With the release of his latest record 'Arrivals' coming on 9th April 2021, Folk and Tumble took a little time for a virtual catch-up with songwriter Declan O'Rourke. Pour yourself a drink, and get comfy.
FT: Congratulations Declan on a fantastic album. ‘Arrivals’ is a great piece of work, and perhaps your most diverse album to date, mixing the personal with the political. You discuss the refugee issue, addiction and drugs, Irish identity, war, and death, alongside more personal songs. Was this a conscious decision to tackle these “bigger issues”?
DOR: No certainly not. In a way, they just came out. I think in the past, even though we can all have very strong feelings about things that are happening around us politically, and socially, I never really managed to filter it into my writing before. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do it, but maybe I didn’t feel like I was doing it well enough. I’m the kind of person who is fascinated with the past – a professional nostalgic, if you like. I’m fascinated by looking back. When you know the full story of someone’s life, you can see the whole thing play out, and maybe that’s why I’ve struggled to engage with the present until now. There are a lot of things happening in the world at the minute that are frustrating us a lot at present.
FT: A few of the songs on ‘Arrivals’ will resonate with people, such as ‘Olympian’, which is based on the true story of Yusra Mardini, a Syrian refugee and swimmer. Why did Yusra’s story*, among so many others, moved you to write about her?
*Yusra and her sister tried to escape the war and destruction in her homeland. They arranged to be smuggled into Greece by boat with 18 other migrants, though the boat was meant to be used by no more than 6 or 7 people. After the motor stopped working and the dinghy began to take on water in the Aegean sea, Yusra, her sister, Sara, and two other people who were able to swim, got into the water and trod water for over 3 hours until the engine started working again, and the group reached safe land. Yusra later completed in the Olympics under the Refugees Olympic Athletes banner.
DOR: When I heard that story, I was instantly moved and engaged by it. I felt like it was really such an epic story, almost like a parable. So important for our times especially with the apathy towards people on the move in this big humanitarian crisis, that kind of spreading everywhere, with all the right-wing nastiness about. It was such a powerful and positive story. It tied in with the word Olympian, and what our idea of an Olympian is – almost superhuman and going back to classical stories of Greek legends. And Yusra’s story seemed like a modern-day version of that. It was just so powerful. I thought it had to be told. It had to be shared. I laboured over it for a couple of years actually. I really, really wanted to get it right, to tell her story well, and to honour it.
FT: Another very affecting song on the album is ‘Andy Sells Coke’ which tackles the issue of drug addiction from a different perspective. Was that a deliberate part of the songwriting?
DOR: I think it’s just a reflection of how I see it. Again it wasn’t deliberate, it’s a reflection of what you see happening in society. In many ways, the record is a kinda self-portrait of me and where I am, and you hope you distill a little bit of your own truth and feeling on something. If you can distill a pure drop of anything, it relates to everything, and people will hopefully relate to it.
The 20s and 30s present different things to your life and I remember friends saying when you hit 30, it’s a massive shift, and you feel this huge change. I remember thinking, “really?”, and low and behold, it was. It was this huge shift, and the 40s were the same. A friend of mine said, it’s like hitting a plateau and you get to a place where you know what you want, and I really felt that happening – a shift away from certain social things. My idea of a night out now is dinner with friends or a few songs with friends over a pint or whatever.
FT: Would you have been that guy in the song who doesn’t leave the party?
DOR: Ah yeah, but not as a drug taker. Certainly, the odd time out, you think you can still do it. You think you still have the endurance to drink and stay up all night. I don’t think I’m getting old, but I just don’t enjoy that anymore. I think it was a perception of that as well as the problems with the kind of frequency and how ubiquitous coke is. It seems to be everywhere now. You read about how it affects families. It’s kind of endemic in society at present. But again, it wasn’t a conscious decision to sit and write an anti-drug song.
It’s like I’ve been doing this so long now, it’s like part of your mind is almost trained to watch and listen out. When something comes up that grips you, your mind just goes, bang! Okay, that’s it. I’m gonna use that. It’s an emotional reaction or instinct or a very strong interest in something that sets a song up. It’s whatever you find engaging. It can be entertaining, something that moves you, or resonates. You start many more songs than you finish. Some will get no further than an idea. I liken them to horses in a race. You might have 10 or 12 horses in a race, but only a few of them will finish the race. Some of them will just fall away. You don’t really worry about it because you have these other ones that for some reason or another will keep coming back as feeling relevant, and they stay on course, and hopefully, if you get to the end, you’ve enjoyed it enough to do it some justice.
FT: ‘Olympian’ and ‘Andy Sells Coke’ are both “issue” songs. You draw these characters in a sympathetic light and let the listener form their own opinions. Is that a better way for you to address an issue as a songwriter?
