Psychiatry and Songs

Ah synchronicity, the brain-wracking writer’s friend. I’m struggling to sum up in a sentence the essence of The Blue Nile when Roxy Music’s ‘Mother Of Pearl’ comes on the radio and does it for me: “The search for perfection, your own predilection, goes on and on and on”. Thanks Bryan: your micro-cheque is in the post.

Paul Buchanan’s search, or, more correctly, eternal quest for perfection is the reason The Blue Nile are only now releasing High, their first album since 1996, and their fourth in a twenty year career. They may be perceived as the Terrence Malicks of pop – brilliant, reclusive, obsessive — but Buchanan is too modest to admit the first of these traits and firmly denies the second. “I think what’s perceived as isolation on our part,” he reflects, “what it actually means is, we’re not on TV. TV is isolation. I’m at the bus stop. I’m really not isolated at all. I’m right in it.”

Still, signs of the third trait —acceptance of nothing but the best, sometimes to a fault — are visible throughout his life story, partly through attempts to temper it.

“When I lived in America, I saw a therapist, and it was great!” he says brightly immediately after we meet. “It was fantastic. He wasn’t strictly a Jungian, but he was along those lines. It completely changed my life, in many ways.”

Asked why and how, he expands. “I think my idealism had got me into troubled waters. I expected far too much, I think, from everybody, and I was disillusioned by lots of what I had experienced. I had gone out into the world, I suppose, expecting it to symbolically reflect my relationship with God. And it doesn’t. People can’t consistently do that. I think I was idealistic, but I was demanding as well.”

He pauses. “I suppose I expected the world to be more perfect, you know; and everybody to be true and pure.”

Did you expect people not to compromise?

“Yeah. And I think also, at times, because I was so intent on being good, and well behaved, that I expected everybody to do that, and I would be disappointed if they weren’t. Not only that, but I would sort of attribute negative motives to them. What my psychotherapist would be arguing was—look, it’s not them, it’s you.”

Now that he says this, it did appear to me when I reviewed High that Buchanan was critical of the characters in the songs, notably in ‘Days Of Our Lives’ and ‘High’. Cue a look of horror on his face—“No!”—and a grave shake of the head twenty minutes later: “I’m still obsessing slightly that you might have thought I was belittling the characters in my songs.”

Ultimately, as Alvy Singer postulates at the end of Annie Hall, we look for perfection in art because it’s just not going to happen in real life. You’ll find this ethos epitomised on High in ‘Stay Close’. ‘Stay Close’ closes the album and it has to, because once it’s over you need silence. Buchanan sings miraculously, pre-verbally; he cries, sighs, intimately exhales, peels off his protective layers to fearlessly and flawlessly convey human frailty.

This purity of expression didn’t come easy.

“I think I probably tried to sing that a number of times,” he ponders.” Obviously, the way that I sing, you know, isnae really about technique, or performance. It’s more about feeling the right way – and is the right thing coming out? It’s a bizarre experience. It’s obviously mental as well as physical. I think it’s about me getting what’s inside me, articulating something emotionally.

“Once you’ve got it, it’s OK then so you know what it is. Up until you get it, you know, you’re kind of looking for it. So when you get it, it’s not generally a consequence of lots of different ways of singing it. It’s just then it happens.”

It’s a moment.

“It’s a moment, aye. It’s like what you were saying about being pre-verbal. We’re so used to getting things dressed up in a way that’s palatable to us, which is often quite short of what a sensory experience is. You need to leave a lot of things aside if you’re really trying to communicate with people.”

This is an interview with Dave Couse I published in Hot Press in 2003. Dave was releasing his solo record Genes, which I listened to that year more than any record except I Trawl The Megahertz. This interview was a big one for me — just meeting Dave for a pint was big for me. I *loved* A House and they sound tracked huge swathes of my teens and early twenties and Dave’s lyrics were central to the connection with the band. The wit, the sharpness, and the lyrical full-throated raw emotion. I was at the last A House show in 1997 and I’ll be at the A House Is Dead show in the NCH. I heard Dave on Eoghan O’Sullivan’s TPOE podcast and it reminded me of the esteem in which I held Genes. I also remember the nights of transcribing afterwards. Dave packed a lot of talk into an hour and a half’s chat down the pub.

It’s the early evening of Tuesday April 2nd, and Brian Kerr’s all-new Ireland are pluckily fending off the mighty Albania as I meet Dave Couse locking up his bike outside Ryan’s of Sandymount. Dave knows the venue for our interview well, it’s a couple of minutes from his PR company’s HQ, and you might expect the author of the World Cup 2002 anthem to be aware of the national team’s Euro 2004 timetable, but no: he pokes his head inside the stuffed pub, clocks the crowd and looks disgusted. He had no idea, and anthem or no anthem, he’s not a fan. “I find football incredibly boring. Repetition beyond belief!”

Dave is disgusted because, for the conversation he has planned in this particular pub, we need a bit of hush. There’s a reason the ex-leader of A House has trekked here from his home in Rathfarnham, and it’s not to share an hour of low-quality international football with hotpress. As becomes clear even as we stand on the street debating whether or not to go in, it’s because this is a place with a recently acquired resonance for him.

Dave’s dad Greg Couse, who for years worked down the road and for whom Ryan’s was something of a second home, died last year. Dave’s warm, tender debut solo album Genes is dedicated to him and today his family is foremost in his mind. “I cycled over thinking it’d be a nice idea to do it here. The old man’d be with me, you know?”

As we find a quiet corner, Dave casts his eyes around the room. He says he feels the presence of his father.

“Oh yeah definitely. The last few times I’ve been here, you know what I mean? There’s a real sense that he’s here. You can hear him laughing. He conducted a lot of his business from here, and you could imagine that his meetings with all his mates would pretty much revolve around him. That’s the kind of character he was. So I get a real sense of him. I haven’t had that since … since the day he died.”

How long is that?

“It’s about ten months now. That kind of thing takes a long time to settle in; the realisation of the whole thing. You’re just left numb when something like that happens. In the next album he’ll be featured in the way of a song. This time all I could do was honour his memory with the idea of it. The whole genes thing.”

The title and the design of Genes both form a tribute, the artwork largely comprising a touching, time-spanning family portrait. You open the CD sleeve to pictures not only of Dave, but of two sepia-tinted strangers and a bright big bald baby peering out at you.

“My father is there, as a 21-year-old man. The man with the banjo in 1900 is my grandfather; 1935 is the old man. Then me in ’64 and then there’s my daughter. There are four generations of the Couse family in the hundred years.

“The strangest thing was, I was going down to the office, and I had proofs of the artwork in my bag, and I had taken them out in here, just to check them and look at them, and it was like I brought him back in for one last look, if you like. Because unfortunately, he had a long illness, it took a long time, it was pretty horrible. But it was weird when I took out these things and… there he was, you know. Back, and I know it was only a photo, but here again.”

You said you’ll write songs about your dad.

“Oh, undoubtedly, yeah,” he avers. “I’ve already written one, in my head. Got a lovely little title for it and everything. I mean it’s a big thing, I’ve never experienced anything as big – well, the birth of my daughter was pretty massive. Add it all together, not long after that he died, it’s a pretty bizarre experience. To have two such massive events so close together focuses you as a human being. I was a no-nonsense person anyway; I’m undoubtedly that now. Because you realise what life’s about, when something like that happens.”

And feelings this huge, this bewildering: can you can express them in song? In words?

“Yeah, you can. Always simply, as simple as possible. You just blurt out what’s in your head, right, and then try and tidy it up a bit,” he laughs, “so it’s not written by a four-year-old. You just tidy it up a little bit, but the honesty has got to be at that level, like a four-year-old, nearly, because young kids have this amazing knack of honesty, which I’ve found with our little one. They don’t hold anything back at all. There’s a beauty, and freedom, and strength, you know?

“The same thing, when I wrote ‘For Sale’, for Eva. I remember seeing her for the first time, when she was born. I just felt,” he says, slapping his hand to his heart, “this bang, you know. If you listen to the lyrics, it’s all about: Seeing you now, the whole world is here for you, and it’s my responsibility to look after it for you, and if you just hold on to the truth, and love, and passion, you’ll get through life.”

‘For Sale’ will be known to anyone who has seen any of Dave’s comeback shows over the last two years – roughly the same period as Genes has taken to gestate, from the initial ideas through writing, then recording with Edwyn Collins, through finally releasing it on his own Beep Beep label, a move away from the tangles with majors that dotted A House’s career. “I am now chief executive of the record company, the CEO, I am the A&R department, I am the artist. I’m the talent. But I’m also the post boy, you know?” he smiles.

As befits the cottage industry supporting it, Genes is an extraordinarily intimate record and, by ‘When I First Saw You’ standards anyway, remarkably happy. The comparison I keep making is with Teenage Fanclub’s spectacular Songs From Northern Britain, an album about the inestimable thrill of waking up beside the same old face every day for fifteen years; the likes of ‘Satisfaction’, ‘Peaceful’ and most immediately ‘Intoxicating’, are the sound of a man supremely gifted in the art of writing pop songs, overwhelmed by love for his wife and daughter, who would like to tell them, and us, all about it with as little fuss as possible.

With any luck at all – and if ‘Intoxicating’ is a single – it could be huge; if not, as long as it’s being heard, he’s not worried if the hit never happens. If he’s reading the economic tea leaves right, he’ll muddle through.

“This is my theory,” says Dave, “and it could be fucking horseshit for all I know – that music, music does really well in hard times. In the ’80s, when it was hard, that was when bands were getting big advances. I was wealthier in the recession than I’ve ever been. Then the boom came in the early nineties and we started running out of money really fast. So I’ve kind of ridden this boom time pretty much as a pauper, you know. So if there is less spendable income for people, to be into music is really cheap! It’s a really cheap hobby.”

So, Dave, the imminent depression has its up side.

“I’m praying for a recession, yeah!” He looks imploringly upwards. ‘Please God make the recession come quicker.’ Everyone else in the world is going ‘Please God, Jesus… if this recession comes in I’m homeless!’ I’m going ‘Make them homeless, Lord!’ At least I’ll be successful.“

A Lazarus Soul are Brian Brannigan, Joe Chester, Julie Bienvenu, and Anton Hegarty. They released their fifth album The D They Put Between The R&L last month, launching the record with a joyous, replenishing show in the Grand Social. They released the single ‘Long Balconies’ on June 14th and they have shows coming up with Damian Dempsey and at All Together Now.

