Interview: Janet Devlin

Janet Devlin: “I’d write my little country songs from my little broken teenage heart.” Photo: Alex Waespi

From The X Factor to Nashville: the unexpected lessons, influences and instincts that continue to shape a modern pop songwriter

Born and raised in Gortin, County Tyrone, Janet Devlin first captured the public’s attention when she finished fifth on The X Factor in 2011. Her album, Running With Scissors, went on to top the Indie Breakers Chart and reach the UK Top 50, while her cover of The Cure’s Friday I’m In Love has amassed almost 23 million Spotify plays. Since then, Janet has released the deeply personal Confessional, toured extensively, reached the Billboard Top 100 and toured with Hollywood actor Russell Crowe and his band.

Her latest releases, Move A Muscle and How Do Cowboys Say Goodbye?,  offer a glimpse of an artist continuing to explore new territory. We caught up with Janet to discuss her earliest songwriting memories, lessons learned from co-writing with the likes of Newton Faulkner and Jack Savoretti, finding her feet in Nashville and the creative process behind her new music…

Janet Devlin’s Songwriting Survival Kit in our Autumn 2026 issue

You were singing cover versions on The X Factor, but take us back to the earliest memories you have of actually wanting to write your own songs rather than sing someone else’s.

“Well, I remember my grandmother would tell me stories about when she’d pick me up from primary school, she’d meet me at the gate, and I’d be singing my wee songs. She’d be like, “Oh, that’s a nice song. Who’s song is that? And I said, “Oh, it’s one I made up in my head today.’ So it’s been a thing of mine since I was like five years old. Just without questioning it, it’s been something that I’ve done.

“Funnily enough, one of my earliest memories, when I was like eight or nine, I think my brother’s friend had left their guitar at my grandmother’s house, and I picked that up, and wrote a song, which I ended up robbing a lot of – well, what I could remember – and putting into a song that me and Newton Faulkner wrote together, which was called Hide & Seek… I think that the verse melody is heavily influenced by the original ‘baby Janet melody’ and then we built a track around that initial concept. So it’s just always been a thing.

“Then in my teenage years, I was so noise-shy. I used to go out to my parents’ big shed, like an industrial farming shed. My dad’s a builder, so we’re not rich, he just had bricks lying about, and he built this little room within this big farm shed – we had a pool table in there and a jukebox. I would sit on the pool table with pen and paper and I’d write my little country songs from my little broken teenage heart, you know? And then if I was feeling brave, I would ask my brother over to the shed and be like, ‘Can you listen to this song that I just wrote and tell me what you think?’”

Where did your love of country music come from?

“Well, it’s hard to explain. Like country music and Ireland are synonymous. My grandparents met at a country music dance, my parents met at a country music dance, and farmer friends of mine met their wives at country music dances. It’s a big thing. The style of country is very different [to American country music] but the root of it is still country… It’s very much in the foundations of Irish culture, and that makes sense when you trace country music back, and the Irish and Scots and their influence.

“I was considering taking a year out of school, to do a gap year early to make an EP, and I remember being asked by a friend of a friend who was good at recording, ‘What kind of genre is it?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know, man,’ so I played him one of the songs that I’d written, and then he’s like, ‘Oh, well, that’s clear-cut country.’”

Janet Devlin: “I just find people fascinating and, therefore, I find people’s music incredibly fascinating.” Photo: Alex Waespi

UK Country and UK Americana have really blossomed over the last few years, but imagine it was a shock for an Irish girl to be doing country music back then!

“Even up until a couple years ago! I’ve had the country album in the works for a long time, but I actually wanted to do it even longer ago because COVID obviously stopped everything… I’ve always liked organic instruments, and my first album, funny enough, was bracketed in the States as ‘country’. So… if you’re living in the United States of America, I’ve always been country!”

What other types of music were you into, around the time you were on The X Factor?

“Oh gosh… I had this old iPod filled with everything from Brian Eno to Slipknot to reggae, R&B, pop… I just had a thirst for music and exploring genres, just because it’s so fun to hear the lyrical context depending on the country, the culture… I just find people fascinating and, therefore, I find people’s music incredibly fascinating. I definitely had a big emo phase – if I can recall correctly – that I was listening to a lot during The X Factor.

