From her Grammy-winning album with the Klezmatics last year, to the series of exciting new concerts planned for spring, Irish singer Susan McKeown is back in the limelight, so prepare to be dazzled all over again. CAHIR O'DOHERTY asks McKeown what's in store in 2008.

A CATHEDRAL filling voice like Susan McKeown's only comes along once in a generation. It's a voice that has always defied categorization, mystifying and beguiling the critics in equal measure since her first CD in 1995, Bones, established her reputation and set her on the road to an international touring and recording career.

Carving out an international career over the last 10 years, McKeown's personal journey has been as rich as her recordings. Along the way she has been labeled a traditional singer, a rock singer, a folk singer, a Celtic fusion singer, and she's even taken time to explore jazz and klezmer - the latter being the raucous Jewish folk music whose spirit is, in her opinion, remarkably similar to the Irish.

McKeown has lived in New York City since she first arrived here in the early 1990s from Dublin, and it's her ideal place to learn and grow as an artist. But in the beginning there was only one drawback. It frightened the hell out of her.

"I had been to New York one summer on the J-1 visa program and it elated and terrified me. Back in Ireland by the early 1990s I had been on The Late Late Show and Nighthawks and I knew I could stay there and be well known in Ireland," McKeown told the Irish Voice.

"But the opportunity to work and study in New York became hard to resist. It was a chance to escape, too."

McKeown had grown up in Dublin where her father worked in a solid career job and her mother was an organist and composer at a time when most Irish women didn't have full fledged careers of their own. Through talent and her own determination Susan's mother had created her own career and her daughter inherited her independent streak.

"Going out at night to play a concert and supplement your income was second nature to her. Religious music was a huge interest of hers, too - when Pope John Paul II came to Ireland she was the only woman on the panel to choose the music for his visit," recalls McKeown.

"I was conscious of a woman who was a trailblazer and who had her own career and who was very successful on her own terms."

Having discovered that her first four children had no interest in music, it was a relief to Susan's mother when her youngest daughter took such an interest early on.

"As a teenager she sent me to train in opera with the legendary Dublin singing tutor Veronica Dunne. But a month before my first lesson my mother died, and it was hard to give my attention to the demanding lessons."

Still grieving - they had grown very close over their shared love of music - McKeown threw herself into the daily piano and singing classes and all the other rigorous opera training classes the school provided. It was an escape but it was also a distraction. After the first year she'd had enough.

"I know I want to make a career in music or the arts, but not opera. So I went out on the streets, literally. I'd meet up with Glen Hansard (the recent Oscar winner for the film Once) and all the other local buskers - at the time they were all singing Waterboys covers on Grafton Street in the center of town," she says.

"But there were also traditional musicians and jazz players to sing with too. I would just go around and see who was in town on any given day and I'd try to hook up with them. It was traditional one day and folk or jazz the next."

An English and philosophy graduate at UCD, McKeown applied and was astonished to win a scholarship to the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York in her final year of college. It was one of those fateful moments that meant one door was opening and another closing. Taking her courage in both hands, she jumped into the unknown.

"In the early 1990s in Ireland working as a woman and a singer and songwriter there was still a strong element of people saying, 'Yeah right, who do you think you are?' I wondered how much opportunity was going to open up and so I thought I might as well come over to the U,S."

Soon McKeown was a regular performer at the famous East Village Irish club Sin-E Cafe. Her debut album meant more critical acclaim as she set about boldly yet respectfully refashioning Irish traditional music, introducing it to the myriad sounds of the metropolis and yet retaining its authenticity and spirit.

Soon she was sharing the stage with singers like Natalie Merchant, Pete Seeger, Billy Bragg and Mary Margaret O'Hara.

It should be remembered how creatively daring it is to cross genres and traditions with the facility McKeown has demonstrated throughout her career. To refuse to put shackles on Irish traditional forms simply to please the genre purists takes some nerve, especially when it can confuse the CD buying public.

"I'm in the fortunate position that I have quite a following because I've done a lot of different things with different people. I've always been hopping around. They've never been able to pin me down and say you're this, because I've always done that."

Since the debut of the iPod in 2001 and illegal music sharing on the Internet, the music industry has been in a kind of rolling crisis that it seems unable to emerge from. In consequence it's become much harder for new artists to get signed, or if they are, they are now often hobbled by anemic budgets and low-level publicity campaigns.

Nowadays the artists themselves have to find ways to get the music out there. That usually means two things, the Internet and touring.

Says McKeown, "Touring is the thing. You have to get there. If you get your music into a film you'll get the exposure an artist needs.

"A lot of people have discovered me through compilation albums. Some have found my website. If you're new the odds against you are much more stacked against you than they were when I started out."

In the last four years as a singer and producer McKeown has been on the road with the Klezmatics (she won a Grammy for their album Wonder Wheel last year) and released two albums of traditional music in the last two years. But now McKeown is ready to reemerge in full flight in her own solo career.

"I was very visible up through the 1990s, but then I had my daughter. I mean I've been working away but I haven't been in touch with the fans quite as much. When I got a Grammy last year I didn't really let anyone know."

To make amends for keeping a low profile recently, this year McKeown plans to release a new album, and meanwhile there's a series of new concerts to look forward to (expect to hear some of her new material in the concerts).

"The singer songwriter part of me is just itching to get out," says McKeown. "That's what I'll be focusing on this year."

McKeown will perform on March 14 at the Rubin Museum of Art, 150 West 17th Street in New York. For tickets and more details visit www.rmanyc.org.