CMAT has spoken to Music Week about her bond with AWAL and the creative freedom the relationship has allowed.
The Irish singer-songwriter, whose third album Euro-Country was released on Friday (August 29), signed to the Sony-owned firm four years ago at the age of 25.
“By the standards of the music industry, that is so old,” laughed CMAT, aka Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson.
Speaking in our recent cover story, the now 29-year-old said she didn’t “see signing a deal as a measure of success”, but found the nature of the arrangement met her needs perfectly.
“They gave me a very good and fair deal,” she said. “Maybe you don’t get the big fat advance you might with a major, but you will own your music, and you will earn residuals off it, and be able to do whatever you want with it once you come out of the deal after a short number of years, instead of someone owning 85% of the songwriting for 80 years. I needed to have control of my own ship.”
If I turn around and say I want to release an album in three weeks, they can’t do anything because I have control
CMAT
CMAT’s first two LPs – 2022 debut If My Wife New I’d Be Dead and Ivor Novello and Mercury Prize-nominated 2023 follow-up Crazymad, For Me – were also released via AWAL. And Thompson believed that retaining control has helped her to increase her output.
“I’ve made three albums with pretty much no interference; if I turn around and say I want to release an album in three weeks, they can’t do anything because I have control,” she said. “It’s not a model that works for everybody, some people want more guidance, but I’d been wanting to make music professionally for so long that I made three albums in four years. If I had signed with a major, I would still probably be on my first album cycle.”
Hailing from Dunboyne, County Meath in Ireland, both of Thompson’s first two albums topped the charts in her homeland. Euro-Country’s title track is partly sung in Irish and addresses the consequences of the failure of the Celtic Tiger, while the record’s cover pays homage to Dublin’s Blanchardstown shopping centre – a popular CMAT haunt during her formative years.
Nevertheless, the London-based musician said she “certainly wasn’t part of an Irish scene”, adding that she didn’t meet fellow exports such as Fontaines DC until after becoming successful. What’s more, she said she wasn’t a huge fan of “traditional Irish music”.
You need to understand your audience and when you’re doing good or badly
CMAT
“It’s amazing and it’s beautiful, but there are so many nights where musicians end up in the same pub and people will pass the guitar around,” she said. “You have The Mary Wallopers, Lankum, Lemoncello and Junior Brother and they’re all singing a traditional song. Then it comes to me, and I don’t know any of those songs, so they have to listen to me singing my own.
“Everyone has always been nice and respected me and no one’s been a fucking dickhead or anything, but it has always made me feel a bit insecure and not a part of things.”
Thompson recently achieved her first hit single with Take A Sexy Picture Of Me, which peaked just outside the UK Top 40 and inspired TikTok dance craze the “Woke Macarena”. It also reached No.22 in Ireland.
The singer, who described herself as an “extremely loud, hyperactive, Tasmanian devil person,” said she has enjoyed being able to experiment creatively and in business.
“You need to understand your audience and when you’re [doing] good or badly,” she said. “I’ve released songs that I didn’t like, and the immediacy with which I was able to understand that I didn’t like them was only as a result of being able to release so prolifically.
“Releasing as much stuff as I could in such a short amount of time has been the best education I could have had. The fact that other labels don’t work like that is crazy, because they tank people’s careers that way.”
Subscribers can read the full CMAT cover story, which also features interviews with her manager Barry O’Donaghue, AWAL and agent Natasha Gregory of Mother Artists.
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