Steve Wickham plays on The D too, as does Vyvyenne Long, whose cello contributions to ‘Funeral Sessions’ and ‘Lemon 7s’ add further richness and profound beauty to a couple of the greatest songs I have ever heard. Brian Brannigan told me that the band arrived in Long’s house in the mountains of Wicklow on a stormy afternoon. They showed her the songs, he said, and “She was like ‘Holy fuck, this is dark!’—then she got really into the stories.”

Vyvyenne Long’s reaction to The D resonates with mine. The moment I knew I was dealing with a masterpiece was when I felt the shiver of the closing couplet of ‘Lemon 7s’: “Pills ground down like powder, ’til your problems are no louder than / A little infant whimpering for Ma to come and help“. But the same song is at its heart a love song, the lead character “A lady with a love so fine and genuine that only few could know“. Brian Brannigan calls ‘Lemon 7s’ a “love story in darkness”, and that captures something essential about The D: these are songs of love for home, family, and community, in hard times. The songs are deadly serious, with themes of social exclusion, addiction, alienation, and abuse, but they are suffused with compassion and elevated by humour and a battered but hardy hope.

This is a conversation that I recorded with Brian Brannigan on June 10th. We covered a lot of ground. The themes and origins of The D provided plenty of raw material, including enjoyable excursions into musical inspirations like Nick Cave, Nyabinghi reggae, Mark Eitzel, and The Idiots. Brian spoke warmly about his formative years in The Attic in the 1990s and about his friend Dave Carroll, of Wormhole and E+S=B, who had died the week before. Brian messaged me the day after we met to say “We rambled – I forgot we were doing an interview”. I felt the same way, and I hope that ease and unguardedness comes across in the piece.

NC: Congratulations on the album. I am curious what it must be like for you now. We met at the album launch, and that was an amazing celebratory night. But even since then, the reception for the record has been incredible. What is it like to be on the receiving end of all of that?

BB: It’s a bit strange. We’ve been making records for twenty years as A Lazarus Soul, and we haven’t had that reception before, so yeah – it’s a bit odd to begin with. But it’s kind of something that’s happening in social media, really, to me, you know? Because we’re not playing, we’re not out there all the time, and then I’m just back in work after two weeks or so. I kinda feel that people’s relationship with the album is theirs now, the album is theirs. Bar playing gigs, it’s someone else’s now. But it’s nice. It’s good to get that positive feedback.

What do you think people are connecting with in the new songs?

I haven’t got a clue. The only thing is they’re more song-based, like ballads, and maybe that’s just in our DNA. And maybe people were waiting for a record like this. I don’t know. People that like A Lazarus Soul can’t understand it (laughs). People that like the other records can’t understand it. They’re wondering like why people are attracted to this record. It’s not really for us to say, you know? It’s just for us to put them out there and we’re just happy that we’ve had a positive reaction. It is, it’s strange.

Something that I think runs through the album, like in ‘Lemon 7s’, ‘Metal Railings’, and ‘Funeral Sessions’, is the attention you pay to the social forces at play in people’s lives that dictate what happens to them, often more than choices they make themselves, and that we don’t really give enough credit to.

You know, I’m probably going to ruin this by saying this, but, the album wasn’t written as a piece. So it was very much an album of circumstance. It wasn’t meant to fit together and at one point it really didn’t fit together. So before we wrote ‘Black & Amber’ and ‘Long Balconies’, the album wasn’t gelling basically. We had it in a different sequence and it wasn’t working.

There was no agenda more than any record that we’ve made before. On past albums, we had a really strong idea of what we were doing and there was a title hanging around and all that. This record seemed to just come together itself. It wasn’t forced. Them social issues and themes: it wasn’t a grand plan. It wasn’t like me going, I’m going to write this record about what’s going on now. And it wasn’t a big statement that we were making.

When I’m writing, it’s very much, I’m writing a sentence and then the next sentence. I don’t ever stand back to examine the songs when I’m writing, and the next song is completely separate. So it just so happened that when it came together, I didn’t even realize it, but it just so happened that when the album came together, I didn’t even realize it until people started listening to it, that there was all these things going on that people were talking about. I didn’t see that at all. I work in a very small way. I didn’t see the songs fit together. And then there was definitely a time where we felt that it wasn’t even sounding like a record at one stage. Then we wrote ‘Black & Amber’ and ‘Long Balconies’. ‘Long Balconies’ went on to the album after the album was finished and mastered.

Did it.

Yeah. And that kind of changed the whole – you know, I had a sense when we wrote the song, that’d be a great second song. But when you’re writing a song, you can’t tell what anybody’s going to think of it. You have a very different relationship with a song when you’re writing it than does someone listening to it. And you can never imagine what anybody will make of it – nor should you care. You’re just writing the song. So a lot of things that people are saying about this record, we were completely oblivious to.

One of my written questions is “Did you come at the album with an initial overarching vision like a novel” and what you’re saying is that you didn’t.

No, absolutely not. On other records, we have, but on this record, it seemed to write itself. There was loads of little accidents that happened that pushed us in particular directions. You know, I didn’t even realize that the Black & Amber was so close to O’Devaney Gardens. I’d found photos from Last of the Analogue Age, where I’d taken pictures of the Black & Amber and I didn’t even realize it. So there was something subconscious hanging around in my head.

Then I was in Gmail one day and I found the photographs I’d taken five years earlier. Then I wrote ‘Long Balconies’, which was inspired by O’Devaney Gardens plus some early memories of flats where my granny lived. I only realized when I wrote ‘Long Balconies’, and knew it was going to be the second track, that the two things were really close. It’s only up the road. Strange things happened like that.

I didn’t know ‘Long Balconies’ was inspired by O’Devaney Gardens. I had visualised Dolphin House. There are lots of long balconies.

Yeah, completely. It was initially inspired by a short documentary by a film-maker called Joe Lee, who spent a lot of time in social housing complexes and he was filming. But it was inspired by early memories as well of Granny Brannigan in the flats in Ballybough. Those barrelled stairwells are some of my earliest memories.

I wonder if some of what people are emotionally connecting with in the songs is compassion. You are telling stories of people who have difficulties for which they are punished – disproportionately to put it mildly. People for whom things are set up so: you are born into difficulty and struggle, and then we punish you for being born into difficulty, thereby creating further difficulty for you. And you don’t hear these connections being made much in songs, do you?

No. Maybe in Jinx Lennon or Damien Dempsey’s stuff. But yeah, there’s a huge divide in this country, and it’s getting worse. But again, this wasn’t a big statement that I was making. To me, they were very small stories that I was focusing on.

So you take ‘Lemon 7s’ for instance. It was a couple that lived out beside me in Maynooth. They begged for cans outside the shops. I was just telling their story. It’s mostly a true story. A little bit of drama added, but mostly true. And it just so happened that they were sleeping in a tent, which is what’s happening all over Ireland at the moment. But you know, I was just writing their story and that’s what it is. And there happened to be addiction and there happened to be homelessness in the song. But really I was telling a love story in darkness. But what really struck me about that relationship was, they seemed to be madly in love, even as, as I say, they were on the bottom rung. And they had nothing. Actually sleeping in a tent.

So, you know, to me I was just telling a sad, tragic love story. Both of them died in the end. One had died when I wrote the song. Like you’re saying, people don’t tell them stories and that’s my place, to tell them stories.

I’m thinking about homelessness and addiction and the role that we don’t really acknowledge that a person’s circumstances play in their addiction. We treat addiction as if it’s a decision that individual makes.

Yeah, completely. You know, one of, one of the big struggles I had with this record was ‘Funeral Sessions’, and it was using the word “junkie”, which I hate. [“All the drunkards they stay local / All the junkies go to town”.] It dehumanizes people.

And I went to great lengths on Last of the Analogue Age to tackle this on the last song, which is called ‘Last of the Analogue Age’. And I was rallying against people like that who use the term “junkie” or write people off, you know, so they almost become invisible. It’s like homeless people or people with addiction and how people just completely ostracize them.

But ‘Funeral Sessions’ came and that line came to me and I thought the best way to say it was to use the word. I struggled for six, seven months with whether I should put that song on the record just because of using that term. But I think in the greater context it worked. It’s a striking term and I was writing from someone else’s point of view if you like, so it kinda made sense to use it. But yeah, I definitely think that society ostracizes these people. They dehumanise them in a way. A lot of the time it is probably a product of circumstance or area or whatever.

‘Metal Railings’ touches on the same thing: how a person’s chances of going to prison depend so much on circumstances of birth and and on social forces for which they’re not responsible. It makes me think about how individuals can represent more than just who they are. You’ve got an individual judge passing down a judgment on an individual person but really what you’ve got is two quite different worlds meeting represented by those two people.

I think you hit the nail on the head. People that are in charge of people that are making them decisions can never fully understand or, in my opinion, don’t care about the people they’re passing sentence down on. They’re part of the problem because the system that we have is fundamentally flawed. Poverty makes money for people and I don’t think there’s any great appetite in this country to fix that.  

Those people can never understand jail. They can never. It’s a different story if you’ve come through something and gone on to something else. If you’ve been there and you’ve moved on, you can look back, I think you can understand it. But if you’ve never been there, you can never understand it.

I mean, I grew up in Finglas. My family went on to get social housing. I was the youngest of nine so I used to go with my sisters who were a lot older and stay with them while their husbands were working, in fledgling estates like Primrose Court out in Darndale, and in Tallaght. I loved these places and I’ve seen them grow up and I’ve seen what they’ve become. Fettercairn out in Tallaght as well. So you grow up seeing them and you can understand how they work. Someone in the system can never understand, I don’t think. I don’t think they care.

When you say you love those places and you’ve seen what they’ve become, just explain that to somebody who maybe doesn’t know what that means.

It’s very hard to come out of them places. To me, social housing should be mixed with private housing. You know, you take people who are not well to do, you put them all together, and these places get stigmatized. It’s very hard for people to get jobs. Accents even stop people from getting jobs. They’re neglected.

You take Ballymun for instance. Not only did they leave thousands of people living together, there was no bus route out there. When they started there was no bus route or buses would go out very seldom. It’s almost cutting people off. Until something becomes real estate, there’s no real appetite to fix them problems and they just let the places run down.

But in saying that, what happens is that people in them places band together and you get an amazing community. People help each other out, you know, people share, help each other to the next bill, so you get an amazing community as well. But there’s so much social problems around these places as well that ultimately they’re gonna fail. So I think you need to mix up social and private housing.

