Sometimes there is nothing more powerful than understatement. With a voice so pure it belies the heartache she sings of, 21 year old Claire Sproule needs little more than her guitar and extraordinary, evocative vocals to capture the world around her in all its bittersweet reality. Her songs are, simply, the diary of her life, laid bare with captivating, unaffected honesty. They need only the barest of accompaniments, the simplest of production, to translate them to her remarkable debut album, the record even Claire never imagined she would make.
All this just wasn’t part of the plan. Brought up on Tom Waits and Elvis Costello in Derry and Donegal, on the west coast of Ireland, Claire was first introduced to music by her guitarist father and her grandmother, an opera singer who had once made recordings for the BBC. Sports-mad, she was vaguely aware her voice was better than average when she was promoted to soloist in her primary school choir but promptly forgot all about it when she reached secondary school and realised she “was one in a zillion people who could sing.”
When her brother, Conor, started learning the guitar, though, Claire decided she wanted to get in on the act too. “As soon as I started getting interested in the guitar,” she remembers. “My parents sat me down and made me listen to Joni Mitchell. I suppose I was lucky they had good taste!”
After learning only two chords, Claire began writing songs, singing melodies along with the little guitar she knew. “I’m a really nervous person,” she explains, “so I never intended to play my songs to anyone else. It was just something I loved to do and I felt I had in my veins, but they were all only for myself. It just gave me an amazing feeling inside that I didn’t get from anything else. That’s when I knew this was something I would really love to do.”
Summoning every bit of courage, she entered a song writing competition at a local festival at 15 and came second. The next two years, she won easily, despite being the only entrant under the age of 30. Just as Claire was making a name for herself locally, however, she began concentrating on her A-Levels instead. It took visiting American exchange students who overheard her playing to point out the considerable talent going to waste. “I just didn’t take it seriously,” she laughs. “My songs were just like keeping a diary, and the music came along with it, so I didn’t really think anything of it until these American students encouraged me. They were the first people to say it was really good and they wanted to hear more of it.”
Protection - we do a lot of it these days. Sun cream for our skin, sunglasses for our eyes, condoms for you know where - but do you remember to protect your hearing?
Click to find all the information you need to look after your hearing now so you can enjoy music for years to come
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