More about: Sorcha Richardson

Deep anxiety and joy co-exist in Sorcha Richardson’s sophomore album, Smiling like an Idiot. In her early demos, there was a persistent happiness which, as she wrote more, was informed by an undercurrent of nervous anxiety. The darker, self-destructive impulses and repetition of bad habits inform the first half of the album on songs 'Stalemate', 'Shark Eyes' and 'Purgatory'.

'Archie', the first single from Smiling, shows off some of Sorcha’s greatest strengths as a songwriter: an ability to convey the heart-fluttering crashing waves of youthful euphoria. Sorcha’s debut album, First Prize Bravery, was an ode to her journey from home in Dublin to New York, L.A., then back home again — but her touring hopes were thwarted in 2020. Over lockdown she turned inwards, transforming her grandparent’s living room into a studio in Dublin, delving into the (almost) solitary process of songwriting and the uphill struggle of zoom collaborations. 

"This album," she begins. "Pretty much all of it was made through lockdown. And so there was a month or so where I did loads and loads of zoom writing sessions. I was living with my girlfriend and she'd be in the next room, like, working away as well. [I was ] like: 'can you hear me?' This is so embarrassing, you know? You don't want anyone to see the process of you writing the song because they'll realise that it's just nonsense." Sorcha has an Irish tendency towards comical lyricism when she speaks: unpretentious and empathetic. Despite her self-effacing sense of humour, the warm glow permeating Sorcha’s work, her lyrical precision is no nonsense. 

Gigwise: Smiling Like An Idiot feels like the perfect album for when your heart feels raw and open! Thanks so much for chatting to us about the album. I know your songwriting process is quite introverted, amplified by lockdown! What’s writing been like for you on Smiling Like An Idiot?

Sorcha Richardson: Often it's just me in a room by myself with a guitar or on a piano, I'll sit at the piano and I'll play away. I’ll get up and I'll walk to my guitar and I'll do the same thing over and over. There's a repetition to it that is very meditative, thus feels like excavating or something, you know what I mean?

GW: It’s been said a lot that there's a strongly cinematic aspect to your music. I wondered if that's influenced by the grandness of the landscape in Ireland, and also the experience of having your formative years in New York, a cinematic place.

SR: I moved to New York when I was 18 and that genuinely did feel like I was living in a movie for a while; mundane activities take on this cinematic value. When you're that age in a setting like that, everything is so exciting, nothing is boring. I was never bored for like six years. I also think I just really have this kind of obsession with finding. I think everything is everything we do, every interaction we have is meaningful, if you can examine them.

I like writing about things that feel maybe on the surface mundane and unimportant, but actually, there's so many layers and they’re telling you something bigger about yourself or your life or the people in your life, if you just take the time. Like my first album: I think it was a sort of a day in the life. All these mundane, ordinary, regular moments. Some of them lead to some sort of greater meaning, or teach you something about yourself. 

This album, to me, feels like the stakes are way higher. It feels like the moments that I'm writing about are epic and existential. 

GW: "I saw you in the city by the churchyard, and I knew this would kill me." 

SR: There’s a lot of melodrama in this album, the things that I was writing about did feel like that! Sometimes there are moments in your life, you do feel like everything hangs in the balance. This album is like me trying to really exist in those moments, play them in slow motion and feel everything. Amplify each as intensely as I can. And most of the album is produced by Alex Casnoff, who I did my first album with. But the way that we went with the production is quite cinematic at times and very much more textured than the first one. And it feels more like sort of widescreen 3D, you know. It just feels more intense, I think. Which then makes everything just feel like it's what's really happening. You really feel it. 

GW: So you’re feeling these intense moments like a gift, to do them justice through songwriting. How do you feel about bringing that on tour and sharing those moments with the world of the public? 

SR: When you write about people in your life, there are real life consequences for saying certain things.  Sometimes I care about that and sometimes I don't. With a lot of these songs I did care about if there was [going] to be any fallout. There's a song that I didn't put on the album, just because that's too complicated, for now. There's a bit of growing pain when you start performing them because you're at a different place to when you wrote them [and] you're in a different place to when you recorded them. And you want to give the sort of intensity that it deserves.

They do become something sort of new when you play them live, especially when there's a big audience. We did a show at an Irish festival last weekend and there was like a couple of thousand people in the tent. It was maybe the second time we played 'Shark Eyes' live. And sometimes the more intense or the darker ones actually become really joyous and cathartic when you play them live with a happy, excited, celebratory crowd. There's like a catharsis that happens and it's sort of shared amongst everybody and it lets you regain the power over these moments or this.

GW: Yeah, almost like you have thousands of witnesses that are giving a part of themselves to you. 

SR: Exactly. We're not just singing about my life, everyone is singing about themselves. And then on stage, you get to see people do this, and your association with the song changes, the story of the song sort of changes because of that, because it becomes a shared thing and not like an autobiographical thing.

GW: Are there any writers or songwriters you take a lot of inspiration from?

SR: It's such a clichéd one to say, but the only book that I've read more than once and continue to read is Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion. And, you know, there's an essay at the end of the called Goodbye to All of US, which is about her leaving New York. I also really like Matt Berninger from The National. I think his lyrics are very conversational, but dreamy. They’re a little bit trippy. Sometimes there's a little bit of wordplay that goes on that I really like as well.

GW: There’s something dream-like about the images in a lot of the songs, even in the chorus to 'Archie', there are all these emotional, dreamy textured images clustered together. Does any influence come from your own dreams?

SR: It’s not necessarily like I take an idea from a dream and I write a song about it, but like, there's a kind of kaleidoscope of images that I have, and some of those are more factual than others. Some of it's just sort of like a lucid thing, you know, sometimes it's an image that I see so clearly, it’s not necessarily a memory. I put those into song as well, with some of the details in. They’re pure imagination.

GW: Do you have any favourite images and lyrics from the album?

SR: In 'Good Intentions', in the verses: "And you were spinning / but I was standing still /  If I tell you that I love you or would that be overkill." Sometimes there's a lyric that reveals so much of my own personality and insecurities: I want to tell you that I love you, I think I'm a little bit in love with you, but only if you're a little bit in love with me too. And I feel like that that line is my way of of saying that it's like you're going to say the biggest thing in the world, but [you're] scared. You have to check the temperature first before you do it, for some reason that wants to sticks out to me.

GW: There is so much of that tension in the album. There's the twinkly synth that conveys that dizzy lovesickness.

SR: Like it's anxiety. 

GW: Anxiety and like getting a ringing in your ears, but it's not just anxiety. There's also like a lot of excitement and sinking into that feeling. 

SR: Yeah [laughs].

GW: How did you sonically decide that you wanted to introduce those elements of anxiety? 

SR: Alex is really great at amplifying emotion. I write the songs and he finds a way to bring them to their most emotional. There was a day when I was like maybe three quarters of the way finished writing the album: I was like, 'Oh God, this is going to be such an annoying album because the songs are so happy!'

When you like someone, if you are not in love, but your friend is in love, it's insufferable! I thought...a lot of my album is like this. I went back to it and I wrote a few more songs and I was like, actually the ones that I even thought were purely happy songs, there’s a little bit of fear.

I am so happy, but what if I fucked up now? Now that I have arrived here. Oh, my God — I have everything to lose. The higher you go, the further you have to fall. I guess that sort of feeling was never that far away from any of the songs. Even the way we structured the album, a lot of the purely happy ones come later.

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More about: Sorcha Richardson