OK. Can I ask you about Elvis Costello? I believe you were not thrilled about his accepting an OBE [the day before this interview – NC].

Oh, me and Joe [Chester] are just like [sighs dramatically]. It’s like, I grew up a huge Morrissey fan and a massive, massive Smiths fan. And we were talking about how your heroes eventually let you down. Joe mailed me some piece on Morrissey last week and it was appalling. He’s a mad Elvis Costello fan so I mailed him back, he’s like – it’s not quite as bad (laughs), but, yeah, we were both really disappointed. Joe actually adores him. So yeah – it’s just sad when people let you down like that.

What did you think of his explanation?

Rubbish. It’s rubbish. It’s like Nick Cave’s reason for playing Israel, you know.

What was Nick Cave’s reason for playing Israel?

I don’t know – it was so rubbish (laughs). It was about music –

Transcending something or other.

Yeah, yeah. And I’m a huge Nick Cave fan as well. So.

I am in the middle of reading Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life and a band that keeps coming up as an inspiration to the 1980s generation of American post-punk hardcore bands is The Birthday Party.

I loved, I was absolutely mad about The Birthday Party. Yeah. Just the power and energy and the violence and everything about that band, I was fascinated with.

Hardly at the time?

No, no. I got into Nick Cave on Henry’s Dream. I heard Henry’s Dream outside Freebird on O’Connell Street and I was just completely smitten by it. And I went back and I love The Good Son, Your Funeral My Trial, you know, all them records. Not so much after that. Let Love In is a good record, but to me, Henry’s Dream’s the pinnacle. But sometimes when you come to people, the album you come in on is the one. Like I know a people that came to Nick Cave later, and they love albums that I think are dreadful. But that’s their experience with him.

The Boatman’s Call? You wouldn’t rate that as much?

No, not at all. I’m kind of baffled by people’s love of that record. I think I can understand people liking the first half of the record but I think the second half of that record is dreadful. I think it’s actually really weak. Even if he had have spaced the songs out, do you know what I mean? The first half of it is great. And then just like ‘Green Eyes’ and ‘Black Hair’, I think they’re really poor songs. Where Henry’s Dream is a masterpiece. Henry’s Dream had a huge, huge impression on my writing.

Did it.

Oh yeah, huge. Probably on this record.

Just talk a bit about that cos that’s not something I would naturally understand.

Cos he was kind of writing ballads but he was writing them… they were like Western ballads. To me, that was the closest Nick Cave ever came to writing ballads. But in his own way.

As in songs with stories?

Stories, and to me they sound like punk traditional ballads.  I’d say he was listening to a lot of Irish ballads and I think he’s said in interviews, not particularly about that record, but he talks about Irish folk songs. And I think maybe that was a big influence on that record. I can hear folk songs in that record, even though it’s dark and gothic and punk. The storytelling is very kind of folky.

I think ‘Funeral Sessions’ is very much inspired by that record. That record had a massive impact on me, it really did. And then even stuff like ‘Christina the Astonishing’ and ‘Straight to You’. I can see parallels between that and ‘Tar Road’. And ‘Funeral Sessions’. I mean, we do reference, sometimes when we’re playing, we do say “OK, do this Bad Seed-ish”, we’ll use them terms.

Did you listen to a lot of folk songs or are you steeped in folk songs?

Not at all. Absolutely not. And even when I was writing this record, I avoided stuff like Lankum and that. I saw what was happening with the songs and I tried to stay away from it because I knew where we were going and I didn’t want to be influenced by it. Strangely enough, probably the biggest influence on this record was reggae, old reggae records. There’s amazing melodies. What I’ve tried to do, when I’m writing songs in the last couple of years is write these really strong vocal melodies. So when you bring the music to the vocal melodies it complements it as opposed to the vocal melodies following the music. I listened to some Nyabinghi, Rastafarian music where it’s chant music and the vocal melodies are incredible.

Nyabinghi? [writes on hand]

Yeah. They’re a Rastafarian tribe. They play this really kind of simple tribal drums and they sing over with these amazing vocal harmonies and so yeah, I listen to a lot of that. I say I listen to a lot of it, I have maybe three albums, Count Ossie and Wingless Angels are two that I love. Count Ossie was a Rastafarian drummer. He was one of the first drummers to record that music. And that just has a lot of Rastafarians chanting over his drums and it’s incredible.

Is that like the seventies or sixties?

I think he would be mid to late sixties. It’s like a Jamaican folk music in a way. Mixed with a kind of American gospel. So I think what they did was they would take gospel airs and then put their own Rastafarian tilt on it. And then Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Bob Marley, old reggae, very organic-sounding stuff. That’s a lot of what I was listening to. And then Joe reckons that makes sense cos it’s Jamaican folk music. But Joe was very much influenced by folk music.

So you know, something like ‘Black & Amber’, I wrote ‘Black & Amber’ and I was playing it on the guitar like it was like PJ Harvey or something. Then when I sent it to Joe I just sang it into the phone. I didn’t know whether the song was any good. I hate playing songs to people when I’ve just written them. And I woke up one morning and just as I woke up I took the phone and sang it. So that’s what you’re hearing is me waking up, that’s why the voice is so scratchy. So I emailed it to Joe on the phone. He lined it up on ProTools and played along with it and recorded it on reel-to-reel tape. And he emailed it back to me and I said: that’s it. We did nothing more with it. And that’s the first track on the record.

Something that I haven’t seen you talk about, I haven’t seen anyone ask you about, is the whole Traveller theme on the record. Several songs refer to Traveller themes, Traveller identity, Traveller ethnicity.

Under this record is a story of – I adopted my daughter from Ethiopia. And there’s a story of me moving from Finglas out to Maynooth, only 20 miles, but not really fitting in and not finding the sense of home. And at the same time there’s adopting my daughter, my mother and father died within nine months of each other.

So there was me becoming a father and also having that line cut back to my own parents and a lot of this record is – it was years ago, it was like nine years ago, but I didn’t really write about it then. It was about me finding community through my daughter and finding a home, and the two of us as well because she’d lost so much coming from Ethiopia to Ireland, much more than I’d lost. And her of being in such an inspiration to me to just get on with things and how tenacious she was, and how strong she is and how she just, you know, just made it work for her.

Like she has an incredible energy and, and she just, you know, like for instance, we came back from Ethiopia and she just woke up the next day and just was like, as if this was her home. She met my family and she just jumped into my family’s arms and just was an inspiration to, you know, how to just get on with things.

So all this is kind of going on underneath.

So, and then talking about Travellers – there’s inter-country adoption. Other stuff that was going on, which you would never get out of the album, is the migrant crisis – well, you might obviously in ‘Tar Road’. But you know, becoming a father gives you I think a greater empathy to see that and being the father of a black child and just seeing how those kids were, and families were just left washing up on the beach. That had a massive effect on me.

The picture of that small Syrian child. [Alan Kurdi].

Yeah. It broke my heart. And so, kind of bringing it back to the kind of racism that we have, you know, with Travellers. All of these things, all these strands, were going on in my head when I was writing the record. We grew up in Finglas, so I lived right beside Dunsink, probably the longest Traveller camp in Dublin. We lived side by side for so long with no trouble, just normal day to day. The shop we went to was the same shop the Travellers would go to and they’d get credit, you know. We lived in relative harmony for years. So I suppose all those things are in my head but I kind of see parallels between all these things.

‘Tar Road’ is where do you draw the direct comparison, isn’t it, between the way that we treat migrants, and the way that we treat Travellers.

Yeah. It was actually a John Connors documentary I was watching. They were talking about old Travellers. They were saying when there used to be Travellers all over the country they’d be helping farmers and they were tinsmiths. And they were saying that they’d love a tar road because they wouldn’t cut their feet. And that just started me thinking about the migrant crisis from the east and Africa. These strands just run around my head and end up in songs.

I listened to the album a lot for weeks after I heard it first and I had this feeling as I walked around of being slightly different for having heard it. And this is slightly embarrassing to say, but I found myself, during encounters with some people, maybe trying to be a bit kinder, because of your songs. And that made me wonder about the ambitions that you might have for the effect that your music might have. Are you writing songs so that people enjoy them, and maybe are moved, or is there a part of you going – can’t art influence people to be kinder and more compassionate, and do you imagine that your own art could be having an effect on the way that people treat each other?

On a very selfish level, I write songs because it calms me and it focuses me, and it’s a kind of a meditative thing for me. That’s why I write songs. It focuses my brain more than anything else. And I take pleasure in doing that.

And when I’m writing, it’s about the lyric I’m writing. I’m not taking the weight of the world on me when I’m writing a song. It’s more like it’s a mental thing. It’s like a mental puzzle and it feels right when the right words are in. I’m not always singing. I’m thinking a lot of the time. I’m out walking and thinking. And when I get the right word I can feel it. I’m not even speaking or singing. It’s in my head, and sometimes I don’t even know I’m doing it. So on that level it very much is an enjoyable thing and it’s not, the songs to me don’t seem that dark or heavy.

I suppose if there’s one thing I’d like, it is, like you say, to show the human aspect of these situations. But it’d be incredibly egotistical of me to think that these songs could change anything.

Sure. That’s understandable.

My relationship with music is like: I get up in the morning and even at the weekend I find the reality of life tough. I wake up, and we’re living in a country where it fucking rains, and it’s grey. Even on days off – we work all the time, and on days off you expect to feel differently but when it’s grey out, I find it hard, you know. The realism of life can – you know, it’s hard to actually go, “Oh this is great”. I mean, we should be happy to be alive. But what I find is, especially in the mornings, and I’m not a great morning person, and then I put on a record and it transports me somewhere. So if it’s a reggae record it brings that kind of Jamaican flavour to the house and straight away it lifts me. So that’s my hope when I make a record. If I could do that for one person, to me that’s a success in writing a song.

Transport somebody.

Transport someone, lift someone, inspire someone – anything. Make anybody feel anything, but changed. To me, music and kids and animals are like an alchemy that makes the ordinary magic. And if a song does that for someone, you know, even one person, it’s a huge success. So that’s my hope because that’s what music does for me. So not so much the content of the song. If I can lift someone in any way.

I was wary of this question because I realize that asking somebody “Do you think that your music is important” is an awkward thing to do and yet you and I and many, many people have all – our lives are different, and we behave differently, because of all the great music we’ve heard.

