Nora Conlon's earliest memory of music was hearing songs by Enya played at bedtime at home in Philadelphia, before her family moved to Springs. The CD would fill the room with gentle Celtic-inspired vocals and rich instrumental arrangements as she drifted off to sleep.
"I remember hearing Enya from my tiny little bed. She's awesome. I love 'Sail Away,' " Ms. Conlon recalled in an interview last week. "But the CD player used to make a scary sound at the end, so I would sometimes get freaked out."
That was years ago, but the memory lingered. Now Ms. Conlon, 20, is a singer-songwriter herself, with talent cultivated under the tutelage of local private music teachers and in classrooms at the Springs School and East Hampton High School. She has taken her talent all the way to the Clive Davis School of Recorded Music at New York University, where she is honing her skills even further.
In October, Ms. Conlon released her first formal single, "Cut It Out," featuring a bass-driven musical arrangement and lilting melody to go with her folksy vibrato and lyrics that manage to sound wry yet gently authoritative. She originally wrote the song for a class taught by Mike Errico, a veteran songwriter, film and television composer, and author of the book "Music, Lyrics, and Life: A Field Guide for the Advancing Songwriter."
"We had to come into class with a new song every week," Ms. Conlon recalled. "It was pretty difficult, but also good because it got me to hone in on my writing. I was really proud of it."
How it came to be professionally recorded is a right-place, right-time type of story. At the time, she was interning at Fraser Studios in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood, learning the recording ropes with the studio's owners and chief engineers, Kit Conway (a cousin of Ms. Conlon's) and Colin Fraser.
"One day when they didn't have any clients and didn't have any busy work for the day, Kit said, 'Maybe we could work on your music,' " Ms. Conlon said. "I showed him a couple of songs. For Mike's class I just submitted a voice-memo recording, but Kit said, 'We have to record this.' And we did, that same day, in the beginning of December, just a week after I'd written it. We sat down and pretty much recorded everything in a four-hour session."
Ms. Conlon might look back on this early professional recording experience someday as a turning point in her career. N.Y.U.'s Clive Davis Institute "has nice studios, but I'd never sat down with a professional producer on my own music," she said. "It took me a while to grow the confidence, but I trusted Kit because I look up to him, and I love what he's doing. Hearing the finished product -- or at least half of one, the night that I left -- I was blown away and super excited."
Usually, she explained, the first vocal recording of a song is a "scratch" version -- functional but meant to be retracked eventually. But even the scratch vocals sounded authentic, Ms. Conlon decided.
"I wasn't warmed up or anything, but I listened to it so many times that I started to feel that that was actually the song," she said. "I really wanted to put it out there. I wanted to get something on streaming platforms, because at my school a lot of my peers are artists and even those who aren't still have songs out to show their songwriting or producing skills. I felt a little bit behind the ball, but I was really excited about the song and having something to show for the first year and a half of college."
"Cut It Out," which can be found on YouTube and other streaming services, was one of the first times Ms. Conlon felt she'd found her sound. It only took years of playing cover songs and trying on different styles.
"I think I'm still very much trying to figure it out," she said when asked to describe her own style. "That's what's so special about 'Cut It Out.' It was the first time I achieved the sound I had been going for. I guess alternative folk-rock is how I would put it into a genre."
Her first musical listening experience may have been memorable, but her first experiences learning an instrument were not as impactful. She started guitar and piano lessons early on, but they "didn't stick," Ms. Conlon said. "When it really started to stick was in fourth or fifth grade. My music teacher at Springs School, Angelina Modica, got the school to buy a bunch of ukuleles, and she taught the class how to play. I think because I had the experience with guitar, it came a lot faster to me, and that was when I started getting into it."
"I had learned a couple of covers and my Pop Pop was super insistent on the fact that I should go to some local open mics and do a three-song set," Ms. Conlon continued. "I was 12 or 13, and I went to these open mics and got a lot of really positive feedback. I wasn't sure if it was because I was a cute little kid playing the ukulele and singing, but people started to get to know me, and I kept doing it as I got older."
Nowadays her covers -- tunes like Hozier's "Eden," Ray Lamontagne's "Trouble," and the country blues standard "When the Levee Breaks," which she once sang with Nancy Atlas -- aren't the focus. It's original music and partnerships with friends and fellow Clive Davis students. Some of their most promising work can be heard on her website, noraconlon.com.
"Nora has the very rare quality of being able to silence a room when she sings," said Ms. Atlas in an email. "A lot of singers sound lovely or have great pitch but when she walks on stage, she has that very magical presence that something special is about to happen. It is just an authenticity you cannot buy."
"I love collaborating. That's another thing that really inspires me," Ms. Conlon said. "I think when I'm working with someone, it helps to bounce ideas off each other and it's fun to have that 'aha moment' with someone else, too."
She feels grateful for the support of the South Fork music community, citing artists like Ms. Atlas, Annie Trezza, Ray Red, and Josh Brussell as supporters and influences. They have helped her book her gigs -- at places like the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett, the Clubhouse in Wainscott, Springs Tavern, and the former Harbor Bistro in Springs -- and given her the confidence boosts she needed. And she'll never forget her Springs music teacher, Ms. Modica.
"I would have maybe eventually picked up the guitar again, but she was instrumental in getting me to start playing and practicing on my own time," Ms. Conlon said.
She says she feels happiest when she's onstage with her guitar, singing her heart out. It's not just for her art, but it's also for her mental health. And more and more, music is helping her open up to the world.
"There's something important about being vulnerable. Songwriting, and sharing it, can be scary," she said. "It is really important, and it's becoming more and more radical. Radical vulnerability is important to me in the music that I have released and want to continue to release."
