Singer, rapper and spoken word artist Denise Chaila's next move might surprise fans, as she sidesteps into the film world in a new Irish movie about legendary Motown group The Supremes.
The Choice Music Prize winner spoke to RTÉ.ie ahead of her appearance in the the commemorative Ireland 100: An Old Song Re-sung concert. She was enjoying a "lazy day" at her parents’ house in Ardnacrusha, Co Clare, as she recovers from a knee injury she suffered when running for a train a few weeks back.
The Anseo singer says, "I was at Limerick Junction and I got my leg trapped between the train and the curved thing when you step off the train - I did not mind the gap. There’s a reason why they tell you to!"
Describing the injury as "the most awkward part of my entire year", she said she’s "learned a very, very, very distinct lesson… about taking life a bit slower. "
"I burst my bursa" - a fluid-filled sac behind the kneecap that acts as shock absorber - "So basically I've punctured it and don't have a shock absorber anymore. It hurts when I put weight on it and it's very, very uncomfortable."
But the nasty injury hasn't held her back from recording new music – more on that later – or flexing other creative muscles. Her latest project sees her take up the mantle of creative producer and star of a new film about The Supremes’ trip to Ireland 40 year ago.
She says, "The Supremes came to Ireland in the early 1980s and had a really psychedelic experience of the craziest tour I've ever [heard about].
"So myself and Brian Cross - who is an incredible director and also my neighbor and now great friend - we ended up coming up with this idea that we take a number of musicians, retrace their steps and go to every town that they performed in, and try to chart the story as faithfully as possible.
"And in the course of doing that, as these projects tend to do, it became much bigger than we had anticipated and we discovered a story that I don't think any of us expected to discover."
Describing the feature as, "Motown meets Detroit meets Limerick meets us here in the 21st century", she says it’s been an all-consuming project: "It was kind of crazy. I can't wait to actually release this."
So is this the start of her making a move into filmmaking and acting, or is music still number one?
She responds, "I mean, I've always sort of been a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. I started my venture into the arts by believing that I would be an actress more than a musician, because my background is actually in musical theatre, not in music."
She says she was also a writer before that, and progressed from writing to musical theatre, to then performing her own monologues and spoken word – and that was all before she started rapping, for which she is probably best known now.
"…And then someone suggested I could rap one day and I just said, 'Why not?’ So I’m walking it all the way back again really."
"I have all these desires, and like curiosities that I haven't explored," she says, comparing her artistic journey to that of Sylvia Plath’s in The Bell Jar, where each branch of a fig tree represents a different path in life.
She muses, "She’s talking about a fig tree and at the tip of every branch, there's a purple fig and one of them is representative of a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig, she's a poet, and another, she's a professor and an editor or whatever.
"And she's just standing there looking at this tree, starving to death because she can't make up her mind which one wants to choose, and she just kind of watches them wink out of existence and fall to the ground because she's unable to pick one."
"And I’m like a walking testament to the idea that I never want to have to choose - I want them all actually."
But music certainly remains one of those figs she’s not ready to let go of yet. What’s coming up musically for Chaila? "I'm doing a lot of recording…I've been kind of quiet these last two years.
"I spent the last six months to a year travelling and making music because I finally sat down to write my first official studio album, which is coming out early next year and, by early next year, I mean, just before the summer."
She continued, "I took some time away to kind of grow up a little bit and deal with the beautiful, miraculous hangover of a post-Ed Sheeran world," she says, laughing, referring to her collaboration with the global megastar on a version of his single 2Step, which catapulted Chaila to global prominence. She also was his support act on the Irish leg of his 2022 Bad Habits tour.
Describing the experience of Ed’s influence as "incredible", she said, "And also, I think you need some time after an experience like that to just sort of get your head screwed on and your feet back on solid ground."
Denise Chaila was part of Ireland 100: An Old Song Re-sung, which is available to watch now on RTÉ Player.
For updates on Chaila's music and other projects, you can follow her on Instagram.
