Alice Laffan grew up in a household filled with trad and country music in County Laois. Her mother played the accordion, and other relatives sang and played various instruments, but none pursued music as a vocation; instead, they mostly played in local trad sessions as a hobby.

Despite having a music-centric childhood, Alice wasn’t entirely convinced that it was for her. “I didn’t start music until I was in my early teens,” Alice said when she spoke with Post-Burnout. “I didn’t realise that I had an inclination towards that until I got a little bit older, and then, when I was about thirteen, I got a ukulele. [Laughs] That is where it started! The ukulele wasn’t really in line with what everyone else in the family was playing at the time!”

After a few months of playing the ukulele, Alice decided it was time to move on. “After the ukulele, I moved onto guitar, and I kind of just stayed going from there,” she says. “I picked up the guitar in my early teens, and I would’ve learnt a lot by ear, because it would’ve been happening at home and stuff, and, yeah, I went to a couple of lessons and stuff, and I fell in love with the whole thing.”

A couple of years later, Alice began gigging, but felt ambivalent about it. She explains, “I kind of started gigging when I was about sixteen, in pubs and stuff, and I started out playing what I loved and what I listened to, and after, I think, about a year or two, I’d have people come up to me, saying, ‘Play stuff that we know. We want to dance. We want to do stuff.’

“I think I kind of lost myself for a couple of years, where I was just playing stuff that I knew that people would know, and knew that they were going to like, and it kind of makes you feel terrible, only playing to please other people.”

But around the same time, Alice found a passion for a different type of live music that rejuvenated her interest. “I was kind of thrown into musical theatre, accidentally,” she says. “I volunteered at a show one time, just for a bit of extra cash as a teenager, and I was backstage, and I just fell in love with the whole theatre.

“I was late getting into it… – I think I was about fifteen or sixteen – …but once I got a peek behind the curtain, I was just in love. Although you, maybe, wouldn’t know it from the music that I make now, I definitely have a lot of influences from musical theatre.

“So, I spent a lot of time in a musical theatre school here, in Laois. Shout-out Curtain Call Stage School! I learnt a lot there. I think a lot of stuff that I learnt there was more so on my performance, but I think it influences my songwriting, still, because in musical theatre, you’re taught how to perform and tell the story of the music that you’re performing, and I think that influences my songwriting, in that I do try to tell a story with whatever I come up with on the day, when I sit down to write something.”

After finishing secondary school, Alice moved to Dublin’s City Centre to attend BIMM, where she studied Vocals. Her time there was marred by the COVID-19 lockdowns, which made studying and networking difficult. Despite these hurdles, she has an overall positive impression of her time there.

“The things that you learn from people… – industry experts, and people that have learnt first-hand and have come up in the industry – …it’s hard to get that perspective from anyone else,” Alice says when reflecting on her time at BIMM.

“I think a lot of musicians that I know have been to BIMM, in one sense or another, whether it’s been for a degree or even for a day, and you do get that perspective from those people in the industry, even if you’re not planning on staying inside that niche of the Dublin music industry, you can take little bits from it and use it in your own stuff. And I do think I’ve learnt what to do, and some things not to do! [Laughs] What to stay away from! You kind of see all perspectives.”

With a “bucketload” of honestly vulnerable tracks written throughout her teens and early twenties, Alice wanted to develop these works into an original musical project. When she returned home, Alice made her debut gig as Just Alice at the Carlow Arts Festival.

“It definitely wasn’t an easy transition, for sure,” Alice says of that experience. “I was doing musical theatre performing, and then I was also doing a lot of cover gigs from the time I was in my mid-teens up until, say, about eighteen/nineteen.

“I had my first gig, then, where I performed my own originals, and I had been performing for years, and I thought, ‘What’s another gig? I’m just going to do it and be fine,’ and I wasn’t nervous until I actually got out onto the stage and I realised, ‘Oh, man. This is actually me that they’re looking at, and these are my songs and my thoughts, and I’m not just performing somebody else’s music.’ It was actually the first time since I was a kid that I got really bad stage fright, and I was shaky.”

In the crowd for that set was the producer and label owner Darragh O’Connor, who runs Youngblood Music. The impressed Darragh struck up a conversation with Alice that resulted in him offering to help her make music.

This offer was a huge deal for Alice, who admits that an initial stalemate in embarking on an original music career earlier was her uncertainty about making connections in the music industry.

According to Alice, she and Darragh have a strong working relationship, with her bringing her music to him and him offering suggestions, but ultimately giving her final say. The first track released by Just Alice was “Wait,” which dropped in May last year.

“So, ‘Wait’ was a song that I wrote when I was about seventeen or eighteen,” Alice explains. “So, it definitely has that more coming-of-age vibe to it. We took that into the studio last year, and although it was an older song and maybe not exactly the vibe that I’m going for now, I sat down with Darragh, and I wanted to give that song…I wanted to make it in a way that the seventeen-year-old who wrote it would have wanted it to be.

