Sorcha Richardson - Smiling Like an Idiot (track by track)
On the anniversary of its release, a runthrough of every track on Dublin singer-songwriter Sorcha Richardson's brilliant second album Smiling Like an Idiot
Smiling Like an Idiot, Dublin singer-songwriter Sorcha Richardson’s brilliant second album, celebrated its first anniversary this week, so I thought we could revisit one of my favourite interviews - and records - of 2022 for this week’s newsletter. Sorcha was generous with her time and thoughts for TPOE 237 - we talked pretty generally about how things were going, as well as reflections on the first album, First Prize Bravery, and moving home from New York. It’s an hour-long interview and was the first time I’d specifically done a track-by-track album runthrough. I’ve been doing them pretty regularly since then. So below, as we’ve done with Maija Sofia and Brigid Mae Power, is a track by track with Sorcha Richardson of Smiling Like an Idiot. It’s edited for length and clarity - and one track is missing, ‘Hard to Fake It’, because my questions weren’t exactly great about it and didn’t quite translate from spoken to written word. You can listen to the interview below if you’d like. And here’s a great new track from Sorcha called ‘Map of Manhattan’.
Sorcha Richardson’s heading on a tour of the US from October 15, and has some Irish tour dates following that:
November 25: Róisín Dubh, Galway
November 29: National Concert Hall, Dublin
November 30: Dolan’s Warehouse, Limerick
December 8: Live at St Luke’s, Cork
Archie
You've got a line in this song, “I've been making posters, trying to start a band”. Is this a very nostalgic song? It sounds like it's you at a very young age.
Yeah, that's a song about you and your friends when you're like 15. And you're talking about what you'll do when you grow up and what your lives will look like. I think you have all these shared dreams with your friends, or at least I certainly did; me and my friends used to spend hours lying outside in the garden, looking up at the clouds and being like, 'and then maybe we'll go on a tour and we'll make an album' and all of these type of things. But then you grow up and not everyone actually... People have moved on and no one ever actually makes any commitments or takes any steps to make those things happen, but it feels really nice to indulge in that daydream. So I think that song for me is about looking back at your life. And I think there's people who make a big dent in your life and who you are and where you end up, but you totally lose touch with them. But just because you lose touch with them doesn't mean that they're any less important to you. So that's me now looking back at my younger self and trying to reconcile the two.
Did you ever wobble in terms of wanting to make it a music? I imagine it's just so hard to actually stick to it and make it as a career.
Honestly, I feel like I tried to convince myself to do something else. I don't even know why because my parents are very supportive. I had never met any opposition or any discouragement at all, but for some reason, I found it kind of embarrassing to say I wanted to be a musician. I genuinely don't know why. For a while I thought about doing journalism. I did English and things like that in college. I interned at record labels... but I think I always, deep down, knew that I just wanted to do this more than anything else. And every time I try something else, I'd be like, 'This is fine. You know? But, like, I don't really care about it.' It is really hard to have a liveable career [as a musician].
Shark Eyes
Two lines I've picked out: “I call you first prize, you can probably tell.” Is that a callback to the first album, First Prize Bravery?
Yes, Jake [Curran, guitarist] actually said this to me the other day. He was like, 'I love how you have these nods to album one'. And I was like, 'Do I?!' I wrote that very quickly after the first one came out. So I obviously was still thinking about it. I wasn't trying really hard to get that in there. It just, I don't know, it just came to me. And it felt like it fit.
There's a line just before the chorus in ‘Shark Eyes’, you say “everything from here’s about to change”. Is that introducing the theme of the album that we're about to get into?
There's a lot of moments in this album that reference that very specific thing of knowing that there is a before and after. And this moment is the line that we're crossing. That's what I mean about things hanging in the balance. I think in all of these songs, I have a feeling like this is either the start of something or the end of something, but it's not going to be the same beyond this very specific moment… Loads of the album is about a new relationship and falling in love, but also how scary that is and how I think uncertain that can be - not with every relationship, but sometimes it's very confusing. You second-guess everything you do and you replay things in your head over and over and over. But I think sometimes you, are at least I, know in a moment like, things are changing here or things are different now. It feels like taking a leap of faith or jumping off a cliff. It feels like you can tell in the moment that everything will be different now.
