No strings attached
After touring with Hozier, now Alana Henderson is free to show off her own melodic ‘folk noir’
ALANA Henderson is proof positive that it pays to be polite. While playing at a tech conference gig in Portland, she was approached by a little-known performer called Andrew Hozier to support him at a gig at the Limelight in Belfast.
‘At the time, I looked up Hozier’s music and was blown away,’ the singer-songwriter recalls. ‘I’d never heard anything like it. I replied to the email thanking him for thinking of me, but that I couldn’t do the support gig. I told him I’d checked out his music and it was great, and I wished him good luck with it.’
A year and a half later, Henderson got a call out of the blue. Hozier had just released his seismic single, Take Me To Church, and was looking for a cellist/backing vocalist to join his band for a two-year world tour.
‘I’d thought nothing of that email, but someone took note,’ she says smiling. ‘I went to Dublin and hung with Andrew for an hour and played through a few songs. On the spot I was asked to go on tour. They started the visa process right then and there. Things were moving so rapidly for him at that point. Things were steamrolling and he was rolling with it, so I hopped on.’
The first gig that Henderson officially played with Hozier was The David Letterman Show which, she recalls, was ‘pretty intense’.
According to research compiled by music website Songkick, Hozier’s touring band were the hardest working of 2015, clocking 250 shows across the globe and travelling enough kilometres to get them three-quarters of the way to the moon. Among the tour highlights for Henderson were a gig at Red Rocks in Colorado, and another in Mexico City (‘they were so unapologetically excited’).
‘I’m sure Andrew would say the same, that things were so hectic you don’t have time to take it all in. It’s only now I’m settled that I can look back at what we did,’ says Henderson.
‘Most artists would say they’d like their career to look like Hozier’s — and I’m not going to say I wouldn’t — but I don’t imagine that’s how things will go for me. In a way, I’m relieved it probably won’t be quite so mental. There’s something about that life that’s quite brutal.
‘There are days when things are plush and lovely and you pinch yourself, but the day-to-day, the lack of sleep and hopping on and off planes, is hard-going.’
WHEN it comes to her own solo career, however, Henderson is certainly no slouch. In fact, the Northern Irish singer has clocked up an impressive seven million listens on music platform Spotify of her independently released EP, Wax And Wane.
By turns charming, beguiling and homespun, the 2013 EP is a prime slice of ‘folk noir’. And as one might expect, Henderson has stretched the possibilities of her cello (she is a classically trained player) hither and thither, delivering music that sounds both familiar and fresh.
‘It’s cool to see how well it’s been received on Spotify,’ she says smiling. ‘Spotify put it on a playlist that has a lot of listeners, which is how that happened. I get emails from weird parts of the world telling me they like my music — people in Jakarta are listening to this EP — which is the really great thing about being an artist in the current climate. You can take things into your own hands and as an independent artist I really like that.
‘If we do the maths, per stream, the [Spotify] revenue is, like, 0.0004 pence, but it’s a trickle of income, and any trickle for a musician is welcome.’
The music industry is a harsh and unforgiving climate for many musicians, yet wily Henderson has found a way of sustaining a living while working on her own music.
‘A couple of years ago I got involved in writing [music] for tech conferences,’ she explains. ‘It’s something I fell into after I met some people who run conferences in the US. They like to weave stories through their conferences to give them a lighter note, and I’ve written lots of songs for them. I’ve been open to doing anything — you have to be or you flounder.’
More recently, Henderson has released the single Let This Remain, proving that after two years on the road she is very much back to ploughing her own artistic furrow. After a period of post-tour decompression, she departed to an isolated Irish cottage with Belfast-based musician/producer Alan Haslam.
The pair travelled light, bringing the cello, a Roland Juno-106 synthesizer and a TR-808 drum machine, along with some improvised acoustic percussion (they snapped a pair of shoe trees together for the snare sound). They may have stripped the recording to the barest of bones, but the end result sounds lush, arresting and inventive.
‘After touring, it took a while to get back into the space where I wanted to record,’ Henderson explains. ‘Let This Remain was written in a hotel in LA, but I suppose the creative well was a little dry by the time I got home. It took me a few months to feel like I had anything to say. When Alan and I were recording, it felt like we were demoing. But I like it because it’s quite simple and minimalist’.
When it comes to her forthright lyrics, Henderson’s naked confessionalism hasn’t gone unnoticed. ‘After one gig, a lady came up to me and said, “God, you’re so honest.” She was fully rattled by it,’ Henderson says smiling.
‘The first few songs that I wrote at 18 were full-on confessional teenage indulgence, but then I found the artists I respect write in that confessional way. They get right down to business, which I really like. You can’t write well unless you’re taking elements of your own experience, and there’s always huge parts of myself in those songs.’
Before she got down to writing ‘indulgent’ lyrics, Henderson grew up in Dungannon, Co. Tyrone, surrounded by music. Alana, who went to St Patrick’s Academy, grew up singing and playing traditional flute with the Armagh Pipers Club.
‘My dad speaks Irish and my mum speaks a little Irish, so I did the Fleadhs and everything. I learned the cello separately in school, and never crossed the two until I was a bit older. The great thing about learning traditional music is being able to
learn things by ear very quickly — something that ended up being very useful when I was on tour with Hozier.’
It was evident that Henderson’s passion lay in music, but with an older brother working as a doctor and an older sister trained as a teacher, she was expected to pursue a more sensible, professional career path. All the while, music and acting were hovering in the background.
‘I wanted to go to drama school, but I was encouraged to pursue law, and I could do whatever I wanted after that,’ she recalls. ‘Luckily I went into an acting job that I did during the summers.’
Alongside Eoghan McDermott (now an RTÉ presenter) and Diarmaid Murtagh (who went on to appear in Dracula Untold), Henderson appeared as Caroline in Seacht, an Irish-language college drama series shown on TG4.
In a neat coincidence, it was filmed at Queen’s University, where she was studying law.
‘I was blessed with a degree, but there weren’t many opportunities during the recession,’ she says. ‘I did eventually secure an apprenticeship with a criminal law firm, but I felt uneasy about taking it. A few weeks before it was due to start I was asked to play a gig on a barge beside the Waterfront. At that moment I knew what I wanted to do.
THAT was a pretty difficult conversation to have with my parents, as you might guess.’ Around the age of 18, she started to write songs on the cello, primarily as a distraction from her law studies.
‘I’d never thought of the cello as an instrument you could write on, but around that time I heard Arthur Russell for the first time,’ she recalls. ‘He was really prolific, and it was like someone had turned on a switch. I was treating [songwriting] as an escape from law, which I really didn’t enjoy.
‘The cello has so much more capacity than it usually gets credit for,’ she adds. ‘It’s thought of as a classical instrument, but it has a lot of range. I incorporate a lot more percussive elements to my playing, I do a lot more plucking and chopping to create different sounds. In fact, it’s the closest musical instrument to the human voice we have, and that’s why it resonates with people.’
The legal world’s loss has certainly been music’s gain. In the coming months, Henderson will take a run at recording her debut album. ‘I’d like to reach a point where I can release an album,’ she says. ‘There are songs I’d like to record that I wrote a couple of years ago, but when I went out on tour I had to press pause on my solo aspirations. I’m so glad I did it, but there’s definitely a sense of unfinished business there.’