Gráinne Hunt: Queer nu-folk music, direct from Ireland to SF’s Lost Church

Gráinne Hunt has been performing in Ireland and Continental Europe for a couple of decades. She’s released two albums and has previously done a tour of the United States, but this will be the first chance to hear her live in San Francisco.

The musical press in Ireland have compared her to Mary Black and Dolores O’Riordan, but she has a voice which is truly her own. She has been involved in projects like “The Stern Task of Living” based on James Joyce’s “Dubliners” and appeared on the PBS program, “Ireland with Michael” (Michael Londra referred to her as “The Irish Joni). She has been onstage alongside performers like Glen Hansard and U2 and has opened for artists as diverse as Gladys Knight, Eagle Eye Cherry and the Bay City Rollers. Hunt performs in San Francisco September 9 at The Lost Church in north Beach.

Michael Flanagan: Is this your first time performing in San Francisco? Will you be singing any Irish songs from “Songs from Ireland?”
Gráinne Hunt: This is my first time to play in San Francisco. A couple of years ago we got to drive up through on our way into the Pacific Northwest, but we never managed to stop off. So we’re getting ourselves into The Lost Church, which we’re really excited about. I say we because we’re traveling as a duo, my girlfriend Jules Stewart is a drummer and backing vocalist. She’s going to play drums and sing with me for the show.

Song wise, my show is mostly 99% original music. It will come from “Firing Pin” and “The Secret,” but I have lots of other new material that I’ve written over the last couple of years. Last year Jules and I did a tour on the East Coast and the Midwest and we recorded a live EP from various venues along the way. We recorded a few different shows and put the live EP together, so we’ll have some of that which is newer material that hasn’t been released in a studio version. And generally, I will throw in an old Irish tune here or there, but for the most part it’s original music.

I watched the Milwaukee Irish Festival St. Patrick's Day Celebration with Brendan Walsh online and I was struck that some of the Irish songs you sing are from school and your childhood. Does this give them a particular emotional resonance for you?
Absolutely! Brendan and I are college friends and we did a music degree in Maynooth back in 2000. We never really played music together when we were in university. He was a classical guitar player. I was a singer, but I didn’t want to end up doing that super classical route. It was a very classical oriented degree. Brendan and I were best buds from the beginning. He moved to Switzerland and we kind of fell out of contact with one another.

A few years ago he messaged me and said, “My dad runs this festival, would you be interested in coming down and we’ll sing a few songs? I’ll play them and you can sing them; we’ll pick some really great Irish songs.”

After the weekend he said, “Maybe there’s something more to this project! We should put an album together. Let’s pick some songs.” So, we sat down and talked about various different songs. Brendan’s not a Gaeilgeoir [Irish speaker], so I was the leading force behind those choices. But particularly “Buachaill Ón Éirne” is a song that I learned in school and would have been my party piece. When I went to the Gaeltacht, if there was something to be done at the school that would be what I would sing. It definitely resonates with me. It kind of brings me back to my childhood years and my teenage years in school.

You recorded “This Secret” in Nashville. Do you feel a connection to American Country music? If so, who are your favorites?
Coming to Nashville for me was one of those things where a lot of things aligned.  It was one of those snapshot moments where I met this incredible producer (Thomm Jutz) in Belfast. He’d come to Ireland to speak at a conference called Belfast Nashville and he was so blasé and so laid back. He’s originally German and you would ask questions and he would say “yes,” “no,” “of course” – no humor; wouldn’t crack a smile. It was very matter of fact.

I thought: I like this guy. I like how he puts himself out there. And he talked about recording and how things go in Nashville and how it works. It’s amazing. You show up and you work on the songs with him and you’ll do a chart together with you and then the guys will all show up the next day and we’ll just press record. There’s no practicing, there’s no running through it. They just capture it in this moment.

I don’t think that I’m a particularly country-sounding artist, but that album does definitely sound like it was recorded in Nashville and I love it for that. I love it because it was a snapshot and a time and a moment and I’ll probably never get to do again.

I think that my connection to Nashville would be more about the songwriting and all of the amazing songwriters that are coming out of there and have gone through there over the years. It would be more about the songwriting than the style, essentially.

Is there a backstory to the song “Breathe?” It seems to have a lot to do with conflict and healing. And how did the Arvo Party remix come about?
So “Breathe”... I used to play music with another musician who just wasn’t a great person.  It took me a while to figure that out and it took me a while to realize that I just needed to step back and that if I didn’t respond, I didn’t answer, if I just kept quiet and kept breathing, that he would probably dig himself a little hole and I wouldn’t have to say anything else. Conflict and healing; that’s definitely the sentiment that’s in there and just realizing that sometimes the best thing you can do is not say anything at all.

The Arvo Party remix was sort of an early COVID thing. A friend of mine had a song remixed by Arvo Party and I thought, “That’s kind of a cool idea.” I reached out and said, “Would you be interested in doing this?” He said, “Yeah, no problem, send me the stems,” and he just took it away and did his thing with it. Obviously, it sounds really different to me.

You’re from Monaghan, you’ve lived in Dublin and Maynooth and currently live in Kildare. Do you feel that smaller towns act as a balm for artists in Ireland? Is it easier to live there than in bigger cities?
I certainly love living in a small village. I find at a very basic level there’s just not so much distraction. Living in Dublin, it was very easy to fill your days with meeting up with people who were around. There’s always something on that you can go to.