I suppose, when I’m writing songs, the last thing in my head is “What is anybody going to think of this?” It’s usually when something’s finished. To me, you know, I have a mad idea and it becomes a song and I go with the mad idea. I’m long enough at this to know that a mad idea eventually will turn into a song, or some of them will. Something will click somewhere along the line and the crazy idea becomes a song, but it’s not really until we finish the record that that I start going “What is anybody going to think of this?” And it’s not like, are we gonna inspire people or anything like that. It’s just – I really hope this is not shit.

I want to ask you a couple more things. I’m always curious when I meet people about the music that formed them. You’ve mentioned Nick Cave and those reggae performers. Who else are the big, big people for you?

If you’re talking about when I was getting into music, The Smiths were, Joy Division, a lot of English indie bands. Pixies, Sonic Youth, that kind of stuff. But probably Brian Mooney out of The Idiots had a massive effect on me.

Brian Mooney!

Yeah. His lyrics. He’s a really under-rated lyricist and songwriter. He’s still doing a lot of stuff now that’s absolutely genius. He keeps posting stuff online that’s incredible. Yeah – his lyrics and his phrasing in his placement of words in very, very loud, noisy songs. I was fascinated by his words and his phrasing and the tone of his voice as well. So he had a massive influence. He has a line in the song ‘Pinned’: “I think I’m going to cut thin ice”. And that line alone had a massive impact on me. It had a huge impact on my lyrics.

How?

I don’t know what it was, but that line was always a line that we’re trying to replicate. It’s hard to explain, but to me it was the ultimate. It’s like the Silver Jews, you know, I was talking on this blog the other day and I was saying, “I want to be like water if I can, ’cause water doesn’t give a damn”. That’s probably my favourite couple of lines in a song ever. And every time I write a line, I try and get within four miles of that line, or those couple of lines. Maybe with Brian Mooney, it was the way he said it, it was the delivery; it was, you know, it was what he didn’t say. “I think I’m going to cut thin ice.” Do you know the song?

I don’t. And I feel like I’m really missing out.

They were a really heavy band, you know? It was kind of like a slow hypnotic beat with really heavy guitars over it. And he recorded really lo-fi as well.

And Cathal Coughlan and Fatima Mansions. Cathal’s a big hero of mine. In later years, Vic Chesnutt. I think Vic Chesnutt was the greatest songwriter of our time, possibly my favourite songwriter. Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse and the Silver Jews. And Mark Eitzel, they would be who I would consider to be the greats.

Did you say Mark Eitzel? Are you a big Mark Eitzel fan?

Oh yeah. I think Mercury is one of the greatest albums.

Talk about formative. Mercury was not my first album of his because I got Everclear when I was 17. California is probably the album I’ve listened to most in my life. And I started writing about music by writing about Mercury.

And like we were saying, you come to bands on certain albums, I came to them on San Francisco. I think they did a Dave Fanning interview that night before they played the Tivoli. And they played that song on the show, the one with “Mercury” in the chorus… ‘Challenger’. They played ‘Challenger’ and me and me mates were like – what the fuck is this? So we went to see them the next night. And we were just absolutely blown away by it.

When you mention Brian Mooney, that whole period of music in the mid-90s, the Attic scene, was really special. Your Wormholes and Sunbears and so on.

That was my introduction to music. I was 17 or 18 and living in Finglas and I used to walk into town and have two or three pints of Guinness and stand at the cigarette machine on me own and watch The Idiots, Wormhole, Sunbear, Luggage. So that was my introduction to the local music scene and it was probably the greatest local music scene ever.

I mean really. Talk about timing.

Yeah, I just walked into this world and at a time where I was just a teenager and I didn’t have a place in the world, and I found this amazing scene. And there were theses incedible people that invited me in. I’m actually starting to see it again now in Dublin. There seems to be that openness in music and supportiveness.  

But back then, you know what, no-one ever thought they were ever going to do anything. Every band was different. It was such great bands. Me and Martin Kelly from Sunbear argue about The Idiots or Whipping Boy. I mean, the Whipping Boy gigs, pre-Heartworm, were probably the greatest gigs I’ve ever seen. There was like eight gigs that I went to where I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that since. There was one particular one in the Project where The Idiots and Whipping Boy played together. And I would say The Idiots were actually better than them. Martin reckons that The Idiots are the greatest Irish band ever. Definitely, The Idiots are up there. Wormhole as well. I was at Dave’s Mass the other day.

You knew Dave?

I  used to go and see Wormhole and I didn’t know them then, but then years later I started going see E+S=B and we used to chat. I used to go to gigs and we’d chat for hours and we had similar kinds of backgrounds. My father worked in the same places Dave’s father worked.

I was working on a documentary that never got made and once we went down to the house where they lived. It’s this amazing footage. We went down and they [Dave and his brother Anto, also of Wormhole] were still staying in the house that they grew up in, in Ringsend. They actually were very naive when they released the first album and they put the home address on it so we were able to find them because they were still there. We went down and did an interview with them and I never met a more infectious and passionate person in my life. We were just, he was talking about music and the film crew and all, when we went outside we were like, holy fuck, he’s amazing. Just the most amazing interview he gave.

So then I used to go to see E+S=B and we played with them in The Joinery one night. And I used to go to gigs and we’d just chat for hours. Just one of the most incredible people I’d ever met. I hadn’t seen him in a long time. Life conspired. The Wormholes played two gigs, and we never fucking play, and the two times Wormhole were playing, we were playing. On the night of our launch they were playing. Dave wasn’t, because he was sick. It’s a big, sad loss.

The songs on The D are a hard look at hard aspects of life. Do you generally feel optimistic? Do you think things can be better?

Yeah. I believe in humanity and I suppose I think there’s very human aspects of this record. I think there’s a lot of negativity in the world. The world is in a bad place. But I find day to day human kindness to be very inspiring. I see things around me all the time that I go, all right, that gives me hope. And it’s usually on a smaller level. So you see people helping people. No, I am optimistic. I think there’s goodness in the world and I think if you can find the goodness in these situations, they’re dark situations but I think there’s a chink of light in these songs. You know, the people that find love and find compassion and, you know, in some cases like in ‘Black & Amber’, there’s a little bit of humour in the melody, you know?

“For he comes home legless and he after a fish supper.” 

Yeah. And there’s people surviving this. So I think there’s an inner strength in the songs that in those little things, if you look, there’s little hints in there that the people are surviving. And the strength of the community I was trying to get across in the record as well. So there is optimism in there in those dark situations.

I’ve thought about ‘Funeral Sessions’ in this light. The dad is trying to connect. And that itself is hopeful. The song makes me think of all the times that this conversation doesn’t happen. Where there’s a connection that isn’t made, and not because there’s no will to make it, but sometimes people just aren’t able.

I think in families it’s incredibly difficult to articulate these things. It’s almost like – those channels become dead.  And it’s sometimes very hard to open them up again. Almost impossible. Families are strange units. We fall out with people, we don’t say the things that we want to say. Even though you know you should say them. It’s almost easier to do it to a stranger. It’s almost easier to be kinder sometimes to a stranger than it can be in families. And especially going back.

I think what we’ve come from in the past — like, I’d a good relationship with my Dad, he was a great Dad, but we never talked emotionally. And even though we had a good relationship, it’s very hard to go, Jesus, he never told me he loved me. Where I tell my daughter fifty times a day. She’s immune to me telling her how much I love her. So I think maybe things are changing, from that generation to us. We’re becoming more open as a people. I think we’re learning from our mistakes.

I interviewed Julia Jacklin in Whelan’s on March 30th 2019. She was at the time my favourite musician on the planet and I was listening to her new album Crushing all day every day, so – I don’t know how well it went from my end. I had to work pretty hard to come up with questions other than “Why are you so amazing?” She was great though – gracious, generous and quite happy to get into some fairly serious stuff with me even thought she was just off a ferry, and heading on another ferry in a few hours after her show. The piece is published in Hot Press and I’m posting this because there were bits that I liked that didn’t fit in to 1800 words. The transcript is tidied up a little bit and divided into themes for clarity. Our meeting began with me giving Julia a copy of Sinéad Gleeson’s Constellations, which was out that weekend.

JJ: I’m reading a lot at the moment actually, so this is perfect. I’m trying to not use my phone, so I’ve just decided that if I have the urge to pick up my phone, I have to pick up a book instead. So I’m actually just charging through books. It’s amazing. I feel so much better mentally than I have.

NC: Great. Em – your album is amazing.

JJ: Thank you.

NC: My three year old is singing ‘Don’t Know How To Keep Loving You’.

JJ: Oh no! That’s too early.

NC: Today, while I was brushing his teeth, he was singing it.

JJ: That’s very cute.

ONE: EMOTIONS OF TOURING AND PERFORMING

NC: I’m thinking about the process of being on tour with the kind of songs that you’re singing now. You were talking about ‘Turn Me Down’ in DIY magazine and you said “Gonna be interesting touring it for over a year”. And I have thought about that before with people like John Grant. What it must be like to perform such personal material every night on stage to strangers. How is it?

JJ: Yeah, it’s interesting because I feel like it changes every night and it changes as you progress through the songs. A song like ‘Don’t Let The Kids Win’ off my first album, I’ve sung that song hundreds and hundreds of times. And some days I feel nothing. Like, I’m up there, and I’m definitely not looking like I’m feeling nothing, but honestly I’m – I’m quite dead inside (laughs). And I’m thinking probably about the catering or something. But then like last night I just choked up a bit because it just makes me think of things. So songs do surprise you.

This album’s been different than last time because the songs do feel heavier to perform. And it’s not even just me performing them and bringing my own experiences to the stage every night. It’s more that I know now that a lot of people have really delved into this album and it’s brought up a lot of things for them. And so then when I’m performing every night, I feel that pressure that, even if I’ve moved beyond that feeling, if I’m not feeling it tonight, that there’s people out there who are going through that and have come to the show because they are, and I feel like I have to perform with everything I have for somebody else, you know? So, it’s just odd.

NC: It’s quite a lot to carry, isn’t it?

JJ: Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is quite a lot. Luckily it’s only like an hour and a half every day. I think if it was for longer than that, it would be harder.

NC: It seems like it’s an important skill to be able to perform without necessarily having to excavate the emotional origins of the song onstage.

JJ: Yeah. I think this whole job is just, like, bizarre. Whenever I think about it, I’m like: Oh, so I go through something traumatic. I write something privately. I record it semi-privately. And then suddenly you go and perform that version of yourself repeatedly for like a year and a half. It’s very strange. I love it, but it’s strange.

