Interview with Aoife Wolf – Part 1
by Killian Laher

No More Workhorse caught up with Aoife Wolf for an update as to how things are going for her.

No More Workhorse: Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. Was there much music in your house growing up? How did you get started making music?

Aoife Wolf: I think the same as anyone. Music is everywhere, so it’s not something you really have to discover. If you have it in you, you have it in you. But no formal training, no artists in my family. My dad’s a very good singer. He started making up songs in the last few years about people in our village!

I’m from County Offaly, from a tiny village. There’s no ATM in the village, it’s a ‘one shop, one pub, one church’ kind of place. It’s more of a hamlet really. I was in the pre-internet era because we didn’t get high-speed internet until I was in university so there wasn’t a huge amount of access to culture.  It was whatever was on the radio or whatever music like friends showed me. Or if some of my friends had Kerrang! in their houses. But we didn’t have Kerrang! So for me, it was just chart music really. No real access to anything terribly esoteric.

What was the first music that really hit you?

AW: When I was a child, Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls was in the charts. And the Cranberries and the Cardigans so that was a good time for music. I have to say, when I heard Florence and the Machine’s album when I was a teenager, I was like, ‘Where has this music been my whole life?’ I really did think that her first album was something special. It really resonated with me. Her kind of imagery, I think was the thing that resonated with me the most. But I used to love anybody with a big voice, so I was a massive Christina Aguilera fan. I would go out into the woods and mimic the voices of all these divas.

And then obviously Nirvana, Alice In Chains and Fallout Boy, emo bands, whatever people were listening to. Bands used to play at lunchtime in my school so that was pretty cool actually, I’ve still never heard of another school that did that I just thought when I was in first year “Oh, I guess this is what happens in secondary school”.

Did you play in any bands yourself?

AW: Yeah, I sang in some bands. I didn’t play guitar.  Where I went to school, it’s a DEIS school. It’s kind of hard to explain what it’s like culturally, but it’s not very progressive, I suppose. I really absorbed the message that girls don’t play instruments, which I think sounds silly because obviously, women have been playing music forever. But it was definitely the feeling in school, and it was what I felt was modelled to me that girls just sang. I didn’t have a lot of self-belief either. I didn’t start playing guitar till later in life.

Did you stick around in your hometown or did you try and head elsewhere?

AW: I went to university in Dublin and I lived in Spain after college. That’s when I picked up the guitar.  I was away from everybody I knew and I was living in a kind of ‘party gaff’. I didn’t really feel like I fit in, in school, but I really loved college. I felt like I was an extrovert because I was really always excited to be going out and stuff and meeting people. But then when I was in this ‘party gaff’ in Spain and it was just parties all the time, there were people in the house all the time… I found it kind of overwhelming and I was actually kind of bored by it.

So I picked up a Spanish guitar. I still have it, it says Juanita on it. Originally I just picked it up to play covers. I didn’t actually know that I was a songwriter, and the first thing I did when I sat down at the guitar was write a song. And I was actually completely gobsmacked by the experience because, at that point in my life, I was a staunch atheist.  I grew up on a farm, and my family are very set in the physical world. So the idea that something could be channelled through you without any real effort on your part… I was so shocked by that. And after that day, songwriting is all I’ve thought about. But then I realised that I actually wrote songs as a child. I wrote loads as a child, but secondary school really stamped out my creativity. I guess it was like, hormones and not feeling good in yourself, teenagers not being the most empathetic of creatures, and not feeling like I belonged. I completely stopped any creativity.

I used to draw compulsively as a child. That’s all I used to do, draw. I was always making stuff up and writing poetry, writing songs, singing and drawing constantly. Then when I got to secondary school, the world became about all of these other things, like social status and if you were cool and if you said the right thing and who fancied you, or if you were going to the disco. I think I just hated it. I don’t think I realised it at the time, but the world teenagers inhabit can be quite toxic and I was extremely sensitive to those influences. I really lost myself.

I just completely stopped doing everything for six years, apart from a bit of singing. I did sing in some bands. I realised that I’d always written songs, but I had completely suppressed that side of myself. Once I found it again, I was like, ‘I have to drop everything’.

The interview continues in Part 2 – Aoife Wolf’s music can be found at https://aoife-wolf.bandcamp.com/track/a-ringing-in-the-ear 

Her latest single A Ringing In The Ear is out now.