A few small gigs aside, it’s been a long time since Gemma Hayes has been a mainstay of the Irish music scene. Around ten years, in fact, which makes her return with ‘Blind Faith’ feel like an exciting new addition in the realm of quirky, downbeat pop.
“I came back because I had this desperate need to create,” Hayes says. “I stopped making music, thinking that it would be that easy, but I didn’t realise how important making art was for my mental health. After a few years, I realised I needed to make music the core of my life, along with my children etc. Creating has got me back in a good headspace.”
“Going without music was a game changer, I had a realisation that to me it’s like oxygen,” she continued. “Handing your music over to the public is the scariest park. You can create stuff, and it can be like an abstract diary. You can understand what you’re saying. I wouldn’t be a natural, Robbie Williams type entertainer, which I think is a massive talent in itself. So I’m always a bit slow to bring music to the public. That said, it’s a form of connection, so doing that is an important step, the final courageous step.”
That brave step comes with a form of acceptance around the public and their taste on Hayes’ part, she says. “Music isn’t for everybody, and that’s something I’ve learnt only recently. Not everybody is going to like the same stuff. You just need to find your own niche of people your music resonates with, that’s a great place to be.”
“With that in mind, my new album is very much a quirky album, but that’s how I intend it. It’s so cliche, but maybe for a reason… at some point it’s out of my control. I’ve done my bit, and after that, some people will like it, and others won’t. And that’s just normal.”
“It’s been ten years since I released music, so I wasn’t sure if there’d be ground for me to stand on. The world has changed so much, and what I had produced felt very much in the past. So I did have an internal battle about whether anyone would listen to it. Is there still a place for me? But it’s been a real joy to carve out a patch again.”
More than that, though, it seems Hayes is comfortable with her niche. “I’ve never had a massive hit song,” she says, “but I’ve put out so many albums over the years, so I think a lot of music people recognise my name. I’m fine with not having that hit, because I’ve never gone into a studio looking to get played on 2FM. I’m not trying to appeal to the masses, so there’s no disappointment there.”
“I’ve been working on little shows with Paul Noonan and Lisa Hannigan recently. It went so well the first time that we decided to keep going, so it was really natural to include them on my album, too. Lisa is my next door neighbour, too, which helps. She’s just across the wall. There’s a song, ‘Feed the Flames’, where she came up with a killer melody for the verses. She gave it a pep when it was quite maudlin, so I owe her for that.”
“There’s a moment in the album where I needed to stretch, and the song ‘Hardwired’ is that, it’s about feeling unsettled in a world of technology, and this idea about living in our phones. All being hardwired, it’s a bit weird being in that space. And it sits in that space because it’ll wake people up from that ethereal, zoned out world.”
‘Hardwired’ represents Hayes’ sense of change and modernity. But the album as a whole, a statement on her comeback, represents a greater sense: one of self-confidence and belonging.