NC: How do you mind yourself?

JJ: I think it’s one of those things that’s not not talked about enough in the music industry and I don’t think there is enough support around it. Because it is quite grueling and especially for someone like me or for anyone who leads the band. Not only are you having to do that every night, it’s kind of your project, so everybody that’s with you is doing it for you. And you’re having to manage a small business on the road and make sure that everybody is financially and emotionally satisfied with the work. I’m definitely getting better. But for the first two years, while there were some wonderful, exciting, amazing times, there was probably some of the saddest and hardest times of my life as well. Just trying to make sure everybody was happy all the time around you is exhausting. You’re not only doing that with your team but then every night you get on stage and you’re like, okay, I’ve got to now make sure that everybody who’s bought tickets is also having a good time. And it can be very easy to just be like, my own feelings will be last on the list. Or I’ll deal with them when I have a day off, and then you never have a day off, so then you don’t deal with it. So, yeah, I mean it’s just not the best environment for people who are struggling as well because it’s also just full of alcohol and like, everybody kind of expects that if you’re a singer-songwriter that you also like to party, or if you’re a musician. So yeah, it’s strange. 

NC: On the emotional demands of your work and the lack of supports. I’m thinking of my own day job in psychiatry. Doctors don’t always look after themselves but about two years ago a few of my friends got together and we have this group every month where we meet and reflect on the the emotional impact of the work. And it’s supportive and a really important point in the month.

JJ: Right, great!

NC: But what do you do? Who’s there for you?

JJ: Well I guess that’s the biggest part is that a lot of this job, part of your branding is to maintain this level of fun and enjoyment. So I’ve had wonderful moments on the road where I start talking to another singer-songwriter or another leader of a band. At first you’re like “How fun’s this, how cool’s this?” And you’re both eyeing each other up, being like, who’s going to be the first one to say “It’s not great all the time, is it?” And then you slowly break down those barriers and then you can get to the core of things.

I think a lot of that’s just based around this job is so rare for most people and it’s, it’s got a lot to do with hard work, yes, but honestly, it’s got a lot to do with luck, timing, and the way you look, and your age, you know. So to be able to get to the position that I’m in is actually incredibly lucky. And you know, whenever I say that, people are like, “No, you’re not lucky, you worked hard”. I’m like, come on. I worked hard, yes. But there’s so many factors that benefit me from the beginning. 

NC: What are they, do you think? 

JJ: I think being young, being, I don’t know, a white person, being, like, moderately attractive, aesthetically pleasing, you know, that’s just the reality of it. 

NC: I suppose being Australian and not, say, Zambian. 

JJ: Exactly, exactly. I mean the music industry is full of middle class white kids from the western world. It’s not like we’re all like the most talented people in the world. Because of that, you’ve gotta be very grateful, which I am, but then it feels like if you kind of make any allusion towards it not being ideal or something, then it feels like you’re kicking all the people who want what you have down. But I guess it’s like: it’d be nice if we could have a once a month meeting of musicians to be like, “Okay, how are we all?” (laughs).

NC: Are there people that you’ve connected with? Aren’t you friends with Adrienne Lenker?

JJ: I know Adrienne yeah. And Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, Stella Donnelly and yeah, just lots of female singer songwriters, we can definitely have those moments where we’re like, let’s be real about this. And it’s really nice.

TWO: SIMPLICITY IN SONGWRITING

NC: Can I ask you about the decisions that you made in the album? The songs seem fairly direct, musically and lyrically. So how did you arrive at that decision that you wanted things to be – pretty clear.

JJ: That’s just the kind of record I like, you know? Like a Gillian Welch record. You know what she’s singing about, you know what chord she’s playing. It’s not that mysterious. And that’s just kind of music I’m drawn to, but also, that’s my ability. I’m not an incredible guitar player, I don’t know many chords (laughs). I think I’ve got a great ear for melody and I can write lyrics, but in terms of being a technical musician I’m not one, really. And I think when I came into the second album, initially I was like, oh yeah, my second album’s going to be super-produced, because that’s what I felt like a second album had to be. But then when I got there I was like, “But you don’t know how to do that”. You know? Like, I would hate to have a situation wherein I got an a producer that could do all this stuff that I didn’t understand and then create something that I couldn’t even play. I feel like with music, for me, it’s always just like try and document to the best of your ability at the time whenever it is, and then you can’t ever regret what you do because, you know, I can’t play any better than that. I did my best, I think. And I feel like as well because the lyrics are so direct and stripped back, any over-instrumentation would have taken away from that. And lyrically as well you feel like good songwriting means you have to be very poetic and metaphorical, and have all these tricky things that don’t make sense really but sound interesting. As I’ve gotten older I’m like, oh, that’s not true at all. Like, if you write a good song that people can understand instantly, it doesn’t mean it’s not good just cause it’s easier to process.

NC: [Waffly question about Jacklin’s singing, her voice carrying a lot of emotional information, so the songs surrounding the voice maybe need to be kept simple — not too sure what I was asking here.]

JJ: I think my singing’s changed a lot over the years, especially since the first album. I am surprised that I sing the way I do because I did classical singing for a long time and I feel like that should have stamped out any individuality. That was my experience – of being scolded for ever trying do my own take on anything. Well, I think a lot of that with my voice is that with this album particularly, I really wanted to just have the vocals right in the front and I wanted to record them very intimately with the microphone, whereas with the first album I was just kinda like, can we put a whole bunch of reverb on there?  And I just was a lot more self-conscious as a person and an artist, so I just kind of wanted to cover everything with just like a padding of effects and safety. Whereas this new record, I just finally understood. I think when you’re younger and you first started making music, everyone tells you, oh, imperfections make music what it is, you know? And you’d be like, no they dont, shut up! I want to be perfect, you know, I suck and I want to be perfect. And if my voice wasn’t just like perfectly in pitch or whatever, I would just have to re-record it. And then I realized that just makes, especially with my kind of genre, like pretty bland, non-feeling albums. So with this one I was like, I’m just going to sing the way I sing.

NC: Did you have to work your way back to your own voice, in a way, then?

JJ: I think so. I don’t know. I think I was just like, yeah, I don’t know, I just wasn’t afraid of it anymore. I wasn’t worried. I trusted whatever came out of my mouth. I think when I was younger, I didn’t fully back myself vocally. I’d always, every night I’d be like, oh I don’t know what’s going to going to happen. Whereas now I just, I have full faith in whatever happens (laughs). 

THREE: THE INDO PIECE AND SEXUAL PREDATORS

NC: You came in to a piece I wrote in the Irish Independent.

JJ: I think I tried to read that, but it has a pay wall.

NC: Yes. I was asked to write a piece about predatory men. I cited you at the end in a way that I’m not totally sure was right. So I wanted to check. I ended by saying that maybe we should stop agonizing over whether we can watch Woody Allen any more. And I wrote: “I propose that we use what we can, including our cultural choices, to ensure that women now and in future don’t have to sing songs about their bodies being the property of careless men.” That was a reference to ‘Body’. “And I propose we cease agonizing over whether to keep listening to predatory artists. We can just let go. Perhaps listen instead to the women who survive their predation. They might have important things to tell us.” Is that too strong a reading of your song?

JJ: Ah, thank you. No! I like that. That’s nice. Cause I do feel like that sometimes. When we are agonizing over Ryan Adams, I’m like, man, there are so many better female singer-songwriters and male singer-songwriters than Ryan Adams. I mean, sorry if you’re a big fan. Like when people for years have told me that I need to listen to him because he’s so incredible and Id listen and be like, he’s a decent singer songwriter, but I don’t get it. And then when this came out, a few people were like Oh no, but he’s such a hero. I’m like, I don’t know if I have the time to be in that discussion because I just feel like that would never happen with a female artist. We just don’t get the same kind of leniency. We can’t be disgusting people in our private lives and still have people listen to our work. So yeah: that was very nice. I think we should listen to more women.

NC: One interesting question to me was: if you’re going to decide you’re turning away from those guys, who do you turn to? I read something you said about your song ‘Convention’, which refers to Donald Trump at the Republican Convention in 2016. About why do we pay all our attention to the worst voices. That song is nearly three years old now. Do you think in the intervening period, have we got any better at listening to voices other than that kind of voice?

JJ: Yeah, I think so. Some days I feel very disillusioned by the world, but I do feel like even though we’ve got a long way to go, I do feel empowered as a woman, as to people actually listening to what I have to say. Even with this album, I feel like people really listen in a way that I was worried about. I was worried that I would put this album out and I was going to get thrown under the bus. Written off as like, she did it for the press, or for the #MeToo movement. I did get a few comments like that and they go Oh, Julia’s gone political. Which I find hilarious that if you speak about your experiences, just basic human experiences as a woman, it’s political apparently. But I do see a shift in the way that – it just feels like women in music are getting pushed to the front in a way that I hadn’t seen before. I feel like people are genuinely being believed. There’s definitely a big group of loud people in the Internet who are always going to be misogynists, so I don’t really have any energy or time to try and convince people like that, that they’re wrong. But I think that maybe there’s some people on the fence maybe starting to listen a bit more.

NC: It’s quite a powerful thing, isn’t it, to say to somebody like you that by describing your own experience you have gone political and that somehow invalidates what you are saying. Like: I’m sorry, who’s decided this?

JJ. Yeah, it is silly. Yeah.

NC: But it happens.

JJ: Yeah. It’s a great time to be a female musician, but then it’s also like if you write about like feminism or just your body or whatever, it’s like this hilarious idea that it’s a trend at the moment. It’s trendy to be a woman, apparently, at that this moment in time. I feel better about it though. My stepdad gave me a book the other day. I think its very easy to think that every single thing is totally shit right now because it can feel like that so much. And my stepdad gave me this book about 1960s Australia, and oh my God. Yes, things aren’t great now, but to see actually how far we have come. In Australia you still needed a husband’s signature to get a credit card in 1968 or something. In 1975 you couldnt get a bank loan. So that put things a little bit into perspective for me.

FOUR: BODY

NC: I will finish up because I think we’ve probably done half an hour and you’re busy. But can I ask this: Is the person in ‘Body’ angry, or not angry? Because the song can make the listener feel angry.

JJ: Ha. I don’t know. To me — no. Or at least, not angry because I feel like the person in ‘Head Alone’ is angry. Right? I always feel like ‘Body’ and ‘Head Alone’ are sister songs.

