A Troubled Enigma Returns - Hot Press meets Damien Rice

“This is so funny,” laughs Damien Rice, disbelievingly shaking his head as he examines Hot Press’ copy of My Favourite Faded Fantasy with all the gleeful delight of a young child on Christmas morning. “I haven’t seen this yet.”

Chilling on a couch in a comfortably posh backstage dressing room at Dublin’s Bord Gais Energy Theatre, the Kildare-born singer-songwriter is apparently holding a physical CD of his long-awaited third album for the very first time. Almost four years in the creating, the lush, orchestral and occasionally epic long player is his first studio release since 2006’s 9.
Given the length of time it took to produce, the sheer weight of critical and audience expectation surrounding it, and the level of control Rice exerts over his own work, it seems decidedly odd that Hot Press has a copy before he does.
“I’ve been on tour and really busy,” the 40-year-old explains, opening the sleeve and removing the individually printed cardboard lyric sheets. “I’d forgotten how long it takes to put everything together – from the artwork to videos to shows to band to crew. That whole thing is really time-consuming, so I’ve been wrapped up in trying to give management all the things that they need by certain dates. As a result, I ended up behind schedule on a bunch of things, and then I ended up sick. I was in the States, and I had to cancel two shows because the body couldn’t keep up.”
Thankfully, he appears to have fully recovered from whatever ailed him. A small, handsome and mischievous man, with a scruffy ginger beard and intensely intelligent bright blue eyes, Rice seems to be in really good form.
This is a relief, as I hadn’t been quite sure what to expect. The last time we spoke (in December 2009 for the Hot Press Annual, when he’d agreed to do a ‘look back at the decade’ style interview), the published piece caused a stir – largely due to his open and unashamed declarations of unrequited love for his muse, musical collaborator and ex-girlfriend Lisa Hannigan.
His record company had mentioned more than twice that this evening’s interview should be “solely about the music.” But there were no bad vibes from Rice when I entered the room. Instead, he greeted me with an unexpectedly warm hug. And a welcome offer of a bottle of cold beer.
So all is cool. In 90 minutes or so, he’ll be playing the only Irish date of his current tour to a 2,000-strong audience. The show sold out in nanoseconds. But if he’s feeling any nerves they’re definitely not showing.
Does he have any pre-show rituals?
“Hot Press interviews,” he deadpans, plucking a fig from a plate on the table. “I don’t meditate. My ritual before the show is doing as much normal stuff as possible right up until the minute I go on. I don’t like sitting around before a show. I like almost ignoring the fact that I have a show. So somebody grabs me at the last minute, ‘Right, you’re on!’”
Rice looks fresh-faced, healthy and enthusiastic. He’s been on the road in the US in recent weeks and has flown into Dublin from playing some European gigs. While he hasn’t been completely idle on the live front in recent years, performing the odd charity gig here and one-off performance there, it’s his first proper tour in quite some time. How does it feel to be back?
“Amazing!” he enthuses. “Exhausting, too, but that’s because I’m not fit. I can feel myself getting fitter every day.” He holds up his hands. “My nails are breaking from playing shows, but the fingers are starting to get hard.”
His attention returns to the cover of My Favourite Faded Fantasy. It features an odd pencilled illustration of little people walking aimlessly around the top of a very high brick wall, which they’ve reached by scaling a ladder from a rowing boat in the water below.
“It was done by a friend called Escif,” he explains. “He’s a street artist, Spanish, amazing. I love his stuff.”
Did you commission it specially?
“No, I’ll tell you how it came about. I’d rented a house in Iceland, and my friend Natalia, and Escif, they went and stayed there because I was away. He drew me a picture of the house as a thank you gift, and it was so beautiful. It was the house and some little penguins walking up to it, I think, a gorgeous little sketch.
“Anyway, I asked him could I use that as the artwork because I thought it’d be pretty good and he said ‘yes’, but then Natalia said, ‘You should see some of his other work’ – because I hadn’t really seen much. So they sent through bits and pieces, and I started discovering some of the things that he’d done. I saw this and I went, ‘That’s my favourite!’ For me, that was My Favourite Faded Fantasy.”
In what sense?
“I think this is hilarious, because it’s like there’s these people all seemingly going to this thing," he says, pointing to the top of the wall, "and some get there by swimming or drowning, and some get there by water or boat, and then you climb up this ladder to get to the top... to do nothing. There is nothing.”
So how is that his fantasy?
