JULIE FEENEY

JULIE FEENEY

pages

THE NEW ALBUM

RELEASING IN IRELAND ON MAY 29, 2009

featuring the lead single LOVE IS A TRICKY THING

Choice Music Prize winning singer, composer, multi instrumentalist and windsurfing enthusiast Julie Feeney returns with her second album, pages, on May 29th, 2009. The album kicks off with the release of the lead single Love Is A Tricky Thing, on May 22nd. A nationwide tour will
be announced shortly.

For further media information, please contact Emma/Mary-Kate at Entertainment Architects on 01 2606998

Julie Feeney - Biography

“She's got everything she needs, she's an artist, she don't look back.”

Julie Feeney wasn't born when Bob Dylan wrote She Belongs To Me. But you would be hard pushed to find a modern artist who better matches the profile of his celebrated lyric.

Self-sufficient and forward looking, Julie does not believe in doing things by half measures. Not only did the multi-tasking composer-performer from Galway sing, compose and produce the songs on her extraordinary second album, pages, she even conducted the top-flight full orchestra which performed them all in one epic 6 hour recording session at the Irish Chamber Orchestra Studio in Limerick. “It was one of the happiest days of my life,” she says, “although I needed a week to recover from it.”

Julie, who first made her mark on the international music scene by winning the Choice Music Prize with her debut album 13 songs, has made a huge leap forward with pages. A one-woman powerhouse of creative energy and technical expertise, she tackled the project in a spirit of almost mystical enquiry.

She began with the words which she wrote during a process of “distillation” over a five-week spell at a remote artists' retreat in County Monaghan. Living and working in conditions of monastic isolation she gathered together her “thought streams”, which she turned into essays, then distilled into poems and finally song lyrics. “I wanted to put myself to the test,” she says. “I wanted to reach that stage where you actually come to the essence of what you're feeling. And I didn't want to have any word on the album that was superfluous.”

She then returned to her apartment in Dublin and completed the instrumental music. Starting in silence with pencil and manuscript, and often working for 24-hour stretches or longer, she spent the best part of four months composing, arranging and scoring the songs for a full orchestra. “In pop music, orchestras are generally incorporated in a certain way”, she says. “I wanted to make a particular sound using an orchestra with songs that I hadn't heard before but one that I could hear in my head.” Julie's idea was to record the orchestra on its own in one day – effectively the first time she would hear her own compositions – and to let the results stand. There would be no conventional pop instruments or samples or indeed overdubs of any kind added to the original recordings - other than her voice. “I also wanted to use the instruments as if they were voices and the voices as if they were instruments
intertwining in the songs,” she says.

The result is a collection of songs performed with stirring, spellbinding elegance, yet delivered with a strange, almost whimsical sense of fun. The album is peopled with characters such as the girl in Impossibly Beautiful who has no idea that people are staring at her because of her breathtaking good looks, and Mr Roving Eye Guy who manages “a holding pattern of romances” from behind the “high wall round his heart”. Amid the swirling yet delicate orchestral backdrops, Julie sings in a haunting, lilting voice of truths distilled from deep thoughts. On the spiky Valentine's Song she sings in staccato bursts of the broken love affair of someone she knows: “Nothing you can do will ease the pain”. But a contrasting mood of inner calm and emotional empowerment permeates the simple lyrical contours of Grace, a song of transcendental calm and spiritual enlightenment. “Just dream, you'll see,” she sings on Stay, a softly shimmering ballad, which she calls a “comfort song”.

Julie may be a dreamer, but she is also one of life's achievers. She has three Masters degrees, plays ten instruments and was a professional singer for the National Chamber Choir in Ireland for five years. She has composed scores for concert performances, contemporary dance productions and for short films. She has studied psychoanalysis and has lectured in education. She has worked as a photographic, live art and catwalk model, and as a "movement actor" in the world of contemporary dance. And, for the record, she is also an accomplished windsurfer and a kayaking enthusiast.

Julie went to university at the age of 16 and shortly after had composed a piece for the English contemporary music ensemble, Icebreaker which was premiered at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. She continued on to earn her startling tally of Masters Degrees, including one in Music and Media Technologies, graduating in 2002 from Trinity College Dublin.

While singing in the National Chamber Choir, she also wrote her own songs which she performed in bars and clubs with a conventional line-up of guitar, bass and drums. But she suffered initially from an identity problem. "The people in places like Whelan's thought I was some kind of opera singer. And my classical-head friends thought I was a singer-songwriter.” Her eureka moment came when she realized that what her songs really needed were instrumentation and arrangements that drew inspiration from her classical background rather than trying to conceal it.

She embarked on a solo career with the release in Ireland of her debut album, 13 songs, in 2005. Having written, produced and sung all thirteen songs and played most of the instruments on the album herself, Julie designed the cover art-work and financed the initial costs by a succession of bank loans, setting up her own record label - mittens – in the process. The album sold over 15,000 copies in Ireland where it won the prestigious Choice Music Prize,
securing Julie a deal with Sony/BMG via the now defunct Red Ink label who released the album in the UK to further widespread acclaim in 2006.

Since then Julie went on to orchestrate 13 songs for 65 piece orchestra; has had compositions commissioned and premiered by Ireland's Crash Ensemble and was commissioned by BBC Northern Ireland to orchestrate for the Ulster Orchestra. She has also conducted an orchestra in concert. She performed as a theatre artist in Paris and at the Galway Arts Festival in a “multi-disciplinary performance installation” entitled Slat and presented a radio series on RTÉ Radio 1 (Julie's extraordinarily wide-ranging playlist can be found at http://www.rte.ie/radio1/kaleidoscope/)

All of which helped to inform and prepare her for the epic journey to the heart of her own artistry which informs pages. The new album was funded by Red Ink, but is now being distributed through Essential, with Julie once again taking a firm grip on the reins through her own mittens label. Having designed the artwork, which is based on a unique, hand-stitched dress sculpted from the actual pages of the musical score, Julie is planning to tour with a small
(eight-piece) orchestra, putting on a show that combines songs from both her albums with elements of theatre and performance art.

“I've decided that instead of having my classical hat and then my other hats, as an artist I want to embrace each of them all as a whole,” she says. “I feel that I'm developing all the time. That's what I'm here for.”

April 2009