Spotlight Television
The lyric I’ve picked out is “Why we gotta worry about the neighbours, baby. They don't give a shit about us. I got good at faking it but I don't want to get that good. I got stage fright coming home because I was way too tired to be myself.” Is that another specific moment where you're thinking about the neighbours? Can you picture the scene as it's happening now, you can imagine the scene in front of you?
Yeah, I remember writing that and being like, 'I wonder will my neighbours hear this?' Because I was living in my granny's house when I wrote that song. They have lovely neighbours there. And I was like, 'Are the neighbours gonna hear this and be like, "Oh my God, Sorcha hates us."' That's a song that I wrote about navigating the world in a same-sex relationship and how other people's discomfort makes you make yourself smaller. Do you know what I mean? And so being hyperconscious of other people's reactions... This is the first time that I've been in a same-sex relationship. I had never seen it before, but I had never been the one at the heart of it. And so yeah, that was me trying to figure out how to how to deal with that, I guess.
Stalemate
‘Stalemate’ seems like a very sad song. And that's why I was surprised that you say it’s such an upbeat album because this seems like a pretty self-evident song that I'm guessing might have been hard to write…
See, this is one of the last songs that I actually wrote for the album. When I thought it was too happy. I was like, 'I need to go looking for the tension'.
The line I picked out was “I don't feel like talking. I leave you spinning in a guessing game and you can work it out for yourself now.”
Yeah. See, this is a weird song. I write these songs and then I forget that - or at least I need to force myself to forget - that I'll ever have to talk about them. Because I put them in a song and it feels contained. That's actually a really easy way for me to talk about these things because there's one degree of separation: I say it myself, in my room, when I'm writing it; you listen to it, I don't see you listening to it. So I can sort of trick myself into thinking no one ever hears it or I've never actually said it. I think this song was just about realising that when you actually let someone into your life that they're going to know a lot about you, they're actually really going to figure you out. And all of the parts of yourself that you know you might need to work on, well, they'll probably figure out pretty soon. They'll probably get to know those parts of you too. So I think it's a song about learning who you are in a relationship. It's a song of a lot of insecurity, I think. But that was one I wrote it with this guy called Bastian, who's a songwriter from Copenhagen. We wrote it initially over Zoom. But it was very different. Lyrically, it was entirely different. I think Saint Sister had just put out 'Karaoke Song' and I was like, 'I want to make a song like this.' And so I sent that to him. He was like, 'What are you listening to? And I sent him that one. So ['Stalemate'] was really synthy and kinda 80s and nothing like it is now. But it was one of the things, we wrote a song. The melody was cool and it had a good vibe to it, but I needed to - in order for it to mean anything to me, I needed to go and rewrite it lyrically. I couldn't write a song like that with somebody else, I don't think, because I would be too self-conscious.
Purgatory
“Don't you know, that we could be so unhappy here.” That's the chorus. And it's about something that's really sad, the breakup of a relationship. How do you go about writing something like that, a chorus to sing along with about something that's really sad?
Sometimes my favourite type of music is sad songs that are not acoustic piano ballads. I think there's something so cathartic about taking something really sad and making it something you can play live and it will feel very triumphant. I did start out writing this on the piano though. So maybe that's why it started there.
525
This is you and an acoustic guitar. It's one of a couple of acoustic songs that are on the second half of the album. I would have thought that that's where you start your songs rather than the piano? Do you alternate?
I'm a better guitar player than I am a piano player. So sometimes I actually like writing on instruments that I'm not that good on. Because I can't overthink it, it's a little more impulsive. And also, sometimes I'll start a song on the guitar and I get stuck and then I move it to the piano and then I keep bouncing back and forth between the two. It just breeds a bit of fresh blood into it or something if I do that.