“This thing is, that’s what we do as human beings so often,” he muses, delicately running a finger over the cover. “Whether the fantasy is money, fame, a lover, whatever, we put it up there: as this is the thing that’s going to give us our answer. And we kill ourselves trying to get there. And then we get there and it’s this total anti-climax because it’s not what you thought it was going to be. It almost never is. That’s what I find, anyways.”

Damien Rice has always come across as an artist reluctantly sitting atop a mountain he almost regrets climbing. That it’s partly made of money doesn’t change matters. He knows how lucky he has been, but has clearly spent the last few years guiltily contemplating those ever-present clouds that dampen the peaks of Mount Success.
First coming to public attention as frontman of indie act Juniper in the late ‘90s (his bandmates went on to form Bell X1), he opted to plough his own furrow – literally, for a while, when he worked as a farmer in Tuscany – and eventually released his solo debut, O, in 2002. He’d hoped for sales of around 5,000; instead the album shifted in excess of two million copies and made him an international star.
Despite the fame, and the attendant fortune, Rice always seemed uncomfortable with his new status as everyone’s favourite neo-folk singer. He followed O up four years later with 9, an album he has since said he felt unduly pressurised into releasing.
Midway through the 9 tour, he fired Lisa Hannigan from his band backstage before a gig in Germany – an impetuous decision he came to seriously regret. When that tour ended, he stepped out of the limelight and more or less disappeared from public view. A couple of years back, he shelled out $500,000 for one of Bono’s old guitars at a charity auction for Haiti, so he’s most likely wealthy enough to stay disappeared if he wanted to. Eight years is several lifetimes in music industry terms. Nobody has forced him to release a third album, so presumably he’s now more at peace with himself?
“Well, yeah,” he nods. “I’ve stopped thinking that music will fill the void.”
So what fills the void now?
“There is no void.”
Was there ever a void?
He bursts out laughing: “Oh yeah!”
The last time we spoke, Damien mentioned that he'd attended some kind of ‘school’ in Los Angeles.
“Yeah – void filled!”
So what kind of school was it?
“It’s a place for learning how to question every negative thought that you might have.”
Was it the Scientologists?
“No, it wasn’t,” he says, shaking his head. “I mean, in some ways, you could say it’s similar-ish to Buddhism. In fact, I watched an interview recently with Leonard Cohen and the woman was asking him about his time at the Buddhist monastery. He said a line and I went, ‘That’s exactly it!’ Which is that his Master taught him that there basically is nothing wrong, there is no void.
“You are it, you’re there, and it’s only your thoughts that will take you out of being completely there, wherever you are, and that’s exactly what happened in the school. The same kind of thing you learn step by step: you basically take problems in your life... and you scrub them.”
Does this school have a name?
“It’s called The School For The Work. It was nine days. No contact with the outside world.”
Could he talk to the people in there?
“Yeah, it’s mostly this woman who runs it. She had this experience where she, in a sense, had a mental breakdown and then seven years later woke up on the floor in a halfway house, had no idea who she was – but everything was amazing, perfectly clear. It was like she had a brain reset and, from that place, couldn’t see a problem and started developing a technique whereby anyone who can see problems can look at them as they are... and they dissolve into nothing.”
So he's in a much happier place now?
“Oh yeah,” he affirms. “Yeah, for sure.”
Having said that, he's obviously still having relationship problems...
Rice raises a quizzical eyebrow: “Oh, really?”
Well, to these ears, My Favourite Faded Fantasy mostly picks up where 9 left off. Many of the songs are full of wistful yearning and intense regret. For example, ‘The Greatest Bastard’ – “Am I the greatest bastard that you know?/ The only one who let you go?/ The one you hurt so much you cannot bear?” – sounds fairly recriminatory and self-flagellating.
He shrugs and smiles. “Yeah, there’s a lot of humour in it... in that it’s almost all humour.”
So he's poking fun at this notion of himself as a miserably heartbroken and depressive troubadour?
“Basically,” he smiles. “Not that I was ever really miserable, but songs are a way to get shit out of your system – for me – and because I might take a dump and it turns into a song, and because that song may have a yearning, a longing or a sense of pain to it, doesn’t mean I’m actually feeling that anymore.”
So song-writing is cathartic for him?
“The song is the releasing for me,” he nods. “When I write a song, the emotion for the most part is out of my system. It’s very cathartic and then the next feeling I get that out, and then the next one. It’s funny because if I was to summarise the common things that people say to me, one is, ‘Oh, I thought you were bigger’ – taller – and the other one is, ‘I didn’t realise you had a sense of humour’ or ‘I thought you’d be a depressing kind of guy’.”
