living there is that very diversity. Being surrounded by people speaking different languages, it's symbolic of the world. We feel like we're living in one of the world's capitals, in a way."
She wasn't at any time tempted to abandon Manhattan Island, though.
"I lost some sleep over it for the next few nights," she admits. "And everyone I know there was affected at a very deep level, but it didn't change me or make me afraid to live in New York.
"The last song on my album, Prophesy,wouldn't have happened if September 11th hadn't happened. I had been reading a story by Yeats called 'The Golden Age' and there was a line in it: 'And if there is a kind and perfect world/ It's a buried mass of roses under spadefuls of earth.' And that really made me think of what they call Ground Zero. Because there was all this beauty and joy and peoples' lives that was lost in all of this mess that was still down there until May. It's a hope song really.
"To me, it almost sounds like a song from the second World War, like something Vera Lynn would sing!"
The real strength of a musician is in the idiosyncrasies and quirks that he/she teases out of the music. McKeown's preoccupation with fairy stories and Irish mythology is no band aid she's grasped in an effort to stand out from the crowd.
But her imaginative energies have long fuelled her writing, whether for public or private consumption. "I've always loved reading old fairy stories and legends," she agrees, clearly uninhibited by more recent commercial attempts to cajole so-called Celtic music into bite-sized chunks digestible by daytime radio.
"I loved reading old Irish texts and literature. My degree is in English and Philosophy, but I was always especially interested in Anglo-Irish literature, so I think when I went to New York it just became more pronounced."
Mckeown's most recent album harnessed the claustrophobia of Emily Dickinson's poetry to spectacular effect, when she set the classic 'Because I Could Not Stop for Death' to music, sharing vocals with Natalie Merchant, former lead singer with 10,000 Maniacs.
"A lot of people don't know who she is," McKeown says. "We started having competitions at the gigs, asking people to guess who wrote that poem. We'd sing the song and people might suggest Jimi Hendrix or Joni Mitchell, or Allen Ginsberg. Or T.S. Eliot or Robert Frost, which weren't bad guesses. But, for me, a song must work as a good poem before I feel confident that it will work well as a song - though at times there are pieces that refuse to be a song, so you have to find a rhythm that'll lend itself to musically expressing those words."
With three more gigs remaining on the current tour, her first baby due in November and the US launch of her album, Prophesy, early next year, McKeown has no plans to slow her pace in the near future.
"I've always been inclined to look for the 'next thing' as soon as I'm finished a project," she says. "There's so much going on in life that I've always been interested in following a lot of avenues, often at the same time. It keeps me on my toes!"
Susan McKeown is performing tomorrow night in Furey's/Sheela-na-gig pub in Sligo; on Tuesday in Campbell's Tavern, Headford; and on Thursday in The Lobby in Cork for the Cork Folk Festival. Prophesy is released on Sheela-na-gig.