Closer To The Truth

It’s 1 o’clock in the morning. The voice of Neil Young, comforting and real as always, floats from the speakers in my Dublin 8 sitting room. Around the circular wooden coffee table – strewn with munchies, wine glasses and cups of tea – sit myself and two men. One is musician Damien Rice, Ireland’s most recent celebrity A-list superstar; the other is Hugh Baxter of Burma Action Ireland.

The situation is an unusual one. I’m not in the habit of bringing stangers back to my house, and I only met Baxter and Rice (well-known for his cautious approach to journalists) a couple of hours ago. Rice had agreed to a Hot Press interview to highlight the issues surrounding ‘Unplayed Piano’, the new single that he co-wrote and recorded with Lisa Hannigan.
Lisa, with her wonderful voice, is one of the star turns on O, the remarkable debut album which has launched this hugely talented and fiercely independent singer-songwriter to worldwide fame – and she is to the fore again here.
‘Unplayed Piano’ is a wonderfully slow, soft and touching song, recorded during time-out from the creation of Rice’s long-awaited – and needless to say hugely anticipated – second album. All profits go towards the international campaign for freedom and justice in far-flung Burma, a Southeast Asian country violently ruled by one of the bloodiest regimes in the world.
Which is why Rice was accompanied by Hugh Baxter, a long-time campaigner with Burma Action Ireland, to handle parts of the interview with him. When we got talking, the conversation took so many interesting twists and turns that we didn’t want to leave it – so, when I was due to head for home to release the babysitter, I invited the guys back.
Five hours later we’re still talking and laughing, about birth and death, pain and pleasure – and everything in between. ‘Learn’, ‘curious’, ‘interesting’ and ‘challenge’ are words that crop up frequently in Damien Rice’s vocabulary – and so it goes, deeper into the night.
My impression is that he’s a keen student of inner and outer life; a philosophical observer from a place of free-spirited independence; an honest man who strives to see the best in people and situations; as good a listener as he is a talker; and someone with a sharp, often self-deprecatory sense of humour and irony, to whom friendships are precious and privacy is sacrosanct…