‘Head Alone’ to me is when I’m feeling empowered and when I feel like what I say actually matters and maybe that if I ask for space, or if I advocate for myself, that people might actually listen. And so I feel encouraged, but also, you know, I feel angry about it and there’s nothing else I can do than scream a pretty self explanatory line like the pre-chorus line (“I don’t want to be touched all the time“). Whereas ‘Body’ is more resigned to my fate as a woman in this world, that maybe things would never improve and maybe no matter what, no matter what you say or try to explain or express your humanity to people, there’s always going to be these deep-seated ideas about what I’m supposed to look like and what I’m supposed to do and how I’m supposed to behave in my private life and my public life, that I’m going to essentially die without ever being able to break free from or change people’s minds.

But then sometimes with ‘Body’, I feel like on the one hand its defeated – I’m defeated – then on the other hand there is something quite empowering to me about the end line (“I guess it’s just my life / And it’s just my body”). Because sometimes it’s actually really nice when you realise, especially with a certain person in your life who maybe treats you poorly or treats you differently because you’re female, there is something nice to suddenly just be like, well: There’s nothing I can do. There’s nothing I can say. There’s no amount of communication or anything that I can say to change this person’s mind. And, like, now I can move on.

I think it’s when you’ve got that middle room, when you think, if only I can just show them the statistics of female sexual assault or maybe if I can really show them the facts. Maybe if I can tell them personal anecdotes to make them understand why this certain thing is traumatic to me, then maybe they’ll change. And that is way more exhausting sometimes. And some people are just always going to be the way they are. It’s not my job to convince people or to change people’s minds. It’s not my job at all.

FIVE: FAVOURITE MUSICIANS AND WHY

NC: Let me ask you about musicians or records that you really connect with.

JJ: Probably my biggest one that I listened to the most would be Leonard Cohen. Gillian Welch, Fiona Apple, and a guy called Andy Shauf. Oh, he’s very cool. I toured with him and it was a bit awkward because I was just very obsessed with his music. They’re probably the four artists that I return to over and over again, and will always listen to their albums from start to finish and get completely immersed in what they do. Whereas there’s other artists I love, obviously, maybe not ones that I will continuously return to like some sort of little home.

NC: I saw Fiona Apple mentioned elsewhere this week as being very important to another musician. I don’t remember who. I missed the Fiona Apple boat at the time.

JJ: Well, I think I missed the boat at the time too, because alot of people’s perceptions of her were just so different to what my experience was like. I think she was really, she was kind of blown up when she was 18, 19, to superstardom. So I think a lot of people know her just as this young person who kind of went a bit crazy, you know. Whereas I had just kind of followed her personal life and I was too young to know that period. But Extraordinary Machine was one of the first albums I heard, which was her third album and I was 13 and my first boyfriend introduced it to me. It was just one of those moments that I’ll never forget because it was like the first time I heard something that that I really liked and I didn’t feel like I was being told to like it or my mum listened to it or whatever. It was the first thing that I went like, oh, I really like the sound of this and I don’t particularly know why. But then, over the years, it’s just – she’s an incredible lyricist. She has a way of talking about the dissolution of love in a way that I totally needed and related to. I don’t feel like many people write about it the way that she does. Yeah. She’s great. You should have a Fiona Apple period.

NC: You said that when you play these people’s music you get immersed in it.

JJ: Yeah, completely immersed, and I think it like reminds me of why I do this. I think it’s very easy to get so lost in this industry, to be like, why am I doing this? Is it cause I’m a massive narcissist? Is it because I like the sound of my own voice? Is it because I enjoy socializing? Once you get into the industry, it can be quite confusing for me. And so I feel like they’re the kind of artists that I listen to going like, oh that’s right, it’s because I love songwriting and they’re all masters, just absolute masters of the song.

NC: Did you learn a lot from these people?

JJ: I think so, yeah. Definitely, when I first started song writing, I think most people do this, you basically feel like you’re, you know, deconstructing a meal backwards. I’d listen to Gillian Welch’s ‘I Dream a Highway’, you listen and you’re like, OK, this makes me feel this and this and this and this – why? And I think she in particular made me go, OK, you don’t need a chorus in every song to make people connect with it. Like with ‘Body’. That, I reckon, came from my love of her music because she doesn’t lean into the typical songwriting structures. She doesn’t just give you verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge. There’s definitely a few songs on this record where I think I was just more confident in my ability, so I didn’t feel like I had to squish every idea into that kind of structure. That I felt like I could just experiment a bit and try not to do that a few times. Yeah. It’s nice.

NC: Where else would you say there’s an experiment with song structure?

JJ: Well yeah, like ‘Turn Me Down’ is one, and ‘Body’, and ‘Head Alone’. I mean,that is a verse, pre-chorus, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, chorus, chorus, chorus, chorus. That never really repeats. I think if you heard my first album, it’s a bit more formulaic, songwriting-wise.

NC: I’m thinking about the structure of ‘Body’. It’s got this really nagging quality. Like, I was wandering round the house for days, going what is it about this song? You know the way it resolves? That’s seemed like a deliberate songwriter move.

JJ: Are you saying about ‘Body’?

NC: I am saying about ‘Body’. First of all the chords aren’t all in the same key, and then they are, just when you get to “I guess it’s just my life, and it’s just my body”, which is like, to me, that’s the message of the song. This fucking sad, resigned moment of – you’ve no right to be angry. Just take it. I felt like you did that musically. [I’ve written about this here.]

JJ: I think with songwriting, that for me especially, I’m not, because I’m not a technical musician, there’s no real like: “And then I thought, I will now use this code and that will make this happen!” It’s just like, I try every chord in my small knowledge book and then I’m like: that, no, no, yes, great! Just a lot of trial and error, really. It’s not some wonderful secret craft.

NC: An Irish interest question really to finsh up. In ‘Pressure to Party’, there’s this wordless vocalising at the end – is there a little Dolores O’Riordan in there?

JJ. Oh, no. I’ve gotten that a couple of times, it’s nice. Yeah. It was definitely not intentional, but nice outcome. Yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you for the book!

NC: Hope you enjoy it. Here’s a pic of my son who was singing ‘Don’t Know How To Keep Loving You’ by the way.

JJ: Ah, he’s lovely. [Indulges interviewer by looking at interviewer’s phone wallpaper.] It’s funny the people you find that connect with your songs. Last night in Manchester, I was looking out in the crowd during ‘Head Alone’ and there was this was this old man in a flat cap, punching the air, yelling ‘I don’t want to be touched all the time‘. And I thought: You are not who I thought I was writing this song for.”

Son I best be going, don’t know when I’ll rise again / Son I’m sorry that our prospects are so bleak / A funeral’s a sad excuse to see your only son / But I’ll be back to my old tricks within a week”

‘Funeral Sessions’ from The D They Put Between The R & L

A Lazarus Soul’s record The D They Put Between The R & L is officially out on May 3rd. It’s out at the time of writing on May 2nd, really, as the CD copy I ordered online arrived today. I’ve had a Bandcamp copy for a couple of weeks now and Brian Brannigan’s vital, furious, tender songs have soundtracked my trip in to work in Inchicore for the last few days. I’ve been the guy on the Luas shaking his head at the brilliant bitter poignancy of ‘Lemon 7s’ (“Smoking Lemon 7s through a broken bottle neck / Pills ground down like powder, til your problems are no louder than / A little infant whimpering for Ma to come and help.”)

The D They Put Between The R & L is a dense, tense, explosive, and novelistic record about life in Dublin now and in the last fifty years. It is huge and teeming with life and death. It is crisply and economically performed by Brannigan, Joe Chester, Julie Bienvenu, Anton Hegarty, Vyvyenne Long, and Steve Wickham. They perform in such a way as to frame and illuminate the stories Brian Brannigan is telling. These are songs celebrating people in the inner city and raging against lives being decimated and those doing the decimating.

I’ve spent a few minutes trying to come up with a sentence that captures the content of the songs on this album, and I can’t, and why would I? There’s too much going on. I wrote “novelistic” above, but it’s nearly more like a series of poetic short films, Kieslowski’s Decalogue only on Dominick St. I can’t not quote ‘The Long Balconies’ here: “First day of April 1963 / Mother fell into the lap of luxury / Still tells of the day they handed her the keys / Second floor palace, the long balconies / They did a little dealing in the shade / But of the cops and priests they were afraid / They hung the washing out there on parade / There was good drying.”

And I won’t attempt a hot take. It would be a mistake to give some unnecessary overall impression of  The R & L without another couple of dozen listens or so. It might be enough to say that it will clearly demand and reward all those listens at least. It is one of those that you want to stick right back on once you’ve just finished playing it. And records like this have layers. You think you have a favourite song, and you do, but then another one, that maybe you missed something subtle about on first listen, sneaks up and takes its place. I’ve come to consider this in an album as a sign of mastery.

So I only wrote this to convey some early appreciation of A Lazarus Soul’s accomplishment, and to give a quick mention to the R & L song I’m playing most right now. It was my wife who honed in on ‘Funeral Sessions’ the first time we played the record at home and it does capture you. The song’s narrative is a father’s apology and hard-earned advice to his son. They meet at a funeral of a friend who died of an overdose; he “scored bad gear on Henrietta Place”. The father has had to leave because he is afraid that if he stays he too  will die: “The boys I ran with dropping off like flies”. Even now, he knows that he has to get away again or he’ll “be back to my old tricks within a week”. Before he says goodbye to his only son, who he never sees, he gives him one piece of counsel: Leave too.

Some of why we connected straight away with this song is simply its irresistible musicality. Joe Chester’s acoustic guitar has an electric immediacy and Vyvyenne Long’s cello underpins the melody with a haunting counterpoint.  And some of it, for me, I suppose, was how it gives voice to people and stories I encounter every day.

I didn’t grow up in town but I have worked in the south inner city on a community mental health team for about ten years. Mental health crises here are complex: depression and psychosis and suicidal behaviour fuelled by poverty, trauma, deprivation, systemic neglect and drugs and alcohol. All of these things are intertwined. Things keep changing for good and ill but it seems that drugs are more lethal than ever. Crack cocaine took its time getting here but it is ravaging long balconies right now.

So the story told by the father in ‘Funeral Sessions’ is all too familiar and the song is so devastated and resonant and brutally truthful. The father’s escape has left him stalked by guilt and sadness, and “There’s only so much sorrow you can drown“. ‘Funeral Sessions’ ends with the father’s admonition to the son he says he had to leave to save his own life, and it’s a hard one: “In my head on a clear day / I hear my late great father say / You come from here you only got two routes / Be a drunkard and stay local / Be a gearhead, go to town / Or you take your second chance and you get out.”