DOR: A lot of people have commented to me, even specifically lately, your songs are real story-based, you know. I don’t think about that when I’m writing. I just prefer to do it that way. I think I like detail. I’m a great believer that you show somebody and don’t tell them. Telling people things doesn’t have the same impact for me at least. You try and equip the listener with the same situation and experience that you feel about things, as accurately as possible. Give them the tools to feel what you felt. You are kind of painting a picture.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
‘Harbour’ – Declan O’Rourke
FT: You mention storytelling. Have you ever thought of following the example of the likes of Willy Vlautin, and putting pen to paper for a novel?
DOR: Well, a couple of people have said to me along the way, and suggested it. A couple of really nice people who have seen something I wrote somewhere. I wrote a piece way back in the early days of social media. You know, you’re supposed to do a couple of lines, and I wrote this epic essay about an event I had been at the night before. It was kind of a big night for me. I kind of described it as if it was my thoughts. It was Shay Healy who wrote to me afterward and said: “You should write a book. You should get into prose”.
FT: How’s the painting going?
DOR: Well yeah. I’ve always wanted to paint. I’ve drawn all my life. I’m good at it. I can draw really well, and always enjoyed it but at the minute, there’s just so much happening I haven’t got round to it. Even last Christmas, my wife asked what I wanted and I got her to get me a set of watercolours. But they’re still in the box!
I just don’t have the time at the moment. I keep telling myself when I get through this project, I’ll give it the time it deserves. The song ‘A Painter’s Life’ was a sort of affirmation not to lose sight of this.
FT: You self-produced your previous albums but this time you have chosen to bring in the legendary Paul Weller. Why a co-producer now? Why Paul Weller? And what did he bring to the process?
DOR: I guess in the last couple of years, the songs that were coming out were leaning a certain way. I’d say that over 70% of the gigs I do have been just me and a guitar on stage. I’m really, really comfortable in that realm. It’s self-contained. I write like that. I started like that but I’ve never really reflected it in my records.
I think in the studio, you get excited about bigger sounds. You try to do on the record what you can’t do at home. But I’ve always wanted to make a record that was just very simple, just me and the guitar really, which is like some of my favourite records of all time. I think there’s a purity to that, and something you can’t get the more you add. The songs that were coming in the last couple of years, felt like this was the time to do it.
When I was starting out, I didn’t really know what a producer was. I had my record made before I really knew what it was. I just kept making them like that. There was no one knocking on my door to produce them. But when it came to this record, I thought it would be great to have a really solid pair of ears that I could trust, somebody who got you and after six records I thought it would great if there was someone who you could actually hand it over to. And that was a kind of spiritual growth as well. I was letting go of control a little bit.
With Paul, that kind of happened organically. We had a kind of nice friendship over a distance over maybe fifteen years. I’m very lucky that he spotted me back in the day. We were on the same label. Somebody told me that they gave him my record and he really liked it. I didn’t believe it at the time but it turned out to be true and he’s been very kind and encouraging over the years. So we were in touch every once and a while and it’s always really friendly and positive.
So just all those things conspired. I was getting ready to start the process. I needed to start putting some things on the board, and I was in touch with Paul just around that time. I listened to his latest record and I could just hear all this.
Jesus, you can really hear the decades of experience in the studio there and the ease.
I thought maybe he could be the guy. I didn’t know if he produced or if he would. But I also thought he could tell me to fuck off, and that would be fine. I thought you can build a friendship with a person like that and it might never go anywhere, but why not share something together, make a bit of music. They’re the nicest moments I think.
FT: What do you think Weller brought to the process?
DOR: Ah a huge amount. He had huge effects on the recordings. When we nearly finished the record, and we were thinking of vinyl, and we had like 43 minutes worth of music. You can squeeze a maximum of 46 onto a record, and he said “have you got one more?”, “will you write me another one?”. I had ‘Painter’s Light’ half-written for a couple of years. It was just lying around, and I hadn’t finished it. I wrote another song and that one, so within a couple of days I sent him the two songs and said what do you think? He chose Painter’s Light, and I was delighted.
From the minute I walked in, we clicked. We both like to work fast. We like it performance-based. It’s the way I’ve always done it, and it’s his favourite way. We did the record in six days in total. From the get-go, he steered me towards certain songs.
When I walked in, I expected it to be just me and a guitar but he would say, “why don’t you add these little bits?” – four bars of something here, a little bit of Hammond there – and it literally came in and back out again. I would have thought that was crazy. I would have thought that on a song with just a guitar and voice, it would have stuck out like a sore thumb. But that was an education. It worked every time, and it changed the feel of it, you know.
Again with the strings. I used strings so often in my records. Again I thought, I’ll try an album without them. But Paul suggested Hannah Peel who’s a Belfast-based arranger, and she was dynamite. She did all those arrangements and I’m so in love with them. They’re great.
FT: ‘Arrivals’ with its songs about war and death, might have been titled ‘Arrivals and Departures’.
DOR: Actually, a working title was ‘Death, The Ultimate Arrival’.
FT: Catchy, but maybe not a big seller! Thanks for taking the time to talk to us. It’s been an absolute privilege.
DOR: I really enjoyed it, Damian. Thank you.