Echoing Simone de Beauvoir's line about "the torment that so many young women know, bound hand and foot by love and motherhood, without having forgotten their former dreams," Sharon sings on We Could Be Lovers about the actual reality of women's private sexual longings. "Would I be out of my mind, would I be losing control?" she coos.
I ask her if the song is her saying that we all have those feelings sometimes for other people, who are not our partners? "Yeah," she says with an honesty that underpins the new record. "I think we do. And I think it is a lie to pretend that we don't. We don't all go through life every day and not, at least once a year, see somebody else that makes you go: 'God, that person is really goddamn attractive!' It is, basically, the truth." "But what I am more interested in in that song is exploring it from a woman's point of view. I am not really interested in the man's point of view. We've heard too much about that over the years. It's like - 'Man is unfaithful but there is no woman involved'. How does that happen? Because, clearly, the vast majority of the time he's clearly doing it with somebody," she says.
"So, for me, in my 40s, I see the world very, very differently. And as a woman, I feel that sometimes we just get so pigeon-holed into this area - especially me, actually, and my sisters, I think - of being so bloody nice! People have way too many emotions just to be nice. Nice is fine, but the point is, on a very basic sort of sexual level, women get very pigeon-holed. Like - we just want hugs and kisses! Whereas, actually, I think we're downright into lust. Of course, we're as into it. And, of course, we can make those mistakes just as easily as a guy," Sharon Helga Corr says, in what I can only presume is a reference to infidelity. "I believe you can," she says - meaning choose to be a cheat, presumably.
I'm not really a diamonds girl but I love the subtlety and grace of pearls. Gavin [Bonnar, Sharon's husband] gave me this bracelet on our wedding day; my engagement ring was also made with pearls.
Sharon adds that when sex is "being served up on a plate" by someone else, "what you do and what choice you make," she says, "defines you". I joke that she is, perhaps, looking for an open relationship with her husband, Gavin Bonnar. "No, not at all!" she says, mortified by the very suggestion. How would you feel if he wrote We Could Be Lovers? "I get you," Sharon says, meaning that she understands the question. "But these are my feelings. They are real. They are honest. They are the truth."
My sister Caroline was my maid of honour when Gavin and I married in 2001. We went to Jimmy Choo together and bought these shoes - I adore them.
Isn't it true that one of the things you inherited from your mother was to have a strong sense of independence within a marriage - emotional and psychological? "Yeah," she says. "But also, I don't want to dilute myself to make somebody else feel comfortable. And the lovely thing is, my husband has never, ever made me feel that way. He has always said, 'the stronger you are, the sexier you are', basically. The song is not about my husband. It's not about infidelity. What it is about is exploring the area from a woman's point of view. We are not just sitting pretty and needing just hugs and kisses, and [the idea] that we would never do that, because we are so emotional and blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, it takes two to tango."
Sitting in the sunshine in Kilmainham, she has just flown in from somewhere exotic. She is full of challenging thoughts about existence and love and the nature of what it is to be a woman in the 21st Century. Apropos of We Could Be Lovers and its subject matter, we discuss the film Eyes Wide Shut, and, in particular, when Alice Harford, played by Nicole Kidman, tells her husband, Dr Bill, about an encounter she had: "I don't suppose you remember; one night in the dining room - there was a young naval officer sitting near us. He was with two other officers. He glanced at me as he walked past. Just a glance. Nothing more, but I could hardly . . . move. That afternoon, Helena went to the movies with her friend, and you and I made love. And we made plans about our future - and we talked about Helena. And yet, at no time, was he ever out of my mind. And I thought if he wanted me, even if it was only for one night, I was ready to give up everything." Bill - who had precipitated Alice's revelation by telling her that women are naturally more faithful than men - is more than disturbed by the thought of his wife having sexual desire for another man.
I began learning to play the violin aged six, but I was 15 when I received my first full-sized violin and it's remained my favourite ever since - it has been with me through everything.
"That proves my point," Sharon Corr says. "Look, I'm not saying this has necessarily happened to me," she continues. "What I'm saying is that - because I wouldn't even explore that with somebody else - this is possible. We are all living, breathing, physical animals and this is how we feel, quite naturally. Women are just too stereotyped. "Three girls in a band," she says by way of explanation - meaning The Corrs - "is perceived like we are the ones being pursued, rather than we can be the pursuers. Women are very well capable of being the pursuers. That's what interesting to me."
All the songs that I wrote for The Corrs are in this lyric book; it's crammed with bar coasters, record company schedules, bits of hotel stationery - anything I could find to write on! When inspiration happens I have to follow it.
I ask her did she pursue Gavin. "He certainly saw me first. But then I asked him out!" (They met for the first time at the Gaiety's late-night Brazilian-themed bashes in the summer of 1995. They married in Clare on July 7, 2001.) She started writing this extraordinary new album in 2012. Extraordinary, because Sharon sings, in that Karen Carpenter-esque voice of hers, lyrics that are perhaps her most confessional, certainly her most emotionally bare. On one song, Raindrops, she sings, "I can't let you go because I want you to know that I tried."
Growing up in Dundalk, County Louth, I loved cats but cats didn't love me. Probably because I used to pick them up by their heads. I remember arriving home from school at lunchtime and my mother would have a pot of stew on the back doorstep cooling for us.
Asked what was going through her mind, her soul, when she wrote those lines, Sharon says: "I was having a particularly low day, as people do, but one that was lower than normal. Do you ever get in seriously bad form and it is like the world's turned upside down and the world is against you? And you don't know why? And you really have no excuse for it, either. It's not justified in any way. So you can't find what you're trying to grapple with. You don't know what's disturbing you. So I spent the whole day like that. It was lashing rain outside all day."
The biggest achievement of my life is having my children Cal, eight, and Flori, seven. Cal drew this picture of me.
The constant driving rain all day became the focus of the song. "So I treated the weather like my enemy. It was like the clouds were ganging up for the chase. You know?" she asks rhetorically. (You know, the thing about Sharon Corr and her sisters - Andrea, in particular - is that they have a unique way of looking at the world. Poetic, definitely; there is an innocent intensity, an existential seriousness that Woody Allen would find entertaining.) "I suppose the idea of Raindrops is not to give in to the dark times. It's about not giving to the times where you feel like that and letting it get worse. And fighting that. I've gone through dark periods in life, and, yes, for sure, I am [prone to dark stuff], but I am having a particularly light period at the moment," she laughs. "But I have had those moments," she says referring to dark moments in life, "and I think you need that, in order to really appreciate the good times. I have been quite down at stages in life, sure. I have."