Fionn For The Road

The thing about songs is that it’s always very hard for me...” Fionn Regan pauses, drinking in one of those long, considered silences he so adores. “I mean, I can articulate myself completely within the walls of a song. I get transported when I’m inside a song. When I play shows sometimes I come out the other end and feel like I’ve been somewhere else. And sometimes that keeps you up for two days.”

This just might be a summer of sleepless nights. What Regan’s getting at is the difficulty in communicating what his work is about. He’s being hard on his conversational skills, of course – anyone familiar with Bray’s finest troubadour will know him to be a fine wordsmith outside, as well as inside, of his songs. He lives language. And yet, he seldom says anything too concrete. Much better to deal in metaphors.
“With this tour of Ireland, we’ve gone off the beaten track. We started in Wexford and went to places like the Seamus Ennis Centre, Sligo, Lahinch... going to bars after the show and hearing traditional music and people singing. It’s been a window into the heart of Ireland.”

Over the course of our conversation, references to ‘mirrors’ and ‘windows’ reoccur, as does the importance he places on the idea of ‘The Artist’. In the liner notes of the Decade compilation, Neil Young wrote about not compromising his artistic vision following the success of ‘Heart Of Gold’. “A rougher ride”, Young wrote, “but I saw more interesting people there.” You figure a young Fionn was reading along intently. Three albums deep, Regan sees his career-to-date as a learning process, one that has wholly benefited his accomplished new release 100 Acres Of Sycamore. He also has a habit of drawing on his lyrics to fill temporary gaps in his recollections. Perhaps he’d rather sing all of his conversations.
“Every step of your journey,” he reflects. “If you’re open to it and you’re resonating on a good frequency, you can learn the whole way along.”
So, to the ties and times between each record, and that contrary journey thus far.
“Every record that I’ve made is borne out of a ramshackle, held-together-by-safety-pins situation. Nothing I’ve ever done has been conventional,” he resumes. This way of working took root with 2006’s The End Of History, an unassuming collection that caught fire following a Mercury nomination, subsequently blazing a trail far afield.
“When I started with The End Of History I had no expectations. I put everything into it, I painted the artwork... everything came out of my own mad little postcode, my own little kingdom. There’s no Indian rope tricks. A few things like the Mercury nomination put the flag up, but it’s really word-of-mouth. That’s the currency for me.”

The success took him on a promotional whirlwind around the world and contributed to the long gap (“three years, two months” he smiles) between debut and 2010’s The Shadow Of An Empire.
“The whole thing was staggered. I know for people it felt like a long time, which it was, but my feet didn’t touch the ground. For me, it was just magic. I wasn’t getting any guidance from anybody, telling me to hit the breaks on the touring, do this, do that. The whole thing was so mysterious and wild. I’m glad, because I would never have seen 35 states in America, gone to Australia, all over Europe, otherwise.”
Another factor was that completed, and shelved, album with Ethan Johns for Lost Highway (“the Red Tapes, ‘cos there’s so much red tape wrapped around it!”). Regan was decidedly unhappy with the timing of the release. “I struggle with the lead-in times. That record needed to go out – BANG! – straight off the tour.” Likewise, all those ‘Dylan circa ‘66’ references started to grate. “That was my ‘Beatles in Hamburg’ record. That was the reality, it was red and black. I was listening to a lot of Kinks, Neil Young, John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band... loads of the things that people never picked up on. But I think anyone who follows it closely, doesn’t just give it a broad stroke, gets into the gills of it... they get it.”
It all served to fuel the creative fires for the next endeavour.
“You don’t get 100 Acres Of Sycamore without the last record, it doesn’t happen. Everything’s a reaction to what happened before it.”

And so to 100 Acres Of Sycamore, penned in a Majorca villa owned by Anna Friel and likely his most personal work to date. When asked just how he arrived at the English actress’s home, Fionn is typically heavy on the romanticism, scant on the details. “The stars aligned. It was just one of those serendipitous events that led me there.” If Shadow was all character sketches, Sycamore provides plenty of shades of Regan. An album of depth and stillness, its gestation period was paradoxically far shorter than the full-band blast of the second album.
“It’s me learning without any sort of mentor,” explains Regan. “Learning how to make records and be left alone on a small budget. For the pre-production I spent maybe six days a week, for five months, working. I had a phonebook of notes for this record. I knew that I had such a small window to pull it off in. It got to the point where if the roof blew off the studio, we’d still get something.”
For Regan, it’s an album with close ties to his debut.

“I haven’t planned for this, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was part two of a trilogy,” he reveals. “I only started thinking about that the other day. With Sycamore, there was that feeling of the dilated pupil and hair standing on end. We got to a place and I don’t know how. It’s almost like its own little country. It has its own calendar and time, it feels like it will always be there. I haven’t tried to play any cards, I haven’t tried to come to the aesthetic watermark of the times that we’re living in, I haven’t tried any cheap shots. All the pips are in it, all the mistakes are in it.”

That retro ideal of leaving the rough edges alone is vital to Regan, whose heart lies somewhere half a century ago.
“If you compare things to the ‘60s, back then you knew your song, went in and played it. Records aren’t that simple anymore. I don’t think records have gotten any better than the ones from the ‘60s. There’s lots of amazing modern records but a lot of the time it’s a fireworks display. It’s exciting, but it’s over and then someone has to sweep the rockets up. It doesn’t have any resonance. I feel my records are a bit more like the Northern Lights. You have to put the work in and get up there, but if you see it, it will leave an impression on you.”

What unknown worlds and impressions Regan has yet to imprint on our eardrums remains to be heard. The final part of his grand trilogy lies hopeful on the horizon. He talks about possibly releasing the ‘Red Tapes’ on vinyl and the approaches he’s had to produce others, turned down to date because: “I’ve got too many records I wanna make myself.” For the time being, Fionn himself still seems lost in the Land Of Sycamore. “When I walk onstage and I’m singing the songs, they never become one-dimensional. There’s always some back road that I go off on. It’s wide and open. Like the sea.”