“I think I did that with that song. I wanted it to be that kind of coming-of-age pop with a little bit of rock, and that sort of stuff, and have that be its own, standalone single, before I brought out my more recent rites, which are more folky/country/Americana kind of stuff.”

There was some uncertainty on Alice’s part as to whether she wanted to debut her project with a song that was atypical of the direction she planned to go in. “I think I did question it for a while,” she admits. “I’ve always wanted my music to be just the way it is, and the way it always has been.

“So, I think I started with ‘Wait’ because it was an important song to me. It was one of the first songs that I ever performed live for an audience, so it held that special little place in my heart. So, I decided to record that one, and I knew that the vibe was going to be different than all of the rest of the stuff that I was going to release, so I kind of wanted it to have its moment.

“So, I put it out last year and let it have its moment for a while, so I could start from what I had written in the last couple of years, and move forward then, with everything in the same vibe. So, yeah, I think it was always going to be a standalone one. It was one that people knew, and it was one of those songs that people were saying, ‘Oh, you’ve played this live, so will you put it up on Spotify?’ So, I put that one up, and now I can put it to rest. It can stay in its little capsule, its own little genre of Just Alice, and, now, I’ll build on it from there.”

After releasing “Wait” in May, Alice spent the rest of 2024 gigging and accruing fans before returning to the studio with Darragh in December to record a new batch of originals that she felt better represented what the Just Alice project was. The first song from these sessions released was “good thing.”, which came out on Friday the 13^th, last month.

“I think ‘good thing.’ is the start of the direction that I’m taking my music in,” Alice says of the track. “So, it has more of that folky, country…It’s kind of hard to pin it down into a genre, but yeah, folky/country/pop sort of vibe. Yeah, that’s what my music is.”

Lyrically and thematically, “good thing.” is an unshielded piece that deals with a toxic relationship going south, but one that, ultimately, has a positive message of metamorphosis and moving forward. “I am very honest in my music, and I don’t use a lot of metaphors or anything like that, so it is what it is with the music, and I think it’s very clear in that,” Alice says.

“That song was a song I wrote a few years back, during COVID. I think we all took a lot of time for self-reflection during that time. I kind of wrote the song before I even realised what the meaning of the song was. I wrote it while I was still in the situation.

“Then, I only wanted to take it to the studio after I had kind of put it to rest and had time to reflect on it and say, ‘Yeah, this is what happened, and this is the story of it, and I want to put that out there and put it to bed and move on.’

“It is a summer song, and I think there is a little bit of hopefulness in it. There’s a line in it, ‘I don’t want to be a bummer,’ but sometimes, you are a bummer! [Laughs] I do kind of lean into that sad girl singer-songwriter ideal sometimes, because we all have stories and things to say, and they’re not always happy, but I did try to put some pep in it there, with the music; that there is a hopefulness in it. That story had hope, because I had the song finished, and after I had time to reflect on the whole situation, I was able to put that little bit of positivity into the production of it.”

Speaking of production, this is another avenue that distinguishes “good thing.” from “Wait”. “I didn’t want to add too much to the song, because I did want it to be true to my live sound,” Alice says “good thing.”’s production. “I think a lot of people, with the last song, were expecting it to be more acoustic, and I did a kind of bigger thing with ‘Wait,’ for the first single.

“That was fun. It was really fun in the studio and stuff, and having a big kind of sound, but I did find it was actually challenging when you’re live, trying to emulate the song that people know from Spotify. So, with ‘good thing.’, I definitely wanted to add a little bit of flair, but I wanted it to be a sound that I could recreate live. So, bar the banjo shred, I think it’s something that I can recreate with a loop pedal and a beatbox.”

For the rest of the summer, Alice plans to release more songs from the December sessions, gig more, and release Just Alice’s debut EP towards the end of 2025. When we spoke, “good thing.” had been out for about a week, and had already gained a lot of traction, coverage, and features on playlists from various outlets.

We wrapped the interview by asking Alice how she found the reception. “Really, really good,” she responded. “I’m delighted with how it’s been doing for the last week. It’s been received really well, which is nice. I’ve had a lot of nice chats with people, yourself included.

“But, yeah, I’ve had a lot of people asking about the song, and a couple of articles, and stuff. The streams seem to be doing well, and I’m delighted that people are listening to it. When you strip it back, I suppose all artists are the same.

“It’s great to get streams, and it’s great to get press coverage and stuff, but, really, I just want people to listen to the music, at the end of the day, and I’ve had a lot of nice messages and stuff about people resonating with the song and the meaning behind it. So, I think that’s what means the most to me out of all of that. I’m really, really glad with how it’s doing, and I hope that people keep listening!”

Just Alice’s latest single, “good thing.”, is available on all streaming platforms now. You can keep up with Just Alice through their Linktree.                   

Tune into POSTBURNOUT.COM Interviews… tonight at 21:00 (IST) to hear this interview in full. Available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Music Podcasts.

Aaron Kavanagh

Aaron Kavanagh is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Post-Burnout. His writing can also be found in the Irish Daily Star, Buzz.ie, Totally Dublin, The GOO, Headstuff, New Noise Magazine, XS Noize, DSCVRD and more.