Throughout this site’s nine-plus year history, I’ve written a bit about Dublin, Ireland-born singer/songwriter and guitarist Sorcha Richardson. Relocating to the States to study, Richardson quickly developed relationships within Brooklyn’s underground/indie electro pop/electronic music scene that heavily influenced the sonic direction of some of the early material she had started to write and record. Interestingly, Richardson first caught the attention of the blogosphere with a stint in the hip-hop/electro pop act CON VOS, an act that received praise from Nylon, Pigeons & Planes, Indie Shuffle and others.
Once that project ended, Richardson followed it up with her solo debut, the bedroom recorded debut EP Sleep Will Set Me Free EP, which received 200,000 SoundCloud streams and caught the attention of Crosswalk Records/Delicieuse Musique, who released the follow-up EP Last Train. Adding to a growing profile, the Dublin-born JOVM mainstay played sets at the now-defunct Northside Festival and CMJ, along with several other festivals, as well as a number of headlining shows.
Now, a couple of years have passed since I’ve personally written about her, but as it turns out, during that same period of time, the Dublin-born singer/songwriter and guitarist has firmly established herself for incredibly relatable yet deeply personal lyrics, heart-aching vocals and pop-minded yet genre-defying songwriting. Interestingly, Richardson’s long-awaited full-length debut First Prize Bravery is slated for a November 8, 2019 release through R&R Digital — and the album’s latest single, album title track “First Prize Bravery” prominently features Richardson’s wistful and aching vocal delivery and a shimmering and twinkling arrangement of guitar and organ. But at its core the song is centered around incredibly novelistic detail about the mundane moments of one’s life that are actually transformative — particularly those in which you gather the courage to take stock in yourself and face your demons. But along with that, there’s the sense of not letting disenchantment and disappointment stop you from your own personal development. The song seems to come from the wisdom earned from real life, lived-in experience.
“This song started out as my attempt to make something that sounded like a track from the latest Feist album, Pleasure,” Richardson says in press notes. “It doesn’t sound anything like that anymore, but it was originally full of really raw acoustic guitars and lo-fi vocals. It sums up a lot of what the album is about for me—the beauty found in life’s ordinary moments and the bravery it takes to not allow disenchantment to cease your best efforts.”