The line I’ve picked from this song is, “Dublin City's shutting down.” Is this one of the themes of the album as well? You thinking about Dublin and your place in it and the state of Dublin.
There's a few songs in the album where Dublin is a key character. This one and probably 'Smiling Like an Idiot' the most and 'Hard to Fake It'. I think those three, Dublin is pretty important to the three of them. Yeah, that song is really just about me not knowing if a particular moment was the start of something or the end of something. Is this a relationship starting? Or is this a relationship ending? And I'm not sure what to do if it's an ending.
Good Intentions
This is the start of the second half of the album. You were saying that you think the album is very upbeat. I actually think all of those songs we've talked about so far, apart from maybe the first song, they’re kind of downbeat and this half of the album is a change in pace.
I agree. The way that I actually sequenced the album, it starts off actually quite dark and quite sad, and it arrives at a much - the second half of the album is way lighter and much happier. And I think much more easy, perhaps. And 'Good Intentions' is definitely the start of that. Although I think sonically it's a little lighter. Lyrically, like someone was like, 'This is a breakup song, isn't it?' And I was like, 'No.'
Holiday
“Down to the beach. Now the light’s almost faded, with two glasses of wine that we took from the house.” Again, this seems like a very specific moment. When it's happening, do you know that ‘Oh, I’m storing this away’ (for a potential lyric or song)?
There's certain moments in your life that as they are happening, you feel like they are really significant. And sometimes they do have a kind of poetry to them, and a romanticism to them. It's not that in those moments I'm like, ‘This will make a great song,’ but I actually think I experience them and I remember them in a very specific way, that I can't help but write it down and retell it.
Jackpot
“I saw you in the city by the church yard, knew that this would kill me.” I guess that we're nearing the end of a relationship. Do you get nervous about putting those moments in the songs?
See, for me, this song is actually about the start of a relationship. But I like that everyone can hear [what they want in it]… I think it's cool how people can listen to them and sometimes it's genuinely based on their own life. The listener brings their own stuff to it and fills in the gaps a little. So, yeah, this is one that I wrote about the start of a relationship, but not knowing if it would actually ever be a relationship. So that's where all of that uncertainty comes from, in it? I feel like that's such a melodramatic line.
Smiling Like an Idiot
"On my birthday. We do karaoke."
Honestly, that was the greatest birthday party I ever had. I loved it. We were in Germany playing in Reeperbahn, I think, me and Joe [Furlong, bassist] and Cian [Hanley, drummer] and the band and we flew back. It was my birthday that day, maybe, so I remember we landed in Dublin, went home to have a little sleep. And then we went and met at Lord Edward pub in town.
By the cathedral…
Yep. "Domino told me it was her favourite. So I go and bring all of my favourite people." It was one of those nights... so many people from different corners of my life all met for the first time. And David [Anthony Curley] had us all back to his house and we did karaoke until god knows what time. I had people texting me for weeks to be like, 'That was the best party ever, Sorcha' and I don't even think I did anything. I just put really good people in a room with each other. That's where Joe and David met and that was the birth of The Cope. And then I obviously felt like it was important enough that I needed to write a song about it too.
And finally, we'll end on where you got the title from. “I'm smiling like an idiot again.” It's the second time that you call yourself an idiot on the album, there’s a reference earlier on ‘Purgatory’. Is it an affectionate term?
Yeah, I mean, smiling like an idiot is definitely an affectionate term. It's something that my girlfriend said to me a few times, like, as a joke, when I was clearly smiling like an idiot, like too happy for my own good. But I remember actually, that is something that I wrote down. and I was like, 'That would make a really good song title.' I never do this but for that one, I wrote the title before and I wrote the song to the title. And then once I did that, 'I was like, actually, I think that should be the title of the album. But it's definitely affectionate I think.