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance, our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.

David Whyte, Consolations

Outside is the first album by Yelling Bones, who are led by Gerry McGovern and Myles McDonnell. Gerry sings and plays guitar and writes the lyrics. Myles was in Whipping Boy and as I understand it he is the sonic architect in Yelling Bones. He does amazing work here. The arrangement to ‘Outside The Window’ is a work of art in itself, a lesson in building, sustaining and releasing emotion, and the album opens with this gorgeous, shifting, floating chord sequence of ‘Let’s Swim’, that immerses you right away. 

Gerry has had a number of lives but I met him first when he was a writer with Hot Press. I met him just after I joined Hot Press myself as a young fella. I remember lolling about near the front desk in HP in Trinity St in June of 1993 and I had just reviewed the singles, as they often got the newbies to do (don’t get me wrong: it was a HUGE privilege). I had mentioned Dylan’s ‘Queen Jane Approximately’ and had described myself as a Dylanophile in a review of Kingmaker’s ‘Queen Jane’, and don’t ask me how I remember this stuff. So when I said hello to Gerry he had read the singles and we bonded over Bob.

I met Gerry last year for a coffee to talk Yelling Bones and it was the first time we had met in over twenty years. The morning we were to meet I shared Dylan’s ‘Blind Willie McTell’ on Twitter and he replied that this was his favourite Dylan song. So we re-bonded. Fist bump to Bob Dylan.

Gerry was one of the handful of writers in HP or anywhere else at the time whose stuff I would read regardless of what he was on about. Mostly, he was on about great stuff – Palace Brothers and Sunbear and Lou Reed and The Flaming Lips and the like. Also, Whipping Boy – in his review of Heartworm he said that it was one of the greatest albums he had ever heard, not knowing then the status it would ultimately acquire. But it didn’t matter what he wrote about. It was how he wrote, with poetic colour and a passion and earnestness that I enjoyed and admired. He was not shy about spelling out how much he loved the music even when that meant exposing himself emotionally. He would press the music upon you: Listen to this! This moves me! His writing was unafraid. I looked up to him a lot.

Gerry’s writing hasn’t changed too much. He goes for it. Why say words that he does not mean?

‘A Good Man’ lays it all out, an explicit inquiry into existential and ethical doubts that many of us worry about quietly: “It’s a work in progress, but it’s very slow / I’ve stumbled many times. I suppose you know / But I keep struggling on, stubborn as I am / Reaching for something better, trying to be a good man… Maybe I’m not trying hard enough / Is my talk of change a lifetime’s bluff / Am I making enough effort? Am I really doing all I can? / Hoping for something better, trying to be a good man“.

Actually, it really helps to hear this in Gerry’s voice. It’s a lovely instrument. His voice is not un-Bob-like; he whispers, he strains to hit higher notes, and his pitch wavers when the emotion gets intense. His voice is as vulnerable as the lyrics and his singing is completely committed. And Myles’s arrangement again – so subtle and deft; piano trios filling out the sound around Gerry’s voice. The song leads into ‘Outside The Window’. I haven’t spoken to Gerry about this one but I hear it as a revisiting of his childhood; it’s pretty painful. “They hate each other / His father and mother / It will come to blows.”

‘Outside The Window’ ends back in the exact present as Gerry sings, supported by strings but almost a cappella, voice tremulous: “Some day he’ll smile / Sing for the child / Who will help him grow / Some of us get by / That child survives / He’s tougher than he knows“.

Something about that combination of resilience and vulnerability is what epitomises this record and, you know, much of the music that really matters. Great music can be a source of strength but there is no resilience without vulnerability. Music can only provide strength and solace if it is emotionally open and honest enough to let you in, in the first place, to where fear and hope and doubt and all the raw human stuff is hiding. Vulnerability and resilience are at the heart of who we are, at the heart of a full life, and at the heart of this music.

Julia Jacklin’s album Crushing is out on February 22nd and it opens with a song that has been circulating since last October called ‘Body’. In a feature on ‘Body’ on NPR’s All Songs Considered, Jacklin described the song as “a long and exaggerated sigh”.

‘Body’ tells a story in the second person. The protagonist addresses an ex-boyfriend and explains how and why she left him. Her ex ruined a trip by getting arrested and it sounds like a last straw. She is tired of his self-regarding fecklessness: “I know you’d like to believe it, baby / But you’re more kid than criminal.” He is “just a boy who could not get through a domestic flight / without lighting up in the restroom“.

The arrangement here as throughout the song is sparse. There’s a snare drum partnering an insistent andante 1-2 bass line (boom, boom-boom; boom, boom-boom) and rumbling piano chords every second bar or so. The piano is like way-off thunder. There’s a guitar but there is no strumming of full chords. The atmosphere is taut and tense.

As she leaves the narrator sings of “heading to the city to get my body back” – reclaiming herself. But she imagines his response to her leaving. She anticipates vengeful violent spite. This guy is not used to facing consequences. Even when the police came to the plane, she reminds him, “They let you finish your meal”.

She foresees reprisals, and she recalls an old imposed intimacy that leaves her exposed. She sings “I remembered early days / When you took my camera / Turned to me, twenty-three / Naked on your bed / Looking straight at you“. Of course he took her camera; she didn’t offer it. She asks him: “Do you still have that photograph? / Would you use it to hurt me?” Then an exhalation: “Well I guess it’s just my life / And it’s just my body“.

It took me a few days of listening a lot to ‘Body’ to begin to understand how the song’s tension is attained and sustained. For the first half of the song the chords dissolve slowly into each other and they progress between A minor, D major, F major, and back to A minor. Anyone who has played an instrument knows that D major doesn’t belong there. A minor and F major are in the same key, of C, and D major is in the key of D. That D major sounds dissonant. It evokes unease, like there’s something hanging unresolved and disquieting over the verses.

Then as the song closes, Jacklin repeats the final couplet four more times. She’s accompanied by the guitar and bass and an organ that plays flurries of notes in A minor, F major, C major, and F major. These chords all go together in the key of C and coming from the previous dissonance this sounds right. It sounds complete and final. So the song is resolved at its most resigned moment: I guess it’s just my life, and it’s just my body.

I first thought “seething” described this song but I was projecting. You naturally want justice but that’s no guarantee of getting any. The song does not have the energy to be angry. The song has too much experience to be optimistic. The protagonist leaves a guy because he is proudly careless and destructive and now his careless destructiveness hangs over her. He doesn’t deserve power but he won’t let it go. It’s hard to tolerate the song concluding so full of lingering indefinite dread. But there are times, concludes ‘Body’, that anger is an affectation.

Walk into our kitchen any time in the last three weeks and you might have come across either of our two sons sitting at the table playing Lego and saying “Very, very, very beautiful” in what they imagine to be a Galway accent. They just intone it to themselves at random moments. Michael, who is seven, also likes saying “Suddenly, the ice that was floating down the Hudson river STOPS” and chuckling. They are quoting a song, one that has settled in to all our imaginations, ‘Ballad of the Lights’ by Peter Broderick and Seán Power.

‘Ballad of the Lights’ is originally by Arthur Russell. Peter and Seán’s version is on a fascinating tribute album, Peter Broderick & Friends Play Arthur Russell. The wonderful singer-songwriter Brigid Mae Power is on the album too and she is Seán Power’s mother. She is also Peter Broderick’s wife and I think this means that Seán is Peter’s stepson. Seán is so good on this song – I guess he couldn’t miss it.

In our house we have long been positively disposed to Arthur Russell. My wife listened to his instrumental albums relentlessly when she was pregnant with our youngest, who is three. Evan was so nearly named Arthur, but we were also on a Lemonheads buzz that year. Still, we had never heard Russell’s ‘Ballad of the Lights’ until we heard Peter and Seán’s version when it came out on Christmas Day.

‘Ballad of the Lights’ is really a poem and song narrated by a person looking out from New York to New Jersey (“Why I chose New Jersey to look at I don’t know“). Seán opens the song and he does the spoken word sections. Allen Ginsberg performed those parts on the 1977 recording. No pressure Seán! Peter sings the Arthur Russell parts. Seán begins:

A young man sits on the bridge after night fall
And looks across the Hudson river to New Jersey
He wonders about life
And he wonders if he'll ever get old
He sees the lights
And he wonders if they are talking to each other
And he wonders if they are talking to him
And he asks if they are 

I tweeted a few days ago that Allen Ginsberg is great and everything but he’s no Seán Power. And I do genuinely prefer his performance to Ginsberg’s. But Ginsberg is at a disadvantage when it comes to delivering Arthur Russell lyrics. This song is about finding magic and mystery in apparently humdrum experience. I was going to write “magic and mystery where there is none”, but that’s not it. If the narrator can find it, it’s there.

That the narrator here is voiced by a child is part of it because kids have amazing powers of finding mystery. Children are always asking if street lights are talking amongst themselves or if there are worms on the moon and so on. But it’s also that Seán has the recitation skills of a nascent poet. He makes these lines sound fresh, like he wrote them. When he lands on the final word in the line “Suddenly, the ice that was floating down the Hudson river STOPS“, I hear Paul Durcan in my head on ‘In The Days Before Rock’n’Roll’, as he escalates and exclaims: “Nor Fats, nor Elvis / Nor Sonny, nor Lightning / Nor Muddy, nor John Lee!”

Anyway. We play this song and album a lot and we have a busy kitchen and often you don’t be listening too carefully. But there’s a point in the song that always stills me. Mostly Peter and Seán swap verses but there is one point when Seán replies within a verse to a single line of Peter’s. It’s when Peter sings, of the New Jersey lights, “They are so beautiful”, and Seán replies “Very, very, very beautiful”. It’s such a warm and earnest moment and such a sweet father-son exchange. I love that he says “very” a full three times – like, he’s not kidding. I love when my kids listen and when they copy Seán and gently say “Very, very, very beautiful” when they are idling about. I’m glad they are connecting with this wonderful stuff. Knowledge of beauty is itself rare.

“The natural world is where we evolved; where we became what we are, where we learned to feel and to react. It is where the human imagination formed and took flight, where it found its metaphors and its similes, among trees and pure rivers and wild creatures and grasslands rippled by the wind … It is nature which is the true haven for our psyches.”

