WHEN The Whileaways – Nicola Joyce, Noelie McDonnell, and Noriana Kennedy – first took to the stage together, they had arrived after a number of life events, personal and cultural, that mapped out the path to the microphones and the adoring audiences in front of them.
For Noelie, it was the tsunami that hit Ireland in the form of the Saw Doctors that decided him on a musical career.
"I've been involved in music for all my life really," he explained as all three Whileaways joined me on a hugely enjoyable Zoom call last week.
"I'm from Tuam in Co Galway and when I was a young boy, the Saw Doctors were the biggest band in Ireland. They had just brought released N17 and I Useta Love Her, both huge hits and they were the first few songs that I learned to play.
"But from that age, I could see that this could be a legitimate way of life, that these these guys from my little Galway town were tremendously successful in what they were doing, touring all around the world and playing music so, ever since then, I've always taken music very seriously.
"I went and did other things but it doesn't surprise me that I have found myself here at this point in my life, involved in music, bringing out albums and doing all that makes me very, very happy."
For Noriana Kennedy, who only started playing music as a social thing with friends in her late teens, it was the economic recession which decided her on heading to the west of Ireland to pursue her musical career.
"It was actually by default in a way because I'd studied environmental science and had a job but when the recession hit, it guided me further into music really. It was great to be given no option but to do it," recalls Noriana.
"I'm originally from Lucan in Co Dublin but I'd heard there was a great scene in the west and so I moved to Galway for that reason."
Nicola Joyce, on the other hand, had already tasted success with the Irish-New Zealand band Gráda with whom she was a member from 2004 until it went into hiatus in 2010.
"That kind of happened by accident when I finished college," she explains.
"They were already an established band, and they were touring all around Europe and Australia and America and all that craic.
"So they had a success that I had absolutely nothing to do with but they they needed a singer. And it was my brother, actually, who coaxed me into going for the audition as he knew a couple of the lads in the band. And I went for it so that's what I was doing up until The Whileaways."
"But before that, there was always kind of music in our house, my dad's a great singer, and a great collector of songs and parties and that kind of craic," Nicola reminiscences.
"He had a pub as well so I was always around sessions and around music growing up."
These various life experiences in different places at different times have led by some musical alchemy to The Whileaways, a band of "perfected simplicity", who combine their respective voices in sublime harmonies, singing songs the have mined from their own lived lives and the lives of others. By extension, they sing about the lives of all of us who have known family, love, loss and/or who have a sense of place.
Their fourth album, In All Honesty, has just been released and the title comes from a phrase Noelie's father – and many others – would often use.
"It's just a little phrase that fitted nicely into a sound that I had rattling around in my head, and it worked as a chorus too. And so when all those things come together, you end up with a song," he explains.
"I suppose that one song started with those three simple words and the idea of what those words represented, and then I had to work out how would I express those in a song that's about my father and about my family and about, hopefully, other people's fathers and families."
It really is a gorgeous song that struck a chord with me but another of my own favourite songs on the album is Blackbird.
It's the kind of song, where, if you are lucky enough to be alone at home, you can play loud and dance a waltz with yourself until it ends whereupon you fall onto the sofa, laughing at its sheer beauty.
On Home, Noriana Kennedy draws from a poem written by her father Jim, a former Columban Missionary priest and published author who passed away in 2019. She explains that "turning one of his poems into a song is another way to hear his voice again".
On her track Walking on the Wall she beautifully reveals memories of her life, threaded together with a celebration of the sheer joy of singing: "Without it I'd be a very empty soul."
But while the trio are undoubtedly standalone talents, the sum is more than the sum of the parts, especially when it comes to harmonies.
Noelie explains: "Music is the great leveller. It's a way for us all to communicate with one another without necessarily having to say too much but it's not just lyrically, either.
"It's a melody which can transport you from where you are to maybe some place in the past, make you think about stuff that happened before or it can make you hopeful for things that are about to happen. It can do all these magical things, in all sorts of different environments too I think.
"When you do harmonies, you might be aware that another voice exists, it just happens naturally but then when you get three or more voices singing together. another thing starts to happen where you enter into... it's almost spiritual if that's not too strong a word, but it's that feeling that there's something else going on above the song itself even - as Nicola says, there's that connection and there's that grounding feeling of being together."
So great singers? Tick. Great harmonies? Tick? Great songwriters? Tick? Great musicians? Tick?
All that's left is putting the album together and for that The Whileaways made the journey up to Bann View Studios in Portglenone to team up again with producer, Sean Óg Graham, and this time round, with Alex Borwick, to give the songs a more contemporary edge.
In All Honesty is now available and the band are playing across Ireland in the next few weeks, including a gig at the Duncairn Arts Centre in Belfast on July 2.
They will be back in Belfast on November for a reprise of their show with Pauline Scanlan, Bird on the Wire: The Songs of Leonard Cohen.
::Full details from thewhileaways.com.