Now I spend a lot of my time touring, so I don’t get to spend as much time at home as I used to. But I definitely find that when I’m there it’s a little haven and I can go out and do everything I need to do in a really short circumference from my home. I definitely feel it enables creativity more. I wouldn’t have thought about that when I moved there. I moved out there at the beginning of 2019 and had never used a space as a creative space. Because in 2019 I just traveled and toured and then COVID hit and I was like, “How am I going to do this? I never had to use my home space as a creative space before.” It took a little bit of time and energy to figure that out.

You’re in the folk ensemble Hibsen and released an album, “The Stern Task of Living” inspired by James Joyce’s “Dubliners.” Was it challenging to approach such a well-known literary work? How did you and Jim Murphy go about doing it without it driving you mad?
I suppose, again, that was a COVID project and so it was perfect timing for quite a big project when you really look at it. I mean, 15 songs written from 15 stories, but we did it over a really extended period of time. Jim and I met at a songwriting workshop in November 2020 and we got paired together. The guy that was facilitating the workshop, his prompt was to write a song about “Araby,” which is one of the short stories from “Dubliners.”

It came together so easily. We did it over WhatsApp and text and email and in about 48 hours we had a song written and the demo recorded. We sent it back to the group and everyone said, “wow, this is really good.” Afterwards, Jim said, “maybe there’s something more in this, maybe we should do else, what do you think?”

We went away and read the book and a couple of weeks came back and were really enthused. The stories really leant themselves to writing songs. Some of the songs we wrote are really linear and just follow the path of the story and some we had to sit down and say, “What are we going to focus on here? How are we going to make this make sense as a song?” We wanted the songs to stand on their own two feet and not need the book references for them to make sense.

It took us 53 weeks to write the 15 songs. We did it over a nice extended period of time. We had a standing Thursday date. We would jump on Zoom every week and we would finish what we were doing the week before or continue working on it. And sometimes that Thursday would turn into the entire day and some days we only had two hours, but we would get back to it the next week. We were really flexible and I think that it helped in it not driving us mad.

 You’ve covered songs by Tom Waits, Radiohead and Phil Collins, among others. How do you choose which songs to cover? I really love your 1981 project.
The Tom Waits song is one of the first I learned to play myself, when I was at university with Brendan. There was another guy there, Dermot, and he used to play the guitar ;we would play that song as a duet. He would play and I would sing. He would do every other verse and we would sing in harmony and it was really lovely.

Then Dermot went off to perform with Celtic Woman and I needed to figure out how to play the guitar. It’s one of the only songs I do play as a cover. I absolutely love it and people really resonate with it. They think it’s funny that I don’t sound like Tom Waits, which of course I don’t.

For that 1981 project I made an Excel document of all of the number ones and number twos from 1981. I sent it out to people and said “These are the songs, these are the options; you pick. I’m willing to do whatever.” It’s a great year for music. Some of the songs, like the Phil Collins one, were songs that most of the people wanted to do, which was funny.

I haven’t learned a cover in a really long time. I also do a Joni Mitchell song. I’m doing a thing later in the year in Switzerland where they’re basing the evening around Joan Baez and reading some of her words, so I’ll probably learn a Joan Baez song for that. Generally, I focus on my own stuff.

You were in the musical “In The Midst of Plenty” about the Great Famine in which you do a stirring performance of a petition letter of the Widow Kilmartin to the landlord Major Denis Mahon. Was performing music for theater something that moved you? Would you do it again?
I had never thought that I would get into musical theater. “In The Midst of Plenty” didn’t feel particularly ‘musical-theatery’ as mainstream people might look at it. It was definitely a new folk musical. The songs were very much in the folk genre. It wasn’t upbeat and there’s no choreography and dancing around and jazz hands or any of that.

Amy (Day, author of the show) had approached me. She found me on the internet and reached out to me and asked me if I would be part of the show. She wanted me to be the main character and I would have had loads of songs. I said, “But I’m not an actor.” She said, “Maybe you would read for us” and I said okay.

So, I read for them and they came back to me and said, “Yeah, you’re not an actor.” But they said they would love to have me in the show. And that particular song was so special because it’s the only piece in the show that’s sourced from the middle of the 1800s. That was an actual letter written by a real woman to Dennis Mahon really asking for relief. It was kind of a cross-centuries collaboration between Amy and the widow Kilmartin. We took the text from the letter and put it into the song. I don’t think that there was any editing. It was amazing to be part of the show.

Would I do it again? I suppose yeah. I was also in the band and so was Jules. That’s how we met. Do I consider myself an actor? No! But you never know what’s going to happen.

As a queer musician in Ireland, I’m wondering if you feel that modern Irish history, including the vote on the 34th Amendment to the Irish Constitution (which legalized same-sex marriage) and having Leo Varadkar as an openly gay Taoiseach (Prime Minister) twice has made it easier to be a publicly known as queer in Ireland?
I certainly think so. I think we live in a really open society. Growing up, we would have considered Ireland to be really Catholic and having travelled the world and seen other countries and how religion is in other countries I think we’re not as Catholic as we thought we were. There’s still that generation of people who don’t really agree or approve. The referendum was amazing; to be in Ireland and to see just the drive and the people flying home for us, how many people came out to vote and support it. There’s only a very small piece in the center of Ireland, one county that voted no.  It feels like a safe place to be queer, which is wonderful.

Gráinne Hunt performs September 9, 8pm at the Lost Church, with Jimbo Scott opening. $28, 988 Columbus Ave.
https://grainnehunt.com/
https://thelostchurch.org/san-francisco/