The days of waiting for that rare album you’ve always wanted to be shipped from the US to your door are long gone as Spotify and other music platforms now give us access to a gazillion albums by clicking the return key.
It’s definitely a case of more means less. However, some voices manage to rise above the white noise of the downloadable leviathans and one of those voices belongs to a French-American chanteuse called Zoé Basha, who has now settled in Dublin after travelling the world for years.
Zoé has a single coming out every month up until the release her debut album, Gamble.
The first one was Love is Teasing, a beautiful rendition of the love song that originated in Ireland (probably) but which has found a home for itself across the English-speaking world. Zoé would first have heard the Appalachian iteration.
“My favourite songs to sing are songs that have crossed the ocean and been sung by different people,” she told me before Christmas.
“Some Appalachian songs must have been written there but a whole load of them are just stories and songs that came over from this side of the ocean.
“So Love is Teasin’ is not an Appalachian song, it’s a song that belongs to different places. Like me, I’m a mutt, right? I come from different places.” she laughs.
Zoé’s French-American status comes from her French father and American mother.
She was born in France but the family moved to Miami where she grew up. Although neither parent was particularly musical, Zoé has been singing since she was really young and always said she wanted to be a musician.
Zoé went to music schools and then to music college but dropped out because she says she wasn’t interested in the industry aspect of it.
“It really turned me off - just the whole music business and selling yourself,” she recalls.
“I also thought it wasn’t really useful for the world, just in terms of things to do with one’s life and so I stopped doing music for a while.”
However, Zoé did continue doing something that she had loved - traditional French timber framing...
“There’s a satisfaction that you get from working with your hands, and especially building something, seeing it grow from nothing to something that’s real and that’s useful. That feels really good,” she says.
“I don’t think you get that as much from music, but then there’s a different kind of pleasure in playing music with other people that you wouldn’t get building something with your hands.”
Thankfully, Zoé is back playing music, employing different genres – jazz, blues, country, traditional – which she sees not as completely separate entities but just different ways of conveying the same human emotions and experiences.
“When I started listening to my own music, I got into traditional American music and old blues, kind of from the early 1900s,” she recalls.
“There are struggles and different forms of sorrow and pain that people feel in different ways in different situations but when it’s coming through a song in a way that’s really authentic, it just grabs you.
“And I think traditional music and blues music and lots of different kinds of folk music in general, do that where you feel like you can relate to it in a bunch of different ways.
“And it feels like it sort of pierces through the fronts that we put up. And I think it’s the kind of raw simplicity of it that really makes it relatable,” says Zoé.
That is certainly true of Love is Teasin’.
”It’s a song I’ve been singing for years at traditional singing sessions and around campfires,” she says of the track.
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“It’s about the fear we all have about love – that it can only fade, that it’s fleeting. That fear is a theme that takes different forms across the album, and this song expresses that vulnerability.”
The next single due out is Zoé’s interpretation of Joanna Newsom’s darkly atmospheric Three Little Babes.
I describe it as “scary”, a word that she likes.
Unfortunately, we are going to have to wait until April 2025 before the Gamble album is released.
With a combination of guitar, fiddle, organ and upright bass, the album will explore themes of love, grief, identity and societal norms.
“It’s called Gamble because one of the tracks is called Gamble. I wrote it in Galway years ago but it’s also about how falling in love is a gamble and how meeting people is a gamble, but then also life is a gamble,” explains Zoé.
I then asked her about a concert she performed at in support of Lebanon. Did she see herself as someone who’s happy to be a sort of activist?
“Yeah, that was a pretty central part of my life for years,” she says.
“I think it’s just really important for people when they have space given to them - musicians on a stage, for example - to take up that space by talking about things that are going on in the world and making people aware of them and also showing where you stand on things just because integrity is really important and people who have that space can be really influential.
“Sometimes, if somebody hasn’t heard of something it’s just letting them know what’s going on.
“And on Lebanon specifically, my grandmother is Lebanese. So her parents came over from Lebanon to the States back in the 1910s.
“I actually went to Lebanon earlier this year for the first time to do research on my family and it was amazing.
“It’s the most beautiful country with the best food, undeniably, and the warmest people. I mean, even my dad, who had never been to Lebanon, was just blown away by the Lebanese people and their warmth.
“And it’s true. It was so easy to meet people, to have people help me with doing my research for my family.
“It was really great and I fell in love with the place.
“And then after finding out about what was going on in that part of the world it felt really important to help in whatever way I could.
“It’s so easy with fundraisers for people to give 20 quid, 40 quid and it ends up helping people directly. So I was really happy to put on that fundraising,” says Zoé.
Zoé Basha’s Love is Teasin’ is available now on Bandcamp, with more singles to be released leading up to the album launch in April.
