The Goo 1
r Interview NORMA BURKE ROE ROE is a singer-songw
riter and multiinstrumentalist from Derry in Northern Ireland. In 2017, aged only eighteen, she performed at the Glastonbury Festival on the BBC Introducing stage; the following year she won BBC’s Northern Ireland Music Prize for Best Emerging Artist. Since then she’s supported Snow Patrol, Kodaline and Robbie Williams. I met up with her on a sunny afternoon in her home town to talk about her latest project. That’s When the Panic Sets In, launches in September. Tell us what we can expect from your debut album. Anybody that knows me from the past few years knows me as a very electro pop, shiny hook synth person. And this album is is the complete opposite of that. It’s a lot more band orientated and there’s horns and strings and it’s way more indie and so yeah, it’s a big step in a different direction. You’re really young at twenty three, but you wrote your first song when you were fourteen, so you’ve actually been doing this for quite a while haven’t you? It doesn’t feel real that it’s nearly ten years now. But it was always something that I saw myself doing. Whenever it came to picking my A levels, I wasn’t allowed to do music because I hadn’t got the grades, so I decided to go to NWRC tech college to do music instead. And worried my mum to no end. But I think it was probably the right decision at that time. That’s When the Panic Sets In is a fairly angsty title. Can you talk a bit about the songwriting on the album? This album is really a documentary of who I’ve become over the past few years. It’s heavily based on my own experiences and those around me and a lot of the things that I wish I could have a conversation with somebody about, but don’t have the courage to. You’re also releasing the album on your own label. Tell us why you chose to do it that way. PAGE 26 Yeah, I’m an independent artist. And the album’s coming out under my little record label called Jonie Wants Records. I love being in control of my creative vision and being able to release the songs whenever I want. So releasing this independently was a big thing. You said your sound has evolved. Has your process changed aswell? My writing is always changing depending on who my inspirations are at the time. Right now it’s Lucy Dacus and Girl in Red and a lot of indie inspirations. So obviously my lyrics and the chords that I use, change because of that. But the whole idea behind me writing was always about getting my thoughts and feelings out onto a page and that’s never changed. I always want to be the person that I am in real life on stage and show that through my writing, so it’s always gonna be about the most personal things for me. And it’s the scariest thing, putting that out, but I know that the struggles that I go through, there’s always going to be somebody else that’s going through the same thing. So it’s so rewarding getting to put these songs out and know that maybe someone is gonna hear it and it might brighten their day or relate to them somehow. Roe is playing Ireland Music Week on October 7th in the Grand Social at 9.15pm. Her debut album That’s When the Panic Sets In is released on Friday the 23rd September on the Jonie Wants Records label. PIC: NORMA BURKE