Faux naif of the Month: Carly Sings chansons francais in English. A new sort of genre has been invented by this young composer and singer, born in Ireland and culturally reared in France.
You look a little like Kate Bush in this photo, is she an influence on your music? No. I haven't listened to her revival album. But she seems a bit too electro-pop for me. That photo was taken on a Dublin beach ...funnily enough, the shoot was called the "kate Bush" session. How would you consider your own music style? Pretty basic.NOT trendy.Take a bit of late sixties folk and pop and add some dyslexic guitar, seventies (eighties even) synth, strings, heavy breathing and some je ne sais pas quoi. Is it true you never play a song in the same way twice? Yes...but it's completely unintentional ....a lot of songs are improvised when I record them first so they don't really ever stop evolving. That's why I prefer to record in one whole take.It's almost like that particular recording is a diary entry of the day you did it.
Why choose Carly sings as your name? I was named Carly after the wonderful Carly Simon by my mother. Carly sings was the only myspace page available when I set up..does that mean my musical career began when I joined myspace?..Well anyway the name stuck but it sometimes trades places with 'Carly' on concert posters. I don't really want to be classified as yet another singer-song writer with a first and second name title like nearly every musician who uses their own name. Would you say your "gypsy pop" sound was inspired by anyone in particular? No not really, but there are a few artists that I have listened to on rotation my whole life...in a slightly obsessive way. Off the top of my head - The Beatles, Rachmaninov, Ravel, Gershwin, The kinks, Pink Floyd, Duran Duran, Radiohead, Bjork, Blur, Francoise Hardy, Serge Gainsbourg, Nick Drake, Fiona Apple, Feist(one of my newer discoveries)... lots of original Brazilian Bossa Nova, Stan Getz and Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Ella Fitzgerald, Bill Evans, Doris Day. Not to mention all the musicals and movie soundtracks I was into which I won't mention here. My dad would play Fred Astaire and Stevie Wonder in the car and George Benson...and we had an awful Andrew Lloyd Weber song book on our piano that I could recite by heart! "oh well I never, have you ever met a cat so clever as a Magical Mr Mephistopheles". Stuff like that. "Memory, all alone in the moonlight, la la la la" (laughter) In one of my weaker childhood moments I listened to Bryan Adams "Have you ever loved a woman" thirty seven times in a row. My sister nearly killed me. Your unusual mix of literary and contemporary lyrics have been considered your trademark. Where do they come from? My relationships inspire me to write what I do. I guess a lot of musicians say that. I actually once predicted the unhappy end of a relationship before it happened by writing about it in a song. A few days later it was over almost exactly how I'd foretold it. But maybe that's just intuition or creative self-sabotage .I love all the literature from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. It's very relationship obsessed. Like the characters from these books, I need to live things sincerely, otherwise I get numb and I feel irrelevant. What I write about tends to revolve around feeling dislodged from reality or maybe being stuck in a reality I hate. All the stuff about love and relationships fits in with that. I just try and make sense of all the information coming at me. How did spending time in France affect you as an artist? I learnt a lot about how stupid notions of normality are. As I got older, it made me less afraid to be myself. Which was a relief for everyone. There's nothing worse than pretending to be yourself. What was it like growing up in Ireland? Well, I have this weird thing about Home. Sometimes it feels like Dublin or Wicklow, which is south of Dublin and in the countryside, I lived there when I was a little girl. Then sometimes it's Lyon or Paris in France. My whole life I've been ping-pong-ing between these places...and I feel like my teen years are split up into two parts. Life in France and life in Ireland. I used to have nightmares about running to airports to get back from one zone to the other and wake up in a fit because I was left in one place while my family were somewhere else. So the Irish part of my teen life was like the opposite of my French one. I felt sort of removed and misunderstood and when my parents broke up I was really miserable ...I spent most of my time day dreaming rather than living. I loved Ireland when I was little, it was a country side fantasy that my parents created for me with music and art and trips to the beach. How do you take being perceived as a hybrid mix of Bob Dylan and Bjork? It's a monumental compliment, I love Bjork, she's an incredible artist and Bob, well watching footage of him play to thousands of teenagers sitting on deck chairs made me realise how, people if they truly understand your art will let you deliver it in whatever form you like, regardless of conventions or trends, and love you for it ...I'd be so happy if I achieved that with my music! When is your debut album going to be out? May 2008. This issue is about women's role in modern society - My life doesn't seem any different to a character from a Jane Austin novel, in that, even though I clearly have more freedom, I manage to limit it for the sake of being Romantic. i.e.. living for the idea of falling in love and being a slave to that love, whilst secretly craving my independence. I actually think the role of men in modern society is becoming more and more confused - I don't think many of them know what to do with themselves. This might be a bit of a cliché to say, but I find men like it better when you are weak and less confrontational, and also would rather you were a rich princess than just a girl depending on them for survival and physical comfort. www.myspace.com/carlysings - for live dates, tracks, and release Info.
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