– Michael McCarthy, The Moth Snowstorm

Lubomyr Melnyk is a Ukrainian-Canadian pianist and composer who turned 70 in December. He is the key exponent of continuous music, “a piano technique based on extremely rapid notes and complex note-series, usually with the sustain pedal held down to generate harmonic overtones and sympathetic resonances”. Melnyk invented continuous music in the 1970s and there’s a 1978 album, KMH: Piano Music in the Continuous Mode, on Spotify. He remained busy throughout the 1980s but in recent years was languishing until the Erased Tapes label rediscovered him in the early 2010s. Melnyk apparently asked: “Where were you when I was 30?”

Melnyk is the eminence grise of Erased Tapes, home to Nils Frahm, Olafur Arnalds, A Winged Victory for the Sullen, and so on. His Erased Tapes bio describes the genesis of continuous music: “He began to play a new kind of music, spontaneous and improvisatory… Using the sustain pedal to create echo and reverb, he transformed free-flowing cascades of notes into hypnotic waves of sound”. His own site attests to the music’s “meditative and metaphysical” aspects. Reading this self-endorsement I think: “We’ll be the judge of that, thank you very much” and also “Yes, that’s right”.

I saw Melnyk on January 24th, with my wife Sharon in a converted cinema in Hackney. Leaving the country for a concert is a big event so we ration these trips for shows that we expect to be be really special and it was extraordinary. The show was a 70th birthday celebration organised by Erased Tapes. They signed him when he was in his early sixties, and his Erased Tapes comrade Peter Broderick collaborated on his 2013 album Corollaries, which won attention his earlier work had not. He played pieces alone and with Peter Broderick and Hatis Noit. As Melnyk wound down his final piece I felt this pang of sadness, which though unexpected was no surprise, because I did not want to let go of the moment. I wondered if I’d ever share a space with Melnyk again. I was going to miss being in a room with him and his piano. I’d love to be there right now.

In practice, continuous music means that Melnyk plays long pieces that build and evolve, ebb and flow, inexorably, ever-changing. He moves in complex coruscating arpeggios up and down the keys. He plays with the speed and intensity of the Dead Kennedys and the delicacy of the Cocteau Twins. The sound is ocean waves then raindrops sprinkling a lake. Patterns repeat but subtly shift like Michael McCarthy’s grasslands rippled by the wind. The music is physical: you feel it in your chest and your belly as much as you hear it. When I really stay with a Melnyk piece I can feel it in my breathing and in the way I connect with the ground. At the show, as Melnyk and Peter Broderick were finishing up ‘Pockets of Light’, I noticed my heart was beating in time with the music. It just was!

There are a few nature metaphors there and this is by deliberate design of Melnyk. His 2015 album was called Rivers and Streams and he said then that his playing was akin to water: “flowing and ever connected”. He said he was influenced by minimalist composers and I can hear sacred minimalism in Rivers and Streams, ‘Pockets of Light’, and Fallen Trees, but the sacred object is the natural world.

I had read a bit about Lubomyr Melnyk before flying to London, and I’d listened to him a lot, and I had been looking forward so much to seeing him. I’d read him compared to Rasputin, and I’d seen his prodigious beard, and I imagined some haughty Franz Liszt character. I understood he had claimed to be the Jimi Hendrix of the piano or somesuch and this was fine. I’ve been to a lot of shows by half-ironic performers who are embarrassed to be as good as they are or to allow their work to mean as much as it could. I was looking forward to seeing someone who knows he is the greatest and does not apologise. I was expecting greatness and seriousness from Lubomyr Melnyk, and that was going to be quite enough. I was expecting to witness mastery. I wasn’t expecting as much joy. I had him wrong.

I cannot explain to another pianist what it is, but I could tell them truthfully that being able to play continuous music is worth more than anything in the universe. Anything. It is like having the sun in your hands. It is like having the four winds. It is like having ice and snow. It is like having hurricanes. It’s like having steel and factories. It’s like having the sunshine just pouring through your fingers. It’s – it’s – it’s a JOY.

– Lubomyr Melnyk, “The Continuous Music Man”

In Hackney, Melnyk bowed and thanked the crowd before walking offstage in a manner so delighted and appreciative that you very much wanted to bear-hug him. He spoke about of his forty-year struggle with a classical music establishment that hadn’t wanted to hear continuous music: “But you do!” (Huge cheer.) Built into the bear-hug is the sense of loss of a musician of Melnyk’s calibre being overlooked for so long, but there’s also an amazing inner resolve at work there. Imagine the belief in yourself and your art that it takes to persist despite apathy from all-comers for thirty years. Imagine that sense of mission! What a gift.

Also, Melnyk is not one to look back. At the show, he said that he would not be playing any old music. He opened with a new work and he said the only person who’d heard it before was himself. “This piece has no name yet,” he told us. “It’s for you. It’s all just music!” His career is a constant act of creating the new right now. He said “There’s nothing like the feeling the first time a piece of music is born”.

It is a lot to ask of a musician or any artist to ask them to make us feel joy. There is a lot to not be joyful about. There is always a new story about humans destroying each other or destroying the earth. And joy has to be genuine. Joy has to exist despite knowledge that contradicts it. An artist who instils joy must acknowledge the suffering and calamity and still find a spark of eternal hope. This is difficult at the best of times but for weeks before seeing Lubomyr I’d been thinking more than usual about the destruction of the natural world. This is often what’s in my mind when nothing else is, but I’d been carrying around a pall of gloom after reading a piece detailing the collapse of insect life in the rain forest in Puerto Rico. I couldn’t shake the thought that if they go, we all go, and even if we don’t, species-loneliness is what we’re leaving our kids. The music in Hackney was suffused with love for nature but can you enjoy hymns to the natural world when the natural world is disappearing? Surely grief is the right response? Surely these are elegies?

I thought about Lubomyr here and his long journey and the ecstatic quality of his work; the bountiful heart that is in it. I watched him play this electric luminous music with his back straight, his arms extended and his eyes closed, like he and the piano were interwoven. I watched him stand and beam and look over at his instrument and touch it again, and shake his head with wonder and say “You know, every day the piano sounds more beautiful”. I thought, I really want to accept this joy, but it felt indulgent to do so while the rivers and forests to which Melnyk’s music pays homage are being deserted and despoiled.

It’s taken a few days to get my head at all straight about this and to attempt a response, which actually comes from Michael McCarthy, a writer and naturalist I encountered on On Being. In The Moth Snowstorm, McCarthy writes that to prevent the ruination of the natural world, people must regain belief in nature’s worth. He compares the change in our worldview that will be required to save it to the changes that accompanied the the Renaissance and the spread of religion: “These are great events,” he writes, “but they are fully matched in historical significance by the calamitous event we are entering upon, the destruction of the natural world”.

He argues that we need to reawaken a delight in nature, to remember “that there is an ancient bond with the natural world surviving deep within us, which makes it not just a luxury, not an optional extra, not even just an enchantment, but part of our essence – the natural home for our psyches where we can find not only joy but also peace, and to destroy which is to destroy a fundamental part of ourselves.” He writes that a mature love for the natural world recognises the scale of the threat, and is engaged, and a love for a forest or lake or bird will recognise that they may not be there next year, and that love “will do whatever it can to protect or save it; [it is] a love that can be fierce”.

McCarthy’s book ends where I think Melnyk and his fallen trees and raindrops and huge unruly beauty comes in; where the joy Melnyk’s work invokes and inspires finds an even higher purpose, and finds a hopeful, hard-headed home. “Now as the twenty-first century crashes upon the natural world like a tsnunami, with all the obliteration and merciless unthinking ruin,” concludes McCarthy, “let this new love be expressed; let it be articulated; let it be proclaimed.”

I met Peter Broderick last March at the DotMd conference on medicine and the arts in Smock Alley. He had just played a short set to a room of doctors. It seemed that not that many people knew him and he was just standing there while we had our lunch.

I have never quite shaken the notion that the musicians I love are a little bit other/more than human and shouldn’t be as readily accessible as Broderick was at DotMd. You shouldn’t be able to just go over and say hello. So it took me a minute. He was great. He has a huge, huge smile. I told him how much my wife Sharon loved his piece ‘A Tribute to our Letter Writing Days’. “No-one ever mentions that one!” he said, apparently genuinely delighted. He signed the copy I bought of All Together Again “To Sharon – Long live the letter!” ‘Tribute’ was from when he had just started singing on his records and I wasn’t sure at first, like I wasn’t sure when Kevin Murphy in Slow Moving Clouds started singing. Sharon was right: Peter Broderick has a beautiful voice, unassuming but full of character. (So does Kevin.)

I’ve listened to Broderick a lot in the last decade, since discovering post-classical music in the late 2000s initially through Johann Johannsson and Max Richter. I would have initially bracketed him with people like Goldmund, Dustin O’Halloran, and Nils Frahm, the melodic melancholic solo piano guys. Broderick’s early solo piano work is really popular; ‘Begin’, the opening track on his first album, has 6 million Spotify listens. He released that in 2008 when he was 21. He could have continued in that vein with great success but he is restless and he has been careful not to be pigeonholed. He is from Oregon but he lives in Galway now and I think you can hear it in his violin playing in particular.

Broderick is incredibly curious and his creative energy is unbelievable. He has released about fifteen albums in the decade since ‘Begin’, including an album of covers of Arthur Russell songs that emerged unheralded last Christmas Day. It is gorgeous. I have rarely known any musician better at conceiving and completing and releasing work. No MBV he. He writes, records, releases, then: Next! It’s amazing.

At DotMD, we chatted about the legendary Ukrainian pianist Lubomyr Melnyk, who collaborated with Peter on a mesmerising piece, ‘Pockets of Light’, from a 2013 album called Corollaries. Broderick and Melnyk are playing together next week in London to celebrate Melnyk’s 70th birthday. He was graciously appreciative of my knowledge of his work with Melnyk and ‘Pockets of Light’ in particular. (I’d named a Spotify playlist and a previous post for the song). He asked if I had heard what he says to Melnyk at the outset of the song, a nineteen-minute torrent of continuous music, and I said no. I listened later. ‘Pockets of Light’ was the first piece they’d ever recorded together. Before Melnyk begins, you can hear Broderick saying “Let’s see what happens”. I loved that – as an exhortation, and as an artistic code to live by for a musician just obviously enthused by the sounds that are out there for the shaping. Long live the letter; long live Broderick’s intoxicating adventure.