Smashing the pop music stereotypes of and MOTHERHOOD
Reevah is on a roll with her debut album release
WE’RE about to hit that spot in October where the clocks go back and nights get darker. For those who need a salve for their souls at this time of year, there’s some sunshine on the horizon in the form of some perfect indie pop.
Daylight Savings is the debut album from Reevah, aka Aoife Boyle who is about to embark on a tour to launch the long-player that she’s been working on for two years.
Tonight Aoife is playing Belfast’s Limelight for BBC Introducing where she will support Snow Patrol while the tour is in Dublin at the Workman’s Cellar on November 1, Belfast’s Empire on November 2, and St Columb’s Hall in her native Derry on November 3.
‘The album is out now,’ says Aoife. ‘I am relieved and excited to get it out there. It’s a strange thing as it’s something you work so hard on and then you are putting it out there and you kind of just have to let it go and see what happens with it when the time comes.’
It’s been a lot of hard work from a small team and Aoife is excited nwo that everyone will hear the record which was recorded in Belfast with Matt Weir.
‘The album was written essentially between myself and Brian Doherty who is my drummer and also acts as producer as well,’ says Aoife. ‘We started writing before Covid but we scrapped most of the stuff we had been working on and decided to start afresh. During Covid times we were bouncing ideas back and forth and that is maybe when our sound was realised a bit more. So as bad as Covid was for musicians, in a sense it gave me time to realise what kind of sound I wanted to pursue.’
Daylight Savings was the first track on the album that was written.
‘After that everything kind of fell into place and it was written and recorded over a span of about two years,’ Aoife says. ‘The album as a whole has a lot of references to time and a lot of the lyrics are about spending the time you have with the people you love and your time here being fleeting and appreciating the moments that we do have.’
Time is one of the recurring themes on the album.
‘When I wrote Daylight Savings the track was about being okay when daylight savings comes and that you will be in a good place or a better place when it’s that time of year,’ says Aoife.
‘It was written at a time when maybe I wasn’t in a great headspace during Covid. It was a hard time for musicians and I was going through a lot of different things and not really knowing where my music was going. Daylight Savings is about hoping that when the time comes that everything will make sense and that it will be good.
‘It made sense that the album in its totality was named after that track as it was the first one I wrote.’
Now we are facing into that time of year again, Daylight Savings is making sense for Reevah, who has already released a number of singles from the album including Call Me Up, a feisty call-toarms for womanhood.
A lot of the record also focuses on what it’s like to be a woman and a mother today and the separation between what Reevah is and who Aoife herself is.
‘It’s about the idea that Reevah is an alias and it is something completely separate from who I am as a person,’ says Aoife. ‘People don’t realise I am a mother and I have all these other things going on and it’s not just about the outside picture, there is so much depth to what I do. It’s challenging pop music and what it’s supposed to stand for.’
Lullaby, too, is not your traditional slice of electropop as behind its upbeat sounds are snappy lyrics that challenge the traditional boy meets girl love song balance. ‘It’s about how some men see themselves,’ Aoife says. ‘And the lyrics are centred around I’m not going to be the one to listen to your lullaby as you are actually so boring that you are putting me to sleep. So I like challenging societal norms in a pop song.’
Just by the very nature of her work, Aoife is doing just that as there aren’t many women who set out to be pop stars as a 30-year-old mother-of-two. But then not many women are like Aoife Boyle.
‘I was always singing, from the age of about five,’ she says of her beautiful voice. ‘I studied music at university and I thought I would go down a teaching or a community work route. I did teach for a while and my role now asides from Reevah is in arts development. Reevah started out as very much a hobby but it wasn’t until two years ago that I decided I wanted to pursue it properly and give it a good go.’
She is also a busy mum to Rosa, 11, and Noah who is eight which means everything in her pop career must be done with precision.
‘Time is a big issue,’ Aoife says laughing. ‘And there are so many other challenges in place about travel and logistics. Of course things have changed in the music industry in recent years but I hope it changes more,’ she says of the view of a mother also being a pop star.
‘I just don’t think the industry is as open to it maybe because unfortunately sometimes women are seen as being something else within the pop industry so there are lots of different challenges, but I am willing to challenge them.’
Tonight Reevah will be at the aforementioned Belfast gig before touring with a full band and some surprises.
‘These shows are bigger than anything we have planned before,’ Aoife says. ‘We have guests coming along to play with us and we are playing the entire album plus older tracks as well. ‘But it’s easy to pick out where future Reevah is going.’ That would be great places, if there’s any justice in the music world.
‘Challenging pop music and what it stands for’
■ See reevahmusic.com for the album and tickets.