Jess Kavanagh has been a force of nature for a minute now, trailblazing through the Irish Soul scene since long before the pairing of words was little more than an eyebrow raising neologism.
Fronting the criminally underrated agro-soul outfit BARQ until 2020, she has earned admiration for her overwhelming voice and deft lyricism. Her work in theater began in childhood, and has developed alongside a career that’s seen her onstage with the likes of The Waterboys, Hozier, Zaska, and as vocalist for the beautiful ‘Somewhere Out There You’ directed by Wayne Jordan last November. All of this while making magic with Sister Fenix, her ecstatic soul duo with Senita Appiakorang [Bantum, Shookrah].
‘Fermented Dreams’ is a multidisciplinary new work comprising an EP of astounding pianocentric soul wrapped within a one woman play, written, produced, and performed by Kav herself, and directed by Totally Dublin April cover star Laura Sheeran, coming to Dublin this September.
I’ve been reading about your exploits with the Dirty Laundry Collective. I was a huge fan of Kate Finegan’s ‘Gammy’, and Laura Sheeran’s work.
Isn’t it incredible! I worked with Eimear [Keating, actor and DJ] on ‘Somewhere Out There You’ in the Abbey in November.
It’s an incredible collective of talent, the three of you and [glass artist] Alison Lowry. I believe ‘Gammy’ was Kate’s first play, as ‘Fermented Dreams’ is your own debut.
It was! We had worked together on some bursary weeks, developing and writing together. It’s been amazing to watch her confidence grow as a writer over the last years.
I had written some poetry and some articles for the Irish Times, and we were working together and doing a bit of a skill swap. She was picking my brain about writing and singing, and working on movement with me. I was absolutely bollixed. That woman is an athlete. That was only in 2021, so to see the trajectory of her work go from picking my brain to ‘Gammy’ in three years is insane.
Can you talk to me about the genesis of ‘Fermented Dreams’, and how it became a theater piece? As somebody in the process of getting my shit together, I am your target audience for this play.
You’re not the first person to say that to me. I wrote this body of work with Geoff Warner-Clayton. We started writing music together in March 2023. At the end of that year I went into the Abbey show, then I felt kind of burnt out. Theatre is an amazing place to be, but it’s incredibly demanding so I decided to go on a retreat for a week in January.
So Geoff and I went to Daithí Ó Drónaí’s Beekeepers – an artists’ space in Ballyform. The energy there is amazing, and we would write music all day and have dinner. We would talk about our experiences in the music industry, how we feel about the scene, about where we are in it. Very conscious and honest discussions in the evenings, before another day of creativity. It was a beautiful, restorative week. There were no thoughts of having to write an album in a timeframe or anything, it was just a situation of seeing what happened. We ended up with this really beautiful body of work which included ‘January Lullaby’ and ‘’New Relationship Energy’. We met up after listening to the demos, continuing the conversations we were having in Beekeepers, around releasing music.
With BARQ and Sister Fenix I’d gone through the cycle of promoting my work and trying to get pre-saves and trying to get people following them on Instagram, and I didnt know if I had it in me again. It just feels like dropping important work into the ether every time. The general consensus around Spotify is getting worse and worse.
I am perpetually astounded by the dedication Spotify has to being one of the most morally corrupt platforms in the world.
It’s kind of insane when you think about the kind of money they’re bringing in. They could have set up their own record label. They could have set up their own developmental university. With the billions that have gone into Spotify, they type of things they could have potentially done to put back into the music industry, and into emerging artists, and they haven’t done any of that. Instead they’ve given that money to Joe Rogan.
It would be impressive if it wasn’t so terrible.
Absolutely, someone said to me recently that the biggest industries in the world right now produce nothing. AirBnB is the largest property company in the world that owns no property, Spotify is the largest music company in the world that creates no music. They don’t make anything. It’s diminishing the process of creation, and the importance of creativity. That the CEO just calls it content, saying that it’s free to make, it’s insane to me that he would devalue the thing that makes him his money.
That, to me, either shows the disconnect between him and the thing that he’s pitching. Either he doesn’t know, or understand, or is wilfully ignorant. Neither of which are good.
These are basically the conversations Geoff and I were having in front of a roaring fire, discussing the world and our positions in it.