Compassion matters to Damien Rice. With the just-released benefit single, ‘Unplayed Piano’, he is supporting a cause – although he tends to look at it in a somewhat different light.
“When I was at the school-into-college phase,” he says, “I was an activist for environmentalism and vegetarianism. I was excited about finding something different to the way I was brought up. I latched onto some of those things and spent a few years pushing them.
“Then I went through a new phase where I realised that all I was doing was telling other people how to live, and I didn’t like that at all,” he adds. “These days I’ve no real problem with anything that goes on. A lot of people find that difficult to hear, but in my heart I feel that everything is the way it is, and I’m not interested in fighting any more.
“When I was younger, in the band Juniper, my thing was ‘fighting the music industry’. But when I left, I just wanted to do what it is that I like to do. I did that with music and now I’m doing it with the Burma campaign. I’ve no desire to tell people that they should or shouldn’t do something, or to say ‘this is entirely wrong’. All I can say is something feels a bit wrong to me, so what I do is bring fresh, positive and creative – as opposed to critical – energy to this issue. That’s where I’m at with all those kind of things. I’m very careful not to jump on any bandwagon, or get attached to any side.”
Damien has a number of unusual ways of looking at the world, and of understanding his – or our – place in it. He believes that “you’re absolutely in control of what’s going on in your life – you just might not choose to accept it at the time.” Allied to this is a moment-by-moment acceptance of experience, and a lack of any desire to struggle either against the person he is or what’s happening in the now. It’s a kind of a Zen thing.
These views seem to have been honed to precision during his eight-year experience as lead singer with the band Juniper, whose members still play together as BellX1.
“I’m often not comfortable doing the things that are expected of people,” he says. “When I was in Juniper, I had the feeling that I was being told what to do. During interviews, the journalist might bring a photographer who’d want me to sit down and pose – and I hated it. Or I might get asked a question I just didn’t want to answer. I didn’t realise – until I did realise – that I could simply and politely say, ‘I don’t want my picture taken’, or ‘I’m uncomfortable with answering that question’. If that means I don’t get the interview, then I don’t get the interview, but that’s okay with me.”
I suggest that in the three years since the release of O, it sounds like Rice has come into a place of power.
“You don’t have to be powerful to exert control over your life,” he insists. “I’ve no more power really than I did before; people might perceive that I have because I’ve sold records, but in a way I’ve actually got a little bit less power inside me, because I’m dispersing it so much, in different areas. Whereas back then, I didn’t give a shit! I didn’t have any ties. I’d left the band and was travelling around Europe, scraping by, recording at home over a couple of years.
“The album got done and we started touring, and it all started growing from there.”
Damien’s remarkable rise to stardom got a further boost earlier this year when his moving and beautiful song ‘Blower’s Daughter’, was used as lead track in the Oscar-nominated film Closer, starring Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman and Clive Owen. Flying in that company must hold some risk of inducing a rock star ego trip?
“No, I kind of did all that in Juniper, to be honest. We were 17 when we started the band in school; it was our dream to be rock stars, to record in Windmill Lane, to get signed by a major label. We got all that...and I hated it. I was unhappy, even though I’d gotten all the things that I thought I wanted. It was a bit like seeing this girl in school who’s just so hot, and you go to college and she’s still there, and then one day you get to kiss her and you start going out with her, and you’re just like – I have nothing in common with this girl!
“When the reality hit, it took me quite a few years to have the courage to leave Juniper because we’d all become friends. But I felt that I was trouble to the band, the label and the manager, because I never seemed to want what they wanted. I felt I had to take a leap – because I’m causing shit here, and I can’t just go along with what’s making me unhappy.
“When it finally hit me, we were just about to record our first album in a chateau in France. The band were pretty pissed off. But I thought, if I go ahead with recording this album and leave then, that’s really shit, like taking off straight after the baby’s born.
“Naturally it was rocky for a while, but it’s like any relationship – take a bit of space, and a bit of time, then everybody calms down. I’m so happy that I went through it all – we all learnt so much from it. I did a complete about-turn, where I totally didn’t crave being a rock star any more, or want any of the things that came with it. Not that I didn’t want to write and play music – that’s something I have no choice but to express. But now I was doing it for me.”
It must have been strange, all the same, to leave Juniper on the apparent cusp of success.
“It totally felt like the right decision,” he asserts. “I wasn’t nervous, because I thought, well, if having money and a band and a label and management and all that kind of stuff is what I thought I wanted and I’m still unhappy, then I’m not scared to leave it, because something in the equation is wrong. When you’re young and excited and everybody starts telling you you’re amazing, that feeds your ego. I had become the person that people thought I should be, so I behaved in a way that wasn’t natural to myself. It took about a year or two to really realise how much of a dick I had become.”

Rice may have turned his back on potential fame and fortune back then – but with his album O now surpassing sales of 1.5 million copies worldwide, wealth and celebrity have finally caught up with him. He recalls an incident recently where a bouncer, who’d just turned him away from a Dublin nightclub, dramatically changed his tune when someone said, ‘That was Damien Rice’. Next thing Rice knew, he and his friends were swept inside – where to their embarrassment, a table was cleared of people, to make room for them.
Rice seems equally uncomfortable with the red carpet treatment and the loss of privacy that go hand-in-hand with fame – though he sees factors like this not as problems but as interesting challenges, which require that he maintains his honesty, integrity and communication skills.
Being recognised in public might be a pain in the ass sometimes, but surely he can’t say the same about the new-found cash?
“I know it sounds like crap,” Rice says, “but having lots of money has made my life much more complex. I’d never had money before, and when all of a sudden you get loads of it, and you’re in the pub with your mates – struggling artists or painters, broke – you start feeling guilty, and you start wanting to give things away, and then you start feeeling imbalanced, and then you just don’t feel connected any more.
“So you start hanging out with people who also have money, in order to feel comfortable. It can be really easy to live in that world, and it can be great fun, but my old friends don’t live there. Again it was a challenge, and now I’m learning to work with money creatively, not do the Irish guilt thing.”
When I ask does he buy loads of expensive clothes these days, he holds out a ragged trouser leg and worn-down shoe for inspection. Rather than going consumer crazy, Rice is planning to invest in worthwhile projects, including the setting up of nature reserves. But he’s also using his wealth to build a firm foundation for his work and the lifestyle needed to sustain it.
“I was depressed last December,” he says. “The band and I did a week’s recording for the new album and then I had to say stop, I don’t feel like doing this. So I took three months off. I thought OK, Damien, the reality is that you have money, but you’re 31 and living with your parents.
“So this year I made a decision to be practical about my situation. I thought in January, I’m going to buy a bicycle. In February, I’m going to get a car, so I can be independent. And in March, I’m going to get a house. That’s what I did, and now I feel great because I’m broke again – I’ve got a big mortgage and I’m back with my mates. I’ve put my money into a home that my friends can enjoy, and that we can record in.”
Which sounds like not a bad arrangement at all…

