Rooney Tunes: Visual artist David Rooney talks swapping the paintbrush for the guitar

”If Bruce Springsteen hadn’t asked Glen to play that day, I wouldn’t have made this album,” declares David Rooney, wearing a satisfied smile. The 55-year-old Galway native is referring to that memorable night in July 2013 when The Boss invited a visibly chuffed Glen Hansard to join him onstage for a couple of songs in Kilkenny’s Nowlan Park. And also to his own stunningly soulful debut album, Bound Together.

An accomplished artist, David has been contributing his highly distinctive illustrations to Hot Press for 30 years. Although he didn’t know Glen personally, for the issue following the Springsteen gig he decided to mark the momentous occasion by drawing the scene from the perspective of the Dubliner’s battered old Takamine guitar.

“I have almost an identical guitar and I know the instrument really well,” he explains. “It wears away very easily and I thought that would be interesting, inside Glen’s guitar looking over at Bruce. So I did the illustration. Glen got in touch with Niall [Stokes] to find out if he could get the original. Niall gave him my number and he texted me. I thought it was someone winding me up so I actually didn’t reply for a week.”

Long story short, David eventually met up with Glen to hand over the original illustration and the pair immediately hit it off. Which isn’t especially surprising given that they look so alike. “Well, this is funny because when we’re together it’s quite obvious we’re not so alike,” he smiles, “but we probably both have that nervous energy thing. He is very enthusiastic, and I’m a very enthusiastic person. I get very wrapped up in stuff. So I suppose we have some similarities there.”

One night when they were at a party together, a sing-song started and Glen asked him if he could play. David used to be a busker so he sang an old Hank Williams number. However, watching Glen play rough versions of the songs that would eventually feature on his acclaimed Didn’t He Ramble album proved to be a eureka moment.

“I suddenly realised that the songs were drawn from the same well as the pictures,” he recalls. “When I went away that night, I started thinking of songs and began writing lyrics. By coincidence, I was back at Glen’s house about three or four months later and, by then, I had three samples. When I played them, I could see by his reaction that I was onto something.”

Some months later, again through his artwork, David met singer-songwriter Declan O’Rourke. “I had done an illustration for the video for his song ‘Galileo’ and he wanted the original. I was visiting family in Galway anyway so I brought it down to his house in Kinvara to give it to him. We got chatting and I wound up playing him a couple of my songs. He has a studio there and he said, ‘Let’s record them now.’ We were up all night and we did four songs. Again I drove away… transformed.

“I can’t stress how important meeting Glen, and then Declan, was for me,” he continues. “After 30 years of drawing pictures, I was suddenly thinking about making music. All of my adult life, I’d been working in a different way. My conscious self disappeared when I retreated to that cave where I turn off and pictures happen, and this was totally the opposite, activating everything. Every cell in your body is singing it. When I got home and listened to those demos, I heard for the first time in those recordings what could be.”

Ultimately, Declan wound up both producing and playing on Bound Together. He also helped David assemble a top-notch band of seasoned players from the jazz and folk worlds – drummer Conor Guilfoyle, bassist Baz Rycraft and pianist Jay Wilson. Also recruited was female Palestinian vocalist Ruba Shamshourn.

The entire album was recorded in just four days in a Dublin studio. “Declan is like mister serenity, like a Buddhist with attitude,” he laughs. “Don’t mess with me, Buddha! But he really had to work on me to believe in my singing. Like, almost get me into a little wigwam of blankets in the recording studio, which used to dampen the sounds, but it had the effect of a cocoon. And he used all the tricks in the book. Pretending he wasn’t recording and chatting to me while the thing was rolling away and so on. We actually had good fun together as well.”

David couldn’t be happier with the finished result. “The album is pretty much a summation of everything I’ve listened to,” he muses. “But there’s something else there as well. If we go back to that thing of going to the same well as where the pictures were found: you have to go deeper, but the water is clearer down there and there is more opportunity to make something beautiful. I think I’ve done that… finally, in my fifties!”
Bound Together is out now on David Rooney Music.