Loreto Convent Blues
Patrick Freyne watches Luan Parle take country to the country, school by school.
Patrick Freyne, 10 Mar 2008
Luan Parle is writing a song with the help of 30 teenage girls in the Loreto Convent in Dalkey, Dublin. One of girls is strumming a guitar, another is playing a malfunctioning keyboard and they’re all shouting out lyric suggestions. Meanwhile a young teacher walks around keeping their more excessive enthusiasm in check and I’m sitting in the corner scribbling in a pad of paper looking a little bit frightened. It’s not exactly Folsom Prison but in its own way it’s just as scary.
It’s not every day you get a pop singer visiting a convent, but Luan Parle has decided to do songwriting workshops in any school that’ll have her, for two reasons – 1) it allows her to give a little back to society and 2) in this era of music downloads and clueless musical marketing departments, it’s also, maybe, a way to take the music directly to the young people.
“I’d just completed a 50-date tour around Ireland and I’d played a lot of all-ages art centre gigs,” she explains. “And because of that I decided I’d go in and see the schools. Initially I just went in and had a little chat with them about music in general and about the music business. I basically grew up on a stage and I figured if I could pass on a bit of knowledge that’d be great. But it just developed. And it really works. They’re often kids who’ve never written a song before or played an instrument, but they end up achieving something. They’re writing a song and it’s a group effort. Plus they’re working together as a group and with their peers. That’s got to be good.”
Of course starting young must make sense to this Wicklow-based country-pop protégée who wrote her first song when she was eleven, and performed it on the Late Late Toy Show the same year. A few months later she’d been on Kenny Live and her first album was on the way. She even had an opportunity to go aged 12 to record with some Nashville greats (an opportunity she’s now glad her parents turned down). She’s only in her twenties but she speaks like a seasoned veteran. “My life in a nutshell,” she says. “Album at 12. Signed a five year contract. I went to school, put a band together and when I got out of school I sent a CD to Stuart Clark at Hot Press, who wrote a little piece about it. It was spotted by Sony at the time, this was before they had merged with BMG. I signed with Sony Ireland but then there have been so many changes since then. BMG came on board. It’s been ever changing really.”
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