In fact, Rice is quick-witted and extremely affable. Not the dour misery-guts of legend.
“Not at all,” he grins. “I, like anybody, have phases. I took a lot of things very seriously before, because I was an idealist looking for this perfection, beauty and the perfect way to express art. I suppose I’ve realised now that seeking that is a form of insanity.
“It’s an interesting path, but nowadays I find I can’t take anything seriously. Like ‘The Greatest Bastard’ I think is funny. It’s like these drawings (points at album artwork). Am I the greatest bastard? I think it’s funny. There’s humour, but it’s terribly dark. It’s like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ – but it’s also that human beings are mad creatures.”
He doesn’t care to mention whether or not he’s in a romantic relationship at the moment, but some of the songs seem to be mining his well-worn theme of unrequited love.
He disagrees. “A lot of the songs might seem like they’re singing to a lover," he observes, "but they’re not at all. They’re more singing to these various personalities inside of yourself. ‘The Box’, that’s a song about looking in the mirror. Looking in the mirror at the asshole that beats you up whenever you want to do something, and tells you that you’re not good enough. Or the stupid guy inside who says that silly thing in that moment where you’re insecure. ‘The Box’ is a conversation with him. A lot of them are like that. ‘Colour Me In’ sounds like a love song – but it’s not.”

Recorded over four years in Ireland, Italy, Iceland and America, My Favourite Faded Fantasy was co-produced by Rice and the legendary American producer Rick Rubin, famed for his sterling studio work with artists as diverse as Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, Jake Bugg, Mick Jagger, Eminem, Lady Gaga, Kanye West and Johnny Cash. How did Rubin’s involvement come about?
“Rick had actually reached out to us on the second record [9], but I was already in the middle of it and I wasn’t in a particularly great space,” he recalls. “It was a frustrating time, but by the time he reached out anyway, we were halfway through. So we finished off. This time around, when I’d eventually got to the place where I wanted to make a record because I really didn’t know, management said, ‘Is there anything we could do to help?’ I said, ‘I feel like I need help, I feel like I need someone to show up for. Somebody that I would want to be my best for’. And they asked who that would be, and the only person I could think of was Rick.”
Any particular reason?
“It was partly because he was a bit mysterious to me,” he admits. “All I knew of him was that he had a big beard, he meditated, he worked with all these people – a crazy variety – and he didn’t seem to have a sound. He was this guy. I heard stories that he doesn’t spend long in the studio, and I found that interesting. I knew one thing that I didn’t want was to go into a studio with a producer who was going to want to put their stamp on me. I wanted to figure some shit out, and Rick was amazing for that. Amazing!”
Although over 50 minutes long, the finished album only features eight tracks. How many songs did he record during the initial sessions at Rubin’s Shangri La studio?
“We started with about 50 and then I think I did about 32 or 34 demos for Rick.”
So is it safe to say that there’s another album there ready to go?
“Yeah, but not from that material, from new material.”
So Damien's carried on writing since he finished?
“Yeah, I’m on fire right now,” he smiles, before clarifying, “I say that in a light-hearted way.”
Well, he hasn't exactly been Mr Prolific...
“Well I have!” he protests. “I haven’t released anything. I’ve written hundreds of songs. I keep dumping them. Perfectionist! Also because I never got a recording of many of these songs that I was happy with – but the main reason is because I’d never finish most of them. I’d write three-quarters of a song and Rick helped me finish.”
What method did he use?
“Basically, I’d have the song and it was one line I didn’t like, but I’d get so frustrated and I’d leave it. Rick would clear the decks and say, ‘Right, between now and tomorrow, I don’t want you to do anything else, don’t go near the piano, don’t start jamming on this, don’t write another song. Stick with this song and those five words until you come up with a better five words that you’re happy with, and I’ll see you tomorrow. Can you do that?’ I’d feel like a child and I’d say, ‘Of course I can do that! For god’s sake - five words in 24 hours’. So that’s what I would do. Then the next day he’d come in and I’d have that finished, and we’d tick that off.”
He moved the recording sessions to Reykjavik after laying down initial demos in Malibu. Climatically and culturally, the two locations couldn’t be more different...