“I was listening to a lot of John Frusciante as well. I think he’d recently released The Empyrean and I freaking loved that record. I was definitely into Devendra Banhart and an Italian band called Verdena, who I still bloody love…. The independent music pipeline of YouTube was where I was at during The X Factor.”

Let’s talk about your album Running With Scissors. I see you were writing with Newton Faulkner, who we’ve had the pleasure of interviewing.

“Yeah, Newton Faulkner, I cannot express how insane it was to work with him. For me, doing a show like The X Factor was so worth it for moments like that. I almost got detention because of him – I was listening to [his album] Rebuilt By Humans in school and my headphones came out in class! I was a massive fan of his; I still am. Annoyingly, the loveliest man to ever walk this planet, and it’s genuine. He’s as lovely as you think he is online and he’s 10 times nicer in person, and so talented, with perfect pitch!

“I turned up to a writing session with him that was organised by my management at the time. I was so nervous in the taxi ride over because I’d just turned 17 and I’m about to go into a songwriting session with one of my heroes… But he was an inspiration, and I learned so much from him, like middle eights aren’t annoying; they can be exciting! Also, he taught me how to write a happy song. To be frank, I really struggled with that. When I started doing GCSE music – which I ended up quitting – the teacher said to me, about the three songs that I proposed for my end piece, ‘No one’s going to listen to these. I don’t think they’re good. They’re incredibly morbid.’ I was like, ‘I’m an angsty teenager. What do you expect?’”

Janet Devlin: “I was 17 years old and I was turning up to random men’s houses.” Photo: Alex Waespi

What’s the trick that Newton taught you to write happier songs?

“It was the notion that you can take a song concept that seems quite negative, but it’s fun to flip it on its head and work around the same concept with ‘happy’ chords in. And the middle eight can be exciting because we can go in all of these different places instead of just painting by numbers. Like The Cure’s Friday I’m In Love – What’s the chorus? Where is the pre-chorus? Is that a verse? Is that the chorus? Who knows? We wrote a few like that, which was quite fun for me, as just a student of music at the time. It was just fantastic and he was just so lovely to me. It was definitely a very weird period of my life because I was 17 years old and I was turning up to random men’s houses in random parts of England, which is very bizarre!”

When you put it like that, it’s such a vulnerable position to put in.

“Yeah, we were living in that era where your parents couldn’t really use the internet that well. So at 16 and 17, I was booking my own flights, booking my own hotels, doing my own travel, doing all my own itineraries… So that was a bit bizarre.”

Yeah, I bet. I think the preconception is that you’re a closeted pop singer who has everything done for her, but clearly that wasn’t the reality for you.

“Yeah, definitely… But also we were living in much simpler times as far as the demands, the prerequisites of being an independent artist – what you have to do to stay afloat and to stay relevant. I’ve always been a social media-savvy person – an internet nerd as well as a country bumpkin – a very odd combo, but it worked. Luckily, with my manager now, if I’ve got a writing session, everything’s in the diary: all the contacts, all the information…”

Can we talk about your writing with Jack Savoretti?

“I worked with him on two tracks – we just revived those songs; we brought them back, essentially. Funny enough, he’d never had instant coffee before he met me, so that was cool – he’s so Italian! It was insane as well, because at the time I hadn’t heard his music, but it was right up my street… It was one of my first proper writing sessions. I freaked him out because I still hadn’t figured out that you should sing your ideas out loud! He was playing these chords and he’s like, ‘Are you all right?’ So basically I ended up writing the two verses I needed, and I might have even written the chorus [in my head]. Whatever it was, I’d written 90 percent of the track, but in his brain he’d genuinely written the session off. He was like, ‘This is a catastrophe; she’s not come up with anything! But over lunch we sat down with his manager to have lunch, and he was like, ‘Yeah, I thought it was a car crash, but no she’s actually really good, it’s sounding really cool.’”

Janet Devlin: “I’m riddled with ADHD…but I got medicated for it, and the clarity in my brain has enabled me to be a much more productive songwriter.” Photo: Alex Waespi

So was the lesson to ‘show your workings’ when you’re co-writing?

