Eleanor Mcevoy isn’t your usual music artist, she arrives in town with little fan fare and seeks out places with a sense of community to play her music and yet, she is the author of the biggest selling album in Irish history.

This hasn’t allowed Eleanor to sit on her laurels, in fact she is more inclined to be reinventing her music and challenging herself.

Eleanor is a young woman who loves the Blue Mountains and is enthused to be including Tasmania in her tour itinerary for the first time.

Eleanor is charming, and refreshingly isn’t that keen on keeping up with fashion, at least what we are told is fashion in copying the present trend. As Eleanor said her job doesn’t really lend itself to high heel shoes and she prefers to wear what is right for her rather than following the masses. The title of one of her songs is ‘I’d rather go Blonde’ and in fact she wouldn’t. Eleanor manages to make going against trends, look very cool.

She believes woman are their own worst enemies, considering they have fought for equal rights and symbolically for those early pioneers the fight against the corset, a device that constricts and controls and now sans the corset we instead have given in to the constricting views of our own gender as to how we should look and behave.

There is no such constricting of Eleanor, she grew up as the odd one out, the girl who wasn’t a member of the popularity clique at school and instead learned to play the violin. This different childhood may have been a good thing as while the other girls may have lost their popularity once school ended Eleanor saw a whole new world open up to her when she went to study music at university. She had found her own niche with people a little more like herself.

One of Eleanor’s most talked about songs is one that speaks about the horrors of anorexia. It is called ‘Sophie’ and is told from the point of view of the family looking in to what is happening to Sophie. Sophie of the song is in fact a composite character based on two women Eleanor knew who encountered anorexia in their lives.

The song has lent itself to Eleanor’s involvement by visiting a hospital in Poland that treats anorexia and Eleanor has received feedback from people who had been touched by the song. One mother told Eleanor that the song had saved her daughter’s life.

Another song and the one that Eleanor is perhaps best known for is the astonishingly beautiful ‘Only A Woman’s Heart’ from Ireland’s best ever selling album. This song has been embraced by Mary Black and EmmyLou Harris among others.

With it’s theme of broken-hearts and broken romance, but underlying themes of strength, endurance and hope it has made a deep impression on Women. Eleanor says many have confided in her sad stories of relationship breakdown. The song has a cathartic nature, a lyrical beauty and succinct expression of the whole gamut of emotions that accompany lost romance.

As well as being a brilliant song writer and performer Eleanor can speak Irish fluently (which I envy!) but she also has a strong social conscious. As she said to me, she did not deliberately set out to write songs about social issues but it just happened.

Eleanor writes songs from an Irish perspective about issues affecting the world today, whether it is anorexia, the sufferings of the economic crisis, political mismanagement, poverty and clerical abuse.

On this new album Eleanor has penned a song about Ireland’s present crisis and although she doesn’t often sing the ‘Irish songs’ we are probably most familiar with she sees this song as her Irish song and her ode to her country.

It is called ‘Shibboleth ‘which is translated as ‘lament for my country’.

Part of Eleanor’s social conscience saw her take up an invitation by Oxfam Ireland’s ‘unwrapped’ campaign to visit Uganda. The campaign is like the one run by Oxfam at Christmas time in Australia where instead of purchasing a Christmas gift for a loved on you buy an item from the Oxfam catalogue which can range from a mosquito net for five dollars upward. The person you would normally buy a gift for then gets a card instead which informs them you paid for a mosquito net or even a piece of livestock like a cow!!

And it is a cow, a creature of mythic importance to many cultures that Eleanor focuses on when discussing her time in Uganda. A cow is a real life changing experience for a family, it means that a family of seven children will be fed and will have something left over to sell; this in turn means there will be some money to contribute toward educating the children. Eleanor said that she actually saw the differences these purchases made. The families with the cow saw their children flourish and look much healthier. Thanks to Eleanor and others like her for participating in these campaigns to educate us on our little from us goes a long way in improving the lives of those in poorer countries.

Another interesting thing about Eleanor is her eclectic interests and in the following example bringing to our attention the importance of keeping language and culture alive.

I was intrigued while researching this article to see that Eleanor had called one of her albums ‘Yolla’, as a student (not a very good one) of Irish I was aware this was an old dialect of Wexford. I had come across the reference of this language before and what a coincidence to find that Eleanor had moved to Wexford and was captured by some writing on a wall there. The script was a mixture of Flemish and English and its existence in that area was because it was accessible by boat and so the Flemish gave their language to the district. Eleanor told me that the last person that spoke Yolla died twenty years ago, however; thankfully the language still survives in some of the songs the people in the community sing.

Eleanor will be doing two performances in Tassie during her Australian tour or you can catch her at one of the following venues
Wednesday Jun 8 at Brighton Civic Centre, Bridgewater Tasmania
Thursday June 9 at Brookfield Winery, Tasmania
Friday 10 June National Celtic Festival Portarlington, Victoria
*Saturday 11 June National Celtic Festival, Portarlington, VIC
*Sunday 12 June National Celtic Festival, Portarlington, VIC
*Monday 13 June National Celtic Festival, Portarlington, VIC

If you are unable to catch Eleanor at any of her dates this tour you might see this elective young woman who is ‘the real Mcoy…or rather Mcevoy accompanying Rod Stewart on violin! Sometime, somewhere…