David Keenan: "My grandfather always said to me, 'Sing in your own accent. It’s yours'"

“As cataloguers go, David Keenan couldn’t ask for better than Hot Press scribe Pat Carty, who has exhaustively covered much of the Dundalk man’s work thus far, in a series of rather mighty interviews and reviews.

“Pat had his own style,” David agrees, “and it was good synergy.”

Carty’s chronicles of Keenan cover an artist who has always evolved, from the incendiary calling card that was A Beginners Guide to Bravery through to the raw power of 2022’s Crude. On new album Modern Mythologies, Keenan continues his sonic evolution, one that he is currently taking around the boreens of Ireland, from Bohola to Tinahely and Tullamore to Dingle. Off the road for