“Well, that was on purpose, totally. I needed a change. Malibu is amazing, not because it’s Malibu, but because I was a resident in Rick’s studio. I basically lived in Shangri La. And it was a great place to learn. Gosh! It was like boot camp for me, to learn discipline, to show up whether I wanted to show up or not.
“I was so used to recording at home when the feeling was right that it was interesting for me to be around Rick where he’d say, ‘Sing it!’ ‘Em, I don’t really feel like singing it...’ ‘Great! Sing it anyway!’ It was exactly what I needed because I’d fallen out of practice and so he basically put me through the motions of practicing, practicing, practicing – and then one day, when I did feel like playing, my fingers were ready.
“And then I chose Reykjavik for exactly the fact that if you play music in Reykjavik you’re very likely doing it for the love of it – because there’s not much money in it. Also, if you want to do something spontaneous, last minute, with a group of people in Reykjavik it’s very easy to organise. It’s small and everybody knows everybody. It’s this really great community of people.”
Did Rubin go to Iceland with him?
“No, once I’d finished a bunch of the tracking in the States, I went to Iceland and moved into a friend’s house with a studio, recorded there, and then did a bunch of recording in another house that I rented, and then I recorded in Sundlaugin – the Sigur Ros-owned studio. I also recorded in a friend’s place in Italy. But a lot of the recording on this was done in home studios.”
Marketa Irglova contributed some piano and vocals...
“Yeah exactly, she lives in Iceland now.”
My Favourite Faded Fantasy is the first Damien Rice album not to feature Lisa Hannigan’s vocals. He recently admitted that he had actually asked his former vocal foil to sing on the record, but she declined.
“Yeah, how the fuck did I let that one slip out?” he laughs. “Yeah, that was when I was in L.A. and I was about to begin with Rick. I didn’t know – I kind of felt time had passed, and Lisa and I were pals and we were in touch, and I thought it’d be nice to clear the notion out, to know whether she felt it was a good idea or not a good idea. The reason was because, if I knew that she would have been singing on something, then I would have changed how I approached the recording. Say on O, how ‘Volcano’ was recorded: I changed it to suit.”
Hannigan is still listed in the album’s acknowledgements. Closer inspection of the credits reveals that Rice has also thanked Sean Penn. Is the actor a friend?
“Yeah, I know Sean through Bono,” he says. “That started about four years ago. He was here in Dublin and Bono introduced me, and we became pals. He was great. He lives in Malibu, around the corner from Rick, and I was recording there, so he was around a lot. He was really supportive. There were basically a few people who were great challengers in terms of being honest enough to kind of poke a hole if they saw a weak part, to knock a hole in it and, at the same time, be really supportive.
“A group like Lisa and Glen [Hansard] and Bono and Sean. There’s a few people who I exchanged songs and ideas with, and that was really helpful because it’s hard to find people whose taste you can trust and also who you feel will actually be straight up with you.”

When he wasn’t moving between LA and Iceland, Rice occasionally returned to his Irish home. The Celtic Tiger was still in full swing when he released his last album. What does he make of what’s since happened to his homeland? He pauses before replying.
“I think individuals have their own paths, their ups and downs. I’ve had my ups and downs, my friends and family, people I know have ups and downs, and I think there’s always something really valuable to learn from a down. I’ve learnt more in the last five to seven years of my life and the stuff that I’ve learned is stuff that I cherish and has transformed the way I see life.
“I think that countries have ups and downs as well,” he continues. “Although it can feel tough when you’re in a low, it’s a great opportunity to reassess the approach and change things. Change whatever needs to be changed, and learn from it. So that’s kind of the way I feel about it. I see the country in a very simple way. I see it like a person, like a being, and it’s easier to manage in my brain that way.”
Bono recently told me that he has “an odd-shaped brain.” What kind of brain does Damien have? “I’m very mathematical, but I’m also a daydreamer. A mathematical daydreamer. Actually, I think I’ll have a beer.”
He reaches into the ice bucket and removes a Heineken. I ask if he usually drinks before shows.
“I barely drink,” he shrugs, “but there was a couple of times on the tour I did a song called ‘Cheers Darling’ and I knocked back a bottle of wine on stage in three or four minutes. I can do that and I’ll end up locked and loaded at the end of the night and it’s always a great show – well, I’m so drunk I think it’s a great show. That’s fine doing that at the odd show here and there, but not every night.”
Drinking is an easy habit to splash into, especially if you’re a wealthy musician on extended hiatus from your recording/touring career. How did he fill his free time over the last eight years?
