By this stage in her career, 12 years after the first Corrs album and a full 30 million albums shifted, it would be fair to suggest that we all know what to expect from Andrea Corr. Raven-haired and demurely beautiful, Andrea is crystal-voiced and endlessly willowy, an updated Karen Carpenter possessed with an incessantly beautiful voice.
But now here she comes with her debut solo album, Ten Feet High, and suddenly Andrea’s entire oeuvre has shifted markedly. She now sounds unexpectedly different and positively leftfield. Reinvention would be a grand claim, but it wouldn't be an exaggerated one. In essence, she has thrown open the creative doors to reveal a wealth of hidden riches, a natural gift for lyrical storytelling, and a voice that errs more on the side of deadpan and understatement than traditional diva delivery.
“For me music has always been more about the song than the singing,” she says. “I love story-based songs, songs by people like Neil Young and Simon & Garfunkel that transport you to all kinds of different places.”
Each of the 11 compositions here - 11 highly eclectic songs that show a breadth of range few would anticipate in any modern-day artist - were initially born on and around Andrea's piano. Some of them initially sounded sweet and sultry, others quite gothic. But for these songs to really come to vivid life, she knew that they needed a greater canvas than she herself could give them. Which is where uber producer Nellee Hooper comes in. Andrea had long admired his work, particularly on Bjork and Massive Attack albums. A mutual friend, Bono, who went on to become the album’s Executive Producer, made the necessary introductions, and a solid union was formed. Ten Feet High now began the process of developing some wings. Or, in Andrea's own words, "with this album, I've written the story, and Nellee has painted the picture."
It's some picture, at once loudly colourful and starkly black-and-white, both stripped back and sparse, and full of trumpet-parping life. At 32 years old, Andrea is flourishing magnificently.
When she was just 15 years old, Dundalk-born Andrea Corr joined forces with her sisters Sharon and Caroline and her brother Jim to form The Corrs. Over the next decade and a half, the siblings would grow to become one of the biggest acts in the world. In 1998, their album Talk On Corners became the UK's best selling album, the first Irish act ever to achieve this feat. Each of their albums has sold an average of 5 million copies, a strike rate few else have accomplished.
"We had an amazing time and some remarkable opportunities," she says now, "but in many ways we were always exhausted, jetlagged the whole time, and forever rushing from country to country and continent to continent, chasing our success. I'm not complaining, far from it - it was the time of our lives - but everything else was put on hold. Basically, we wanted some time off, an opportunity to breathe."
And so, after The Corrs' 2005 album Home, the band finally decided upon their much-mooted hiatus. Each member went home to Ireland to live the life they'd for so long denied themselves. Sharon, Caroline and Jim began the business of having families and raising them, while Andrea undertook a new life of her own, that of a solo artist, and began working on what would become Ten Feet High.
“I wanted to make an album full of little stories,” she enthuses, “where my imagination could really run rampant." Rampant is perhaps the perfect word to best sum up the album's opener. ‘Hello Boys’ sees Andrea - previously, you'll remember, the singer with the dulcet tone and the serene demeanour - now sounding like a cat on heat, claws drawn.
"It is an arresting way to begin proceedings, yes," she says, a mischievous glint in her eye and a sly smile on her lips. "But then I thought that there would be no point in doing what I’d done before. And so I didn't. I went the other way entirely."
Indeed. ‘Hello Boys’, which begins with the line, "I know you are watching me/I think that I like it", certainly reveals an emancipated and more daring side to Andrea.
"Essentially, the song is about the madam of a brothel, the kind that only entertains certain special customers and is, therefore, by far the most desirable of all," she says. Ask her, reasonably enough, quite where the inspiration for such a song comes, and she will shrug her shoulders. "I really don't know. The mind can go to some quite strange places, can't it?"
‘Shame On You’, is a deceptively pretty song full of fluttery musical notes, its very lightness masking a much heavier message.
"It's about conscription and war," she explains, "a protest song through the prism of love, and how these men who go off to war are leaving behind wives they will never marry and children they will never have."
The album's kaleidoscope of colours and style continues apace, Andrea weaving her multiple characters through each song, at once both playful and sombre. ‘I Do’, about a fairytale marriage, is delicate and bewitching, a song as light as air, ‘Anybody There’ features some understated pining ("Will there be anybody there to hold me?") delivered adorably, ‘Champagne Through A Straw’ a wry dissertation on the vagaries of a celebrity lifestyle ("I've got my all-over tan and my tummy-tuck/Big house in the country, with expensive bags for my scary little dogs..."), and the closing ‘Ideal World’ is a poignant ballad about the hopeless pursuit of a perfect life. Then there is the one cover on the album, and it’s a radical one: a startling re-reading of the Squeeze classic ‘Take Me I'm Yours’ that she makes all her own.
"This isn't necessarily about showing the world the real me," she says. "It's nothing that contrived. No, this is just an album where I've had fun and adventure; I'm thrilled with the results. Even if nothing happens with it, I'll go to my grave happy I've done it."
A modest smile, then: "But naturally, I hope it does do well. I kind of think it deserves to."
It really does. 2007 looks like it could be Andrea's most interesting year yet, a year of challenging preconceptions, and re-writing the rulebooks.
