Heidi Talbot’s singing had The New York Times and Village Voice reaching to the top shelf for the superlatives. “A voice that is awe-struck and tender,” said The Times while the Voice found it “exquisite.”

Growing up in Kill, Co. Kildare, Talbot sang in the church choir run by her mother, Rosaleen, at the same time absorbing the vibrant array of music that filled the family home. “I’m the middle of nine children. It wasn’t like I had loads of money to buy my own tapes and CDs,” she recalls. “I would mostly have heard what everyone else was listening to, whatever was playing in the house. With my Mum, it was Nana Mouskouri and Dolly Parton, but then there’d be Guns’n'Roses and the Pogues coming from my brothers’ bedroom – just a bit of everything, really.”

At school she used to get into trouble for singing at gigs. “I remember the headmaster giving out to me because he’d seen my name in the paper for a pub gig, and I hadn’t come to school the next day, so he told me off and said I had to sort myself out, get my priorities straight.”

At sixteen, she enrolled at the Bel Canto singing school in Dublin, studying under its director Frank Merriman – “the best teacher in the universe,” according to another former student, Sinead O’Connor.

I asked her how long she spent with Merriman and what was it like?

“I went to singing lessons with Frank for a year. It wasn’t like a conventional singing lesson where you sing scales and do breathing exercises, the focus was on telling a story and not thinking about the notes you were singing. His reasoning was if you’re listening to how you sound, you’ll sing it wrong, sing as you speak.”

Aged 18, she and her brother moved to New York where she found she really had to sing for her supper if she was to survive.

Within three days she landed a job, singing in a wedding band, complete with a place to stay in Long Island. “It really was pure luck,” she says now. “I don’t know what would have happened otherwise – I guess we’d just have had to come back. I’d probably be in an Irish country and western band now!”

After 18 months on the nuptial circuit, she moved up a rung. “I moved to Woodside in Queens for about a year and later Astoria. I sang in almost every Irish bar in Queens and tons in Manhattan and the Bronx. I’d usually sing five or six nights a week for three hours a night, with sometimes two gigs on a Sunday and four gigs on a St. Patrick’s Day! It was hard going but great practice and if I hadn’t done that I wouldn’t have met Joanie Madden and joined Cherish the Ladies.”

In 2002, Heidi replaced Deirdre Connolly as Cherish’s lead singer. “It’s been an amazing experience,” she says of her five years with the band. “It was pretty scary at first,” she recalls, going from doing small clubs and pubs to 2000-seater arts centres all over America. “Being in Cherish has definitely made me come out of myself .”

After moving back to Ireland in 2005, and more recently relocating to Edinburgh, Heidi decided that 2007 would be her last year with the band. “It was just getting too much flying back and forth every couple of weeks – I was never home,” she says. “And I’d got to the point where I was ready to concentrate on my own stuff – it just felt like the right time.”

While Heidi was singing with Cherish, her “own stuff” had been gently simmering away. Her debut self-released collection in 1999 was followed four years later by Distant Future. A blend of traditional and contemporary ballads, backed up by multi-instrumentalist Dirk Powell, former Solas concertina player John Williams and fiddler Rayna Gellert, it won a raft of glowing reviews. Talbot assigns much of the credit for its success to John Doyle, her right-hand collaborator on the album, for which he wrote four of the tracks.

While Doyle again features prominently on her new album, In Love and Light, this time around Talbot felt more able to draw on her own network of musical comrades. “That’s another great thing about being with Cherish the Ladies,” she says, “becoming a part of that international Irish and Celtic scene. Touring as much as Cherish does, you get to know so many musicians, so when it comes to making an album, you can ask all your friends to come play. To be able to phone people like Roy Dodds from Fairground Attraction, Donald Shaw and Ewan Vernal from Cappercaille and ask them to play on your record is brilliant‚ and they said yes!”

From the Scottish traditional ballad Glenlogie to the vintage Ink Spots’ hit Whispering Grass; Tom Waits’ bittersweet classic Time, to an old parlour hymn, When They Ring the Golden Bells, the album In Love and Light draws on a broad spectrum of influences. Helping out are Eddi Reader, ex-Solas guitarist John Doyle, fiddler John McCusker and flute/whistle player Mike McGoldrick.

I asked her how she went about selecting material for the album?

“Over the past five years I’ve been gathering songs for this record, I had about 30 that I loved, but lots of them were the same kind of song, or saying the same thing in a different way, so that helped narrow it down. I tried to look at it as a whole instead of song by song, how does the mood change from song to song, are there too many down songs, is that song too jazzy/folky/pop-ey to sit in with the others. I say that I tried, because it wasn’t like I knew exactly what I was doing, but I had a fair idea of what record I wanted to make.”

“I’m really excited about it all,” Talbot says. “It’s just amazing to get to work with all these people. On the touring front, I’m hoping to get to the States towards the end of next year. I’ve already got a bit of a head-start there, with people who are fans of Cherish The Ladies, but I want to focus on the UK and Europe first. Cherish haven’t toured much over here, so I’m starting a bit from scratch: scary – but really exciting too.”

So is she happy with where she is at in her career?

“Yes I’m very happy. I moved to Edinburgh a year ago and couldn’t be happier with where I’m living and the people around me. I had a brilliant five years touring with Cherish the Ladies, but it felt like the right time to concentrate on my solo career. In Love and Light has just been released and there’s lots of exciting things coming up: a new trio record coming out later in the year by Kris Drever, John McCusker and Roddy Woomble from Idlewild, which I’m really chuffed I get to sing on. Philip Selway from Radiohead is working on an EP to go along with his solo record, and he’s asked me to sing a song on that, and myself and Kris Drever start our duo tour in the UK this month, then myself, Boo Hewerdine and John McCusker tour in Spain later in the year and lots of festivals and gigs in between. I’m happy and busy.” -RN

Discography

In Love and Light, Heidi Talbot, Compass Records

Distant Future, Heidi Talbot, Compass Records