“I was doing lots of stuff. Mostly, what I was doing was challenging myself to do everything that I was afraid of, or that I’d previously been afraid of. So whether that was diving with sharks, or saying sorry to somebody, or seeing somebody on the street – and you want to say ‘hello’ and you’re too shy and you have to force yourself. Whatever I found myself afraid of, I kept on pushing myself to do.
“I spent those years, in a way, messing with what I thought the reality of life was. A lot of that is thanks to the School that I went to. Where it’s like they mess with you in there, bigtime. They put you in scenarios that really fuck with your brain. And it’s a challenge to see if you’re taking it seriously or not.”
Was there any point where he considered permanently retiring from the music business?
“For sure,” he affirms. “There were many times I’d get so frustrated with myself because I felt like I wasn’t made for the music industry. Music is one thing. Trying to fit into the music industry? That’s another thing. And I felt like I was too particular and too fussy and purist in my desires, that I was a pain in the ass for everybody else to work with. I was a pain in the ass for the band to work with, the management, the label. Basically I was the pain in the ass guy: ‘Oh God, here he goes again'. I had a lot of that experience where I was looking to do things ethically, to do things beautifully, to put time into the details.”
Didn’t he once have a falling-out with his old Juniper bandmates over wanting to print the single sleeves on recycled paper?
“Yeah, I still have those challenges – massively. Live Nation, for example, are this massive, massive corporation. You try to do a tour in the States and work with some local promoters, but most of the local promoters are gone because they’ve been bought over. I find it uninspiring. So I challenged my management and agents to sort of see who we can find that isn’t Live Nation. Not that I have anything against Live Nation. I’m looking for it to be a bit more colourful. But then everybody’s like, ‘Ugh! Why can’t we do it the easy way? Why does it always have to be the difficult way?’”
Are Live Nation handling any shows on his American tour?
“That’s the thing,” he sighs. “I can guarantee you, even though I’ve asked, they’ll have a pile of the shows because I’ll be told they own most of the decent venues so there’s no way around it. That’s what I find a little sad.”
Paolo Nutini is playing across the river tonight. He has cited Damien as one of his main musical inspirations, as have the likes of Ed Sheeran and Passenger. How does that make him feel?
“I don’t take that on at all,” he says, embarrassedly shrugging his shoulders. “I understand what it’s like to be inspired. Leonard Cohen inspires me, as an example.”
It turns out the two have hooked up.
“I’ve met him and I’ve played with him, but I wouldn’t say I know him. I don’t take anything on.”
So he's not full of smug self-satisfaction...
“No! Oh my god, not at all. It’s like there’s this new place that I’m in now and I’ve always had a sense of not wanting to go beyond my evolution. I think the best way of putting it is, I’ve always enjoyed the idea of feeling like the underdog. I don’t know why. Ever since I was in school, I find it more pleasing to be considered the underdog than to be somebody that people go, ‘Oh, you’re...’ and I’m like, ‘No, no, no, I’m struggling!’ Because it’s more interesting to me to be in that position. The student. It’s more fun than the professor. That’s the place that I remain in, even now. I’m even more there than I was before.”
Rice could certainly never be accused of chasing wider fame. When his song ‘Cannonball’ was covered in The X Factor in 2011, he swiftly tweeted his displeasure despite the fact that the airplay was earning him phenomenal royalties.
“The only reason I did that was because people were pointing saying that I had done it for the big bucks or something like that. The truth was I had absolutely no control over it. I found out about it a week before it happened. I have control over, for example, whether the songs are used in advertisements or not. I don’t allow songs to be used in advertisements because I don’t like the commercialisation or over-commercialisation of the music. So my preference is that no one or two or three songs get pumped up or pushed too much. Because I don’t want to have a hit. I don’t want to have a hit single. I don’t want to be one of those bands who plays a concert and everybody’s waiting for that one song. I have no interest in that.”

Damien's tour manager comes in to remind him that there’s a full house waiting outside. We have only a few more minutes to wrap things up. Can he sum My Favourite Faded Fantasy up in a couple of words?
“Yeah – ‘it’s done’!” he says, laughing. “And I’m onto the next. I think that’s my job. My job is to be in the next one while people are getting into that.”
So presumably there won’t be another eight-year break between albums?
“I’m done recording in January. I told you, I’m on fire!”
Any hints as to how album number four will sound?
“Yeah, it’s gonna be my hip hop album!”
I know Damien's joking – but is he planning on experimenting musically?