Speaking of recording, what’s the story with the second album? Is Rice under pressure to get it done, now that he’s recovered from last year’s intensive touring? There must be a few bean counters in record companies around the world wondering if this is going to be one of the big ones of the year – whenever it does finally come out.
“The only pressure I feel is from myself,” he says. “I haven’t had the desire to go near anything musical up till quite recently, till we started to work on the ‘Unplayed Piano’ single. It was a nice reason to turn on the studio again and change the guitar strings. And now I’m really excited. Tomo, our drummer, was out today in the house putting down a new song. There’s a lot of material there but I don’t know which way it’s gonna go yet.
“We’re not working yet on a daily basis – we’ve no particular deadline – and I’m waiting for my house to be finished so we can record at home. The way I work is that I wait till I really feel like doing it, because then I work much faster and what I do is much better – much more true, and real, than if I forced it. I prefer to wait around and let my body tell me when to create…I’ll be driving and I’ll be dying to get home because I need to get in the door to let the music out. For me, writing a song is like taking a shit. That’s how I find it works.”
And are the members of his band okay about having to fit in with Rice’s spontaneous creative process?
“I think everybody’s taken the last few months as a break, but at the same time they’re saying, come on, are you ready? Let me know when you need me! Are we going on tour or what? Which is great, I want people to be excited. Over the next month or two it’d be my plan to get stuff for the next album finalised.”
Given that there have been numerous press stories over the past few months about Damien and Renee Zelwegger, there’s an inevitable curiosity about the nature of their relationship. It’s not something, to use Rice’s own terminology, that I feel particularly ‘comfortable’ with asking, but I give it my best shot anyway.
“So, on to the relationships thing,” I say.
“Yes?” (Stares intently.)
“Did you have a friendship with Renee?”
“Yes, myself and Renee hung out in our time off, yes.”
“And?”
“And?” Rice pauses, embarrassing the hell out of me. “Ask another question,” he says.
“How close… are you, or, eh…were you?”
Surprisingly, while he doesn’t discuss whether they actually slept together (dear reader, would you discuss your sex life in public?), Rice gives an unexpectedly open answer to my faltering line of enquiry.
“About two and half years ago, myself and Renee were asked to the same party in LA. Every year, the guy who runs this party would invite people who weren’t widely known but that he’d heard about, and that particular year it happened to be me and the band.
“You know you meet somebody who you just get a buzz off? The thing I loved about Renee that night,” he explains, “was that everybody was mingling in the sitting room – directors, actors, agents, managers, all these influential people – but instead of canoodling with them, she just hung out in the next room chatting with Jonathan, our sound engineer, who was probably the least ‘important’ person there from a business point of view.
“I was drawn to that immediately. Renee is hilarious – she’s super smart. We hung out together and got to know each other a bit. She came over to Ireland and we hung out here for about a week, went to Galway and drank some pints of Guinness. During my three-month bicycle, car and house period, I went over to her place in the States and hung out there for a couple of weeks, then came home, met up with Lisa Hannigan and we started writing ‘Unplayed Piano’.”
Rice is the kind of guy who gets on well with women, and a lot of his close friends are female. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that he and Renee Zellwegger have enjoyed a platonic relationship, yet when she got married recently, “The Irish tabloids made up some bullshit story that I’d been dumped!” he exclaims. “They got on to me about it but I simply didn’t respond. I was too busy recording ‘Unplayed Piano’. What I’ve learnt is that I should have said something, because instead they just made the story up.
“I’m genuinely happy for Renee,” he adds. “We’re really good mates, and I hate the idea that’s been put out that there’s any kind of negativity between us. I’ve never had to deal with that before – a publication telling me how I get on with somebody, when actually they don’t have a clue.”
And with that the interview closes and our three-way conversation begins, spilling into the small hours back in my dimly-lit sitting room. We talk and talk, Hugh Baxter, Damien Rice and myself, in an unusually frank, open and of course off-the-record way, finding in each others’ company answers to our own personal questions.
At least that’s what it felt like to me.

Burma - The Oppression Must End: Damien Rice talks to Adrienne Murphy about the trip to Burma which inspired him to write 'Unplayed Piano' and Hugh Baxter from Burma Action Ireland provides the background to the campaign to free Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of Burma’s democratic movement.