Niamh Keane- Dublin’s Up and Coming Musician

Niamh Keane, Dublin’s up and coming Singer-Songwriter. Credit: Christina Appleby

Niamh Keane is a promising young singer-songwriter and instrumentalist hailing from Dublin. She is a frequent performer around the Dublin music scene playing venues including Whelans, the Workmans Club, and The Underground. Most recently she has seen support for the Irish Band Kíla. She’s currently working on her new EP and gearing up for her performance The Underground Venue on April 29th.

Since age five Niamh has been playing music. One of her early instruments was the fiddle and she started with Irish traditional and classical music. She said: “I was doing music in my primary school … my dad encouraged me to play in groups like fiddle class and then from there recommended I did my own private classes as I got a bit older, and that’s how it really all got started, I just grew into it.”

By her teens, her range of instruments had diversified and this led her into songwriting. She said: “First I taught myself guitar for a few months, then I started to learn songs from musicians that I loved by watching their YouTube videos, it made me want to write a song. I was 16 or 17 and writing music was more of an outlet.” As she grew older she continued to develop as a musician, and her writing advanced as well. She said: “It just comes from playing away on something.”

Now a graduate of Music from Maynooth University, she has a diverse musical arsenal, combining piano, guitar and fiddle with stunning vocals. Rhythmic instrumentals on guitar or piano pace themselves against hypnotic choruses.

But the storytelling is especially compelling on Niamh’s songs. For this, she draws from her own thoughts and experiences, as well as stories told to her by others. “Lake Michigan” comes from her time spent living by the great lake in the northern U.S. To write “Lonely Sea” she thought about a pirate lost at sea. She said “I was watching Pirates of the Caribbean and I was just in this mood of Pirates and Sea Shanties.” She then said: “It just depends on what I’ve been reading, what I’ve been watching, what I’ve been listening to, as well as interactions with friends and family.” In Niamh’s live performances she also interprets songs from by artists who inspire her, such as Joni Mitchell and Irish artists like Lisa Hannigan, whose work Niamh credits as motivation her own lyrics.

With an array of songs, from whimsical to upbeat melodies, inspired by stories both true and fictitious, Niamh Keane is bringing her own unique flavour to the music scene in Dublin right now.

You can check out Niamh’s Youtube page on www.Youtube.com/NiamhKeaneMusic and look out for her newest song titled, ‘You Don’t Have A Clue’.