Jazz-pop 'marvel' Aisling Quinn for Fringe Festival

Galway born, Dublin based singer Aisling Quinn plays Monroe’s Live this Friday, July 13, as part of the Galway Fringe festival. If you’re looking for a gig out of the ordinary, this is it – expect to see a typewriter being played onstage! The addition of this unusual instrument to her band was prompted by her latest single, Song I Wrote For You.

“If you listen to it, you can hear me doing vocal rhythms in the background, which simulate typewriter-y sounds,” says Aisling. “We were thinking of how to do it live and our drummer at the time said ‘why not get a typewriter?’, and we all just had a laugh about it.”Aisling’s debut album, Let The Games Begin was released in May 2011, and was very much a labour of love.

“I went into the studio in 2008 to start work on it,” Aisling recalls. “It took me two years to do the album, but because it was my first one I wanted to be really careful about it. I knew when it went out that, if I ever had to defend it, I wanted to be completely convinced myself that it was the album I wanted to put out.”

Given that she had put so much time into the project, it might have been difficult for the singer to let it go. But that wasn’t the case for the woman described by Hot Press Magazine as a “jazz-pop marvel”.

“I’d been listening to the songs so much,” Aisling says. “I arranged all the stuff on it, listening to it constantly going ‘what needs to go there, that’s not quite right’. I stopped for a while when I thought it was at the place I wanted it to be, stopped, let it go, then came back and listened to it. And I think there’s a natural progression where you go ‘right, I don’t want to touch it anymore. I’ve manipulated it enough’.”

Aisling then goes on to give an insight into what punters at her Galway show can expect from her five-piece band.

“We’re always quirky, because we like to have fun ourselves when we’re onstage,” she says. “We don’t want to drag anyone down or anything like that. I’ve spent too many nights going around singer/songwriter nights back in the late nineties to ever want to depress a room with songs of suicidal thoughts!

“There’ll be flute and sax – typewriter of course! – doubles bass, me on mandolin, maybe guitar and piano. And my good old brother who’s living down in Galway, Ronan Quinn, on cajon (a type of Spanish drum).

Although Aisling is a proficient piano player, she often opts for the mandolin when it comes to performing.

“It’s a happy instrument,” she explains. “I’m conscious sometimes about the piano as well – while I do like reflective songs, there’s a slight tendency with the piano sometimes to go into that genre. I like to lift myself out of it, and mix instruments. It’s nice to take yourself away from the instrument you’re mainly on, so you can hear a different side of how to write. It makes it more interesting.”

Does Aisling have melodies going in her head constantly, or does she set aside a certain time for writing?

“That’s one thing I actually don’t do,” she says. “I never sit down and go ‘right, it’s song time’. It’s never been that way for me. Sometimes I go through spells where I don’t write at all, and that’s OK because I’ve nothing to write about at that moment.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.