“I am joking, but I’m not. I want it to be a record that I can move to.”
He picks a white napkin up from the table and starts doing origami with it to demonstrate his point.
“From a really silly, light-hearted, point of view, let’s say this is a normal Damien Rice song,” he says, pinching the napkin in at one end and widening it out at the other. “This is an audio waveform I’m going to make for you. If you look at an audio waveform for a normal Damien Rice song, it looks like that. It starts off really quietly, builds a little bit for the chorus, then really quiet, then there’s this big build up at the end (adjusts napkin accordingly). That’s the way it looks if you look at the audio files.”
He unfolds the napkin, shakes it, and holds it up in front of him – a perfect rectangle.
“I want to make a record of songs that look like that. That basically the moment they start, they’re there.”
The nervous-looking tour manager reappears and signals that we really have to wind it up. But he’s not fully talked out yet. What’s the plan for tonight’s show?
“Plan is no plan,” he smiles. “That’s the usual. Well, there’s one plan, I suppose. We have a choir, but we’ve only rehearsed with a few of them. I’ve yet to meet them. I don’t make a set-list. I like walking on. I get bored fast and easily and I don’t function well when there’s something put in front of me that I’m supposed to do. There’s this cheeky part of me that doesn’t like doing what he’s told. Therefore, if I have a set-list in front of me, it doesn’t do it for me. It annoys me. I usually wander out. I might decide before I walk out what the first song is, and then after that I’ll see, or I might decide when I pick up the guitar.”
How have the shows been going so far?
“Nowadays, everything’s great. There was a really intense show the other day in Amsterdam. I didn’t say a word to the audience. I was in a dark place: it was amazing. It was a theatre with seats. I forget the name of it.”
He didn’t say a word to the audience? Is he a Bob Dylan fan?
“Now I am. I wasn’t. I didn’t really know anything by Dylan years ago until I made O and people said, ‘Oh, you must be inspired by Dylan. What’s your favourite Bob Dylan album?’ And I was like ‘Umm... Blowin’ In The Wind’? I knew, but I didn’t really years ago. But in the meantime then, Tom Osander, the drummer who recorded on O, introduced me to Dylan. So I became a Dylan fan in the last ten years. His old stuff, particularly.”
Has he ever played a show with his back to the audience?
“I’ve never done that,” he laughs. “I think I walked off once for a little while in one of the shows, and I asked Lisa and Vyvienne [Long] to do something. I had an intense moment. When I go to a show, I like whoever’s on stage to give me what it is they’re really in. I don’t want a performance. I want an experience. So therefore, that’s what I like to give. I like to dive as much into the place, where you can pretend there is no audience and you wander inside. It’s a balance. Of course you’re aware there’s an audience, but there’s a bunch of times I’m on stage, I’ll close my eyes, I’ll start singing a song and I’ll completely forget. I’ll get lost in it.”
He rises from the couch and starts to get ready. As I gather my things, I ask does he have a motto in life?
After a lengthy pause, the question prompts this impassioned response: “The thing that has probably defined my new approach to life the most, in the last while, is I imagined myself dead. Well... I imagined myself an hour before I was dead. I really got into it. I got into character and I sat with that guy and I realised that all that he wanted was – when he looked back – to be able to feel that he had been himself at least once whilst he was alive. And that’s what hit me.”
Rice becomes extremely animated as he continues. “I realised, ‘Oh, I’m not even really myself'. I haven’t been myself. I’m a version of this guy that grew up in Ireland, Catholic guilt, school teachers, priests, parents, peers. This is good. This is bad. This is right. This is wrong. You should feel ashamed when you do that. You should put this person down when they say that. You should shout when this happens. Basically, this programmed machine walking around the place.
“I was really curious to figure out who I am underneath the English language with the Irish accent, and these hand gestures, and all this other stuff that I’ve accumulated in my upbringing. That’s the thing I’m most interested in now. Taking off the layers. And there’s so many. That’s why the songs are pouring out right now because, as I’m pulling off these layers, I’m finding fucking so much shit underneath. So many things are really interesting to me. I’m really interested in philosophy and the brain and how people function and relationships. I’ve always been interested in that stuff.”
A couple of hours later, he’s taking a sweaty bow on the theatre stage to a standing ovation, having played a storming solo show to a truly besotted audience. Clearly, other people are interested by that stuff, too. Indeed they are.

My Favourite Faded Fantasy is available now on DRM. See hotpress.com for live shots.