“Yeah but I was so noise-shy, I still hadn’t grown out of it. Even though I’d done TV, I’d done an arena tour, it was like there was some layer of vulnerability that I’ve got used to over the years, but it was really hard to. [I learned] to take even the crappy first idea and sing it out loud. I’m still maybe not 100 percent on it, but I know that I have to because it’s part of the process of bouncing off each other.”

How about with your more recent writing sessions for the new album? Were they in the UK, or was that all in Nashville, and did you write the songs before you went into the studio?

“I wrote them all, demoed them [first]. Most of the demos were literally an acoustic guitar on a voice note and just ambient recordings, because what’s the point wasting time trying to overproduce something when I can just play this rough, crap demo to the band and we’ll have a conversation and make it magic. So I wrote all of the songs before I went to Nashville.”

You were writing with Angus Parkin. How did you start working with him?

“Essentially, we met because we were going on tour with Russell Crowe; I needed a guitar player, and my guitar player was busy. So instead of just going on tour together, we decided to do some writing as well, before we started. He’s a long-term collaborator in the sense that he’s like a brother to me now because we’ve just lived out of each other’s pockets… I only had a month to write the album, so I’d sent him 40-odd songs and I was like, ‘Can you listen to this list and see what I’m missing? Because I can’t, I’m too close to it.’ And he’s like, ‘You don’t have a sexy or sensual country love song,’ and I was like, ‘You’d be correct, sir, because I’ve never done that. But I know I need to, so let’s try.’ So I brought the concept of Move A Muscle. I was kind of labouring on lyrics, and we tend to battle each other melodically on stuff a lot. Actually, it’s hard work for us two in a session, but we enjoy it – it’s a good debate. I was incredibly precious about the melody and lyrics in the middle… I tend to work with a lot of the same people solely because they will tell me if something sucks, and Angus will tell me if something sucks… We could start something, and we both just go, ‘This sucks, doesn’t it? Let’s be honest. Yeah, we’re trying to polish a turd. Let’s start again.’”

It’s important to be honest in any relationship, but when you’re co-writing, that’s even more important to avoid wasting precious time. Do you have a writing process?

“I write so differently now than I used to. I’m riddled with ADHD, which I don’t think is a shock to anybody, but I got medicated for it and the clarity in my brain has enabled me to be a much more productive songwriter. I’ll write two, possibly even three songs in a session. And I’m a big fan of wordplay, clever idioms and turns of phrases… I’ll do a research doc, which is basically a glossary of words that are evocative and a few example verses and things… I’ll make these for songs where I think there’s a lot of room for clever wordplay in terms of phrases and then I’ll sit in the writing session – every musician’s an Apple user, so I’ll just invite them into my notes – and say, ‘Here’s my document, we can work from there,’ which is fun.

“Obviously, I still love spontaneity… Maybe it’s because of my borderline personality disorder, but I love writing ballads – I find it quite simple to connect with. Because I’m diagnosed with too many feelings, so for me to get deep and dark and heavy is quite easy for me! So we’ll write a ballad in maybe an hour or two, and I like being a bit more spontaneous with that. I do keep lyrics, ideas, and little verses that I just tinker away with throughout the weeks and evenings. But a lot of the time, I’ll just noodle, just play something, and then I’ll just try to see what that makes me feel. I’ll see what chords they’re playing, and then go find a relevant note in my phone, and start from there. It’s like letting the music do the talking, and still pulling from that river of ideas as they flow.”

I wonder if that also guards against the writer’s block that can come from staring at an empty page. Instead, you’ve always got some notes to start with, and you can then be spontaneous from that point, can’t you?

“I don’t think I’ve ever had writer’s block. I’ve had periods of writing crap songs, but I think a lot of people get in their heads before songwriting sessions. But everybody’s a person; you’re sitting down with a person to write a song. Don’t overthink it. Just be in the moment, be in the room. If you get worked up or you allow yourself to be eaten alive by nerves, then you’re in fight-or-flight – how are you going to think of any ideas when your brain’s thinking it’s going to die?! You just can’t. So if you get that way, it’s totally chill to have a document. Just start, just write some ideas down… Because it’s still helpful to have some form of backup.”

Janet’s latest single How Do Cowboys Say Goodbye? is out now her new album is in the works. Find out more about her music, tour dates and more at janetdevlin.com

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