Niamh Regan: "I Just Have to Follow My Gut"

Interview Aoife Barry | Photography Julia Dunin | Videography Magic Hour Films

“I realised there is no way I’m going to be everyone’s cup of tea – If I’m going to do what I want to do, I just have to follow my gut.”

To be a musician is to be always trying to figure out ways of expressing yourself in the most authentic way possible. For Galway native Niamh Regan, this became all the more urgent as she worked on her second album, having been surprised by the overwhelmingly positive reaction to her 2020 debut, the Choice Music Prize-nominated Hemet.

“I knew doing this album from the get-go that this was going to be an uphill battle. I was so nervous going into it and I was really struggling with the idea of ‘how do I prove myself now?’,” she tells Galway Now of making Hemet’s gorgeous successor, Come As You Are, which came out in May. “Before the first album, I was loving doing music, but I had no expectations or anyone listening. So there was always this freedom. But [while making Come As You Are], I realised that there is no way I’m going to be everyone’s cup of tea if I’m going to do what I want to do, and I just have to follow my gut.”

It’s funny to hear Regan describe herself as not everyone’s cup of tea, because there’s so much about her intricate and expansive folk that appeals to all tastes. She’s always had a unique approach to her “I realised there is no way I’m going to be everyone’s cup of tea – If I’m going to do what I want to do, I just have to follow my gut.” songs, from their structure to her vocals, which marks her out as special.

Regan grew up on a small farm in the “pretty idyllic” village of Kilrickle, and now divides her time between rural Spain and Galway. “Galway always gets a good name for live music,” she says of how her hometown has influenced her. “Ireland as a whole, there’s a good standard of making music and poetry and writing. It’s just accepted that it’s something people do.”

“I feel liberated”

She says Come As You Are helped her find peace with making decisions about the future. “I’ve shed a lot of silly things like ‘I’m 30 now so I have to move on and grow up’,” she says. “I feel the opposite now, I feel liberated – why would I put those restrictions on myself, even though I had them on me for ages? This album really allowed me to deal with all those things.”

By ‘all those things’, she’s talking too about major life decisions like choosing whether to have children, and the impact of a career in music on her personal life. “I got married relatively young, and then I was surrounded by a lot of musicians who happen to be men with children, and no one ever asked them, ‘Who’s taking care of the kids while you’re on the road?’,” she explains. “But then you’d meet a rare mum in the scene, and everyone’s like, ‘But who has the kids, and how are you managing that?”

While the question might not always be a sinister one, Regan recognises that there can be an implicit idea of ‘mum should be at home’. “I remember one woman asked me ‘do you have kids?’ I said I don’t, and she said, ‘Oh, I’m so delighted to hear, how could you manage it?’” While Regan recognised the response was not unkind, it highlighted for her how different things can be for women in music.

It’s unusual to hear musicians talking so openly about this topic, another way that Regan is carving her own path in the Irish music scene. As she says herself, she deals with such topics using “straightforward” words.

For example, the final song on her latest album, written with her Californian husband Wesley Houdyshell, is called “Mortgage”. She received some feedback that she could have refined the title and lyrics, and not used the specific words ‘mortgage and kids’. “But that’s the whole point!” she laughs.

Still, anyone looking for the album to be totally biographical needs to realise that “a lot of it is dramatised”, says Regan. “[People think] you’re a songwriter, so everything that comes out of your mouth, you must have lived it.” She adds: “I think my problem was I decided to sing it from the ‘I’ perspective. So then people are like, oh, it’s definitely happened to you.

But I think it’s sometimes nice as a songwriter to say: I’m singing as a character.” Next up for Regan is a short tour with her band, where listeners will get to hear Come As You Are live. But ever creative, she’s also making new music. “I’m already writing the third record, and I feel a lot more at ease with the whole process, and enjoying it,” she says, before heading off into the Spanish sunshine. We await the no doubt captivating results.

Niamh Regan and band will play the Róisín Dubh in Galway on November 16. Come As You Are is in record shops now.

Shot on location at The Burren Nature Sanctuary, an award-winning nature attraction minutes from Kinvara; burrennaturesanctuary.ie. With thanks to Mary and Rory.