We were asking ourselves what we wanted to do with these demos. I’ve always been interested in Kopjaques trajectory. BARQ’s first gig was with Kojaque and Mixtapes for the Underground in the Workmans Club. Of course, he has a degree from NCAD, and an acumen for visual artistry that he’s woven and infused into his music, and that’s just one of the ways his work is so interesting to me. So Geoff and I were thinking about what I had, and I had theater.
That was the world I started in, when I was twelve, then I went into live music at nineteen, and now I’m back at musical theater, as somebody in my late thirties, thinking maybe it’s the way forward. So that’s what I decided to do. I took the work, and set to writing my first ever act. Even typing out the words ‘Fermented Dreams: A Musical Play by Jess Kavanagh’ just felt like, whoa! It’s happening!
That’s a beautiful title.
It’s based on a poem that I wrote of the same name, that I use within the play, that [lead character Noelle] touches on, and is too frightened to finish. I’ve taken my music, written a one-woman show around it and I’ll be performing it this September.
I’ll be accompanied by Sean Gilligan, somebody I began working with when I was thirteen, which also comes back to that full circle thing as well. He’s moved into the world of musical theater and musical theater education, and we’ve found our way back to each other again.
We reconnected about a month ago, at his mother, Maureen’s funeral. She was my drama teacher, and gave me my first opportunity to be on stage at thirteen. It was to Donna Summer’s ‘Bad Girls’, which is hilarious. Maureen was one of the first people who got me onstage, nurtured me, gave me my first big roles. Sean and I had always been friends, but I came back into his life being part of the funeral. When I was looking for a piano player for this, and a lot of the muso guys I usually work with were a little hesitant as it was a full play rather than cabaret or something, but it really suited Sean and it was a nice way for us to work together again.
Can you tell me about the play itself, and who inspired you?
I went to see this amazing show a couple of years ago, about Billie Holiday, ‘Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill’. It’s a play within a play, about one of her last ever events, and she’s still very much using, so it’s a show within a gig, the band are playing, and waiting for Billie. There’s this really interesting tension between her and the musicians in the performance, and I feel that’s something you don’t often see. I really appreciated that, and how you were also really able to feel the tension between the singer and the audience.
When you meet Noelle, who I play, she’s 40, she has shown up late to her own headline show, and you’re introduced to her in this flurry of self sabotage. She is performing to three people, she’s not performing to the crowd. There’s these three people in the audience who will hopefully redeem her. She’s trying to save herself after showing up late, with the piano player attempting to cover for her, and the audience is watching all of this, and can applaud or do whatever, but it doesn’t matter because Noelle can’t hear them.
A little crack in the fourth wall. Can you talk a little on the story you’re telling?
As a musician with forty on the horizon, we’re an interesting generation, because we’ve been hit with these phenomenally awful circumstances, and I don’t think any of us are really at a point we expected to be. I wanted to explore how much is self sabotage and how much of it is circumstances, and here we are with our dreams, which have not died but have changed and transmuted with us. If we face them, what are we going to do and what decisions are we going to make?
Another influence would be Bojack Horseman. I’ve watched it so many times, It’s a kind of strange comfort to me. And similarly, it’s wonderful at that fourth wall thing, like when in one particular series he ends up getting work as the lead as a tortured-man styled detective. Is it okay to perpetuate this deeply flawed character who hurts people but people identify with it? Are we nurturing the self sabotage in people when we put deeply flawed characters on a pedestal? How best to present these characters so that people feel like they’re seen, without glorifying shitty behaviors?
So Billie Holiday, Bojack, and my life, I suppose.
Did much of the writing come from lived experiences?
A lot of it is quite autobiographical. I’ve found this character is an easier way to present and talk about some things that are very vulnerable for me. I wanted to talk about the things I knew. I’ve done thousands of gigs at this point. The dynamic between musicians and I, and the crowd and I, they’re complex. I’d like to find a way to present that complexity to an audience in a way that they could feel it .
There’s a relationship there, and also that we’re living in this digital world. Our relationship between ourselves and being viewed and perceived. It touches on that anxiety between wanting to be validated with the terror of being perceived, and how we find that validation within ourselves.
And also, it deals with what it’s like to gig in Ireland as a soul singer, with no mentor, nobody above me and no person of colour who had navigated this world. To play that music to people who wanted Garth Brooks or guys with acoustic guitars, and what it was like to navigate those worlds.
And flawed as she may be, I hope that people are going to root for Noelle.
Words: Adhamh Ó Caoimh
Images: Julie O’Brien
