Nora Keane was born in Clonakilty, West Cork, to an Irish father who ran a small bookshop and a Dutch mother who taught piano lessons in their living room. The house was always full of competing sounds — her mother's students stumbling through Czerny exercises, her father's vinyl collection spinning Joni Mitchell after the shop closed, her older brother's bedroom leaking indie rock through the wall.
At fourteen she found a nylon-string guitar at a car boot sale for €15. The neck was warped — the previous owner had left it leaning against a radiator for a winter — which meant the action was high and some frets buzzed no matter what. She learned to play around it: finding melodies in the spaces where the instrument wouldn't cooperate, pressing harder on the notes that mattered, leaving the ones that didn't. She still thinks of songwriting that way.
At nineteen, she moved to Amsterdam. Officially it was for university. Unofficially, she was running toward something she couldn't name yet. She dropped out after two years and never left the city. She works three shifts a week at a café in De Pijp, writes songs at her kitchen table between 2 and 4 AM, and records voice memos on her phone while her downstairs neighbor — an elderly man named Henk who has Opinions about noise — occasionally bangs on the ceiling with a broom handle. She's learned to finish the take before apologizing.
She is twenty-four. She is not famous. She is not sure she wants to be. She is currently writing her debut EP, and for the first time in her life, she's not crossing things out as she goes.