Euro-Country

About

Watching the pure joy of Glastonbury-goers doing the Woke Macarena to CMAT’s anthem “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” at her 2025 performance might make you think Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson is having an easy time being a pop star. But the story behind her third album, <i>EURO-COUNTRY</i>, released two months later, suggests otherwise. “I didn’t think I was going to make another record so quickly, and when all these ideas started landing, I knew I needed to do this before I could do anything else,” CMAT tells Apple Music of the follow-up to 2023’s <i>Crazymad, for Me</i>. “It was a very hard album to make for a number of reason, and it’s a very heavy subject matter. What we were trying to pull off was so difficult that I had a really hard time making it. But that being said, I’m really proud of it,” she say. It’s a big album. While “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” provided the perfect—and well-deserved—pop crossover, complete with viral TikTok dance, CMAT was keen to stay true to her roots and go “full country” on songs like “When a Good Man Crie.” CMAT recorded the album in New York, addressing themes of grief, lo, and “the ambition to be bigger and more important than you currently are,” both in terms of herself and her native Ireland. “In general, I have to work on things on the road when they’re in their infancy,” she say. “But place-wise, I think this album was born of grief and loss and sadness and stuff, and things being put into perspective for me in a way that they hadn’t been before. All of this suffering I endured making it, and now I’m bearing the fruit.” Read on as CMAT talks through <i>EURO-COUNTRY</i>, one track at a time. <b>“Billy Byrne from Ballybrack, the Leader of the Pigeon Convoy”</b> “I definitely needed something to open up the record that wasn’t my voice. A lot of this album is criticizing Ireland, which is something I love more than anything else in the world. So, I wanted something that captured my love for it and to show people I wasn’t coming from a snotty place. One day, I randomly came across a documentary, and this scene happened. Billy Byrne is about to free a lot of pigeon, and this is a phone call that he makes from a telephone box that’s in the middle of a beach. He sums up everything that I love about Ireland: its weirdne, its beauty, and its warmth.” <b>“EURO-COUNTRY</b> “‘EURO-COUNTRY’ is a bit of a Frankenstein song—I wrote bits of this years ago for a completely different thing. I knew the album was going to be called <i>EURO-COUNTRY</i> and then I thought, ‘I’d love a title track for this record.’ Usually, it’s the other way around. The line ‘I feel like Kerry Katona’ came because I have a real fascination with beautiful blondes who are destroyed by the pre. I’ve written about Princess Diana and Anna Nicole Smith in the past, and I think Kerry is another one of those women that was rinsed by the British pre, completely fucking unfairly. I really do admire her, and I think she’s very strong.” <b>“When a Good Man Cries”</b> “I’m really glad the way those two songs run into each other. That’s one of the most successful bits of the album. I needed to go full country immediately, so everyone knew what the record wa. This is me going in on myself because I made an ex-partner cry. He hadn’t done anything wrong. There’s this thing in third-wave feminism, which i, I feel, now outdated, where women should be like men. Making a man cry is turning a trope on its head. I repeat ‘Kyrie Eleison’ [‘Lord have mercy’] over and over again at the end, which is a reference to my favorite song of all time, ‘The Donor’ by Judee Sill, in which she’s begging God for another chance to become a good person.” <b>“The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station”</b> “‘The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station’ is a meditation on irrational hatred and intolerance. It’s based around me getting annoyed every time I saw a poster of Jamie Oliver because when we were on tour, we’d eat a lot of sausage rolls from his branded deli. I don’t actually have any beef with Jamie Oliver, so I’m kind of like, ‘Ciara, you need to stop being a bitch. He’s got kid.’ And then there's a stream-of-consciousness section in the bridge where I’m going through my own history to try and figure out how I became such a bitch. I think it’s good to be self-critical—I don’t think anyone should ever rest on their laurels when it comes to kindness and their capacity for it. We should all be trying way harder.” <b>“Tree Six Foive”</b> “This song has been around for two year, and it used to be called ‘365,’ but there’s a little artist called Charli xcx who released a song with the same name, which is enormou. So, I was like, ‘I can't call it that, so I’ll just call it what it is in my phonetic spelling.’ It’s about looking back on my history again and thinking about a time where I made the decision to try and not to be treated badly anymore. I wanted it to be a proper flashback of a song. Even though I don’t have these feelings anymore, it’s a former version of myself that’s doing bad foreshadowing. A stupid song written by a stupid person to illustrate the person that I used to be, I gue.” <b> “Take a Sexy Picture of Me”</b> “If I’m making an album that is so much about capitalism, the cruelty of the modern condition, and how lack of community has made everyone be an asshole, I had to do one song where I was like, ‘I have also been a victim of thi.’ The thing that had been rattling around in my head the most was last year, when we were doing festival, and there were all the comments being nasty to me over my physical appearance and my weight. I remember saying, ‘Let’s make this the most accessible-sounding, biggest, fattest pop song so that loads of people are forced to listen to the most uncomfortable lyrics I’ve ever written.’ Under no circumstances did I think it was going to go anywhere near as big as it did, with Julia Fox doing a little TikTok dance to it, but I knew it would pop off in some way.” <b>“Ready”</b> “A lot of people in my life really loved this song, but I didn’t know how I felt about putting it on a record because it felt too optimistic and poppy. And I still don’t really know how I feel about the song, but I really like the place that it occupies in the record. It’s about somebody who is giving up after a period of complete stagnation. I wrote it in a COVID-y time. I’m saying I’m so bored of having depression that I’m going to do something self-destructive but fun because I don’t care anymore.” <b>“Iceberg”</b> “This is a song about my best friend Bella. It’s funny, we’ve been best friends since we were 14, and I’m a pop star and she’s a lawyer. She’s the most studiou, hardworking person in the world. When she got her job which she’d worked towards her whole entire life, I saw the pressures of this ambition and this full-time work completely beat her down for a while. And she started to go in on herself. I found it really funny that she thought that I wouldn’t know she was suffering. This is the thing in female friendships that I think is so beautiful—you cannot pull the wool over my eye. I know who you are. There’s a joking line in the beginning of it where I’m like, ‘Where did you go, crazy girl boss?’” <b>“Coronation St.”</b> “I wrote bits of this when I was 23. Leaving something to sit and marinate in one form for seven years is something I like doing, so it’s like I’m in collaboration with a former version of myself. It’s about jealousy, being stagnant, and feeling like I didn’t get everything I thought I was owed by life. I wanted to capture that deadness and feeling of having nothing happening in your life and really double down with hindsight just how harrowing it wa. I used to do a weird job managing and cleaning apartments in Manchester, and one of them overlooked the set of <i>Coronation Street</i>. I found it mad that it was fake building. I was like, ‘Wow, even Coronation Street’s not real.’” <b>“Lord, Let That Tesla Crash”</b> “Weirdly, this is the least profound song on the record. It’s about lo. My friend died, and I had to write the story of us in it because it was the first time I lost someone I was really close with. You make friends with people without thinking much about it, just enjoying their company. And then, when they’re gone, you realize what the point of them wa. I only realized how much he meant to me when he died, and so much about his death annoyed me. I felt quite stupid being a touring musician/pop-star person because I was like, ‘What's the point in this?’ And then, I went to see the flat we both lived in together, and there was a charger and a Tesla parked outside it, and I remember being so angry about that.” <b>“Running/Planning”</b> “I wasn’t going to bring this song to the studio, but we made a draft of it in one night, which sounds almost exactly the same as it does now. It was so instinctive and so immediate. This is another song about ambition, drive, and the downsides of it. I was thinking about how there’s a treadmill of life that you get on when you’re in a heterosexual relationship. You date for a couple of years and then you get engaged, get married, and then you have a baby and live the rest of life. There’s a transactional element to romantic relationships that muddies something that’s otherwise quite beautiful. And also, societal pressures to conform. With conformity comes the weird prejudices against people who don’t [conform]. Carving your own path and going against it makes your life so hard.” <b> “Janis Joplining”</b> .

via Apple Music

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