Michelle Burke

With her radiantly fresh, potently honeyed voice, allied to a musical maturity well beyond her years, the young Irish singer Michelle Burke ranks among today’s most exciting contemporary folk prospects. Signed up in 2008 as the latest lead vocalist to grace Irish/American supergroup Cherish the Ladies, she now unveils her debut solo album, Pulling Threads, a stunningly assured collection of classic ballads and lesser-known gems, produced by the award-winning fiddler and composer Aidan O’Rourke (Lau/Blazin’ Fiddles). Full of atmospheric, subtly sophisticated arrangements involving a stellar array of guests, including Kris Drever, Karine Polwart, Martin Green and James Ross, it vibrantly highlights the rich stylistic and expressive breadth of Burke’s singing.

Although based in Edinburgh since 2002, honing her craft in the thick of today’s dynamic Scottish folk scene, Burke hails originally from rural east Cork, where she grew up in a music-loving household, learning the piano from age seven, meanwhile soaking up whatever songs came her way. “I was always singing, right from when I was very young,” she says. “There wasn’t much traditional music in our parish, but I learned loads of folk songs in school, and went in for all these local competitions: I remember singing ‘The Foggy Dew’ in the village hall when I was seven. I’d be singing along to the radio, too, and my secondary school was big into musicals and choirs and so on - I just got involved in everything.” While early heroines included Dolores Keane, Sandy Denny and Maura O’Connell, Burke nowadays cites artists as diverse as Dolly Parton, Sheila Chandra, Billie Holiday, Amy Winehouse and Odetta among her inspirations.

She went on to study music at University College Cork, majoring initially in piano, but delivering her final-year performance as a singer. It was at UCC that the great Irish pianist/composer Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, who subsequently founded the Irish World Music Centre at Limerick University, had first pioneered the academic integration of classical and traditional music, a diversity of approach ideally conducive to Burke’s budding talents.

“It was a really mixed course - everything from mediaeval singing to sean-nós,” she says, “I did classical singing for two years, and did not enjoy it – learning the technique and everything was great, and I love listening to it, but it wasn’t for me; I just couldn’t connect with it, somehow. But then I had lessons with Iarla Ó Lionaird and Eilis Ni Shuilleabhain, exploring the whole sean-nós tradition from that side of Cork, and that was brilliant. I started to realise that maybe it was okay to sing the type of songs I liked. Then when I was in my final year someone asked me to sing at a trad concert, and that helped give me the confidence to do it for the exam.”

After continuing her studies at Limerick, where she became the first singer to graduate from Ó Súilleabháin’s new Master’s course in traditional music, Burke spent a year teaching before moving to Edinburgh with two friends. “We all wanted a change of scene: they were going to save up to go travelling, and I was really just along for the craic,” she says. “I knew by then that I wanted to perform, but hadn’t a clue how to go about it. I’m a bit of a home-bird anyway, so I didn’t think I’d last more than a summer. . .”

Instead, Burke soon found herself juggling a busy schedule of teaching commitments, both in schools and for a range of community projects, alongside private lessons. While still finding her feet as a performer, she kept on developing her craft and broadening her musical palette, taking lessons herself from jazz singers Sheila Jordan and Sophie Bancroft. The close-knit camaraderie of Edinburgh’s music scene, too, provided a fertile seed-bed for Burke’s talents, as she got to know the musicians who would feature on Pulling Threads. “For the first while I was here, I was just too shy to ask anyone to play with me,” she says, “but the more people I met the more they seemed to know everyone else, and it all started to feel more possible. Eventually, at the end of 2007, I decided I was just going to go for it and record an album. James and Aidan and Kris were the original core line-up, and then Aidan organised the others later on.”

Burke was just starting work on the record when she learned from another Scottish acquaintance, Kathleen Boyle, who’d recently joined Cherish the Ladies on piano, that the band were looking for a new singer. After sending them a few home-recorded songs, she flew over for some trial shows in April 2008. “Luckily they were in quite small venues,” she says, “because I literally met the rest of the band at the airport and went straight to the first gig - no rehearsal, nothing; I was totally flying by the seat of my pants, but it was grand in the end.”

Joining such a long-established and illustrious outfit – which helped launch the careers of Liz Carroll, Eileen Ivers, Aoife Clancy and Kathy Ryan, among others - has been a crash-course for Burke in many ways, from the rigours of long-distance touring to singing for crowds of thousands. “It’s certainly big shoes to step into, and I still feel very green, but so far it’s been brilliant,” she says, of a schedule that’s already taken her from Alaska to the Caribbean. “I’m learning so much just being on the road, which I’ve never really done before; things like having to go onstage when I haven’t slept, and come up with the goods regardless. Doing my own gigs, I’d probably have spent too much time thinking about it beforehand, getting myself in a panic, but this is different – you just have to get on with it. And it was great timing, what with already having my own record on the go: hopefully it gives me a bit of a springboard to work from.”

Apart from Burke’s haunting version of the traditional ballad ‘Molly Bawn’, which opens the album, Pulling Threads focuses on the work of contemporary songwriters, with such diverse choices as Bob Dylan’s ‘I Shall Be Released’, Andy M. Stewart’s ‘Where Are You Tonight, I Wonder?’ and Tom Waits’s ‘Broken Bicycles’ highlighting the range of Burke’s tastes and artistry. She also dips into Americana territory, with Chris Stuart’s ‘Springhill Mine’ and Gary Burr’s ‘I Would Be Stronger Than That’ – the latter previously covered by Faith Hill and Maura O’Connell –alongside two tracks by cult Edinburgh songwriter Sandy Wright, on whose own forthcoming album Burke also features. She draws on that aforementioned jazz tuition to telling effect in Fran Landesman’s ‘Ballad of the Sad Young Men’, and closes with an artlessly new-minted rendition of ‘I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen’, minimally backed by Drever’s guitar.

With other instrumentation including piano, fiddle, cello, accordion, double bass and percussion, arrangements elsewhere vary in style from classical-style lyricism to edgy nu-folk, torch-song intensity to polished acoustic pop, united by Burke’s timelessly expressive, exquisitely nuanced voice. “There are loads of different strands on the album – that’s what the title’s about,” she says. “With it being my first album, I wanted to try and pull together as many of my influences and ideas as I could, and the types of songs I love singing, because they’re all different facets of me – of who I am as a singer.” Burke’s many-sided musical identity might resist easy categorisation, but it certainly makes for magical listening.