SINGING was encouraged in the Casey family home in Ballyduff Lower in Co Waterford. Both Karen’s grandmothers sang. While at school she was involved in the GAA Scor na nOg competitions and then in Slogadh.
In 1987, after a year in Waterford Regional College, she went to University College, Dublin, to study music. Unhappy with the teaching methods, she concentrated on her other two subjects, Italian and classics. She also studied piano and voice at the Irish School of Music and the Royal Academy of Music.
Towards the end of her UCD period Karan sang in the jazz band Bourbon Street, was the resident singer in George’s Bistro for two years, and also performed with the group Dorothy, singing her own original songs.
“I learned mostly from Ella Fitzgerald records and I was doing some scat singing along with the occasional traditional song or two,” she said in a 1997 interview. “Later I sang in a jazz band, also with a folk-ballad group and then another jazz band. I love jazz, the spirit of it, and still use what I learned from it in my approach to Irish traditional songs”.
In 1993 she travelled to the USA on a Morrison Visa. She has been in the USA before on a summer student visa and visited New York and Boston. She went into a jazz course and frequented the lively Manhattan session scene.
She started singing with a traditional group based around New York, Atlantic Bridge, featuring Mayo-born fiddler Fiona Doherty and native New Yorker Patricia Conway Furlong on accordion and Brendan Dolan.
Seamus Egan persuaded her to join the new group he was forming with Winnie Horan, John Williams and John Doyle. And so in 1994. Solas and Karan Casey arrived on the big stage and the festival circuit. Their debut album received wide coverage in Ireland as well as America.
She sang with Solas for over four years and they released two further albums, while she released a solo album Songlines in 1997
Solo career
She left Solas in 1999 for a solo career and in December 1999 gave birth to daughter Muireann. She toured with musicians Niall Vallely, Robbie Overson, formerly of Scullion and Paul Meehan from Armagh. She released her second solo album The Winds Begin to Sing in 2001, a collection of mostly traditional songs with two new songs by Cork’s Liam de Paor and John Spillane.
She sings in an easy, flowing voice, favouring understatement. Frank Harte and Aine Ui Cheallaigh figure strongly among her main influences, both vocally and in her choice of material. These, along with the local neighbouring singers in Co Waterford, Seamus Brady and the Foran family, were all instrumental in her development.  She’s particularly grateful to Frank Harte. “I’m doing a sort of apprenticeship with him,” she said. “He rings me and sings me songs, what more could you ask for?”
Politically and socially aware and, increasingly rare in Irish music, she was not afraid to air her views on the North, for example. For her 2005 album Chasing the Sun, she wrote five of the songs herself. She is married to Niall Vallely and they live in Cork.

Discography

Exiles Return, Karan Casey, John Doyle, Compass, 2010

Chasing the Sun, Karan Casey, Vertical Records. 2005
Distant Shore, Karan Casey, Shanachie 2003
The Winds Begin to Sing, Karan Casey, 2001, HMV.
Songlines, Karan Casey. 1997. Shanachie
With Solas
The Words that Remain, 1998
Sunny Spells and Scattered Showers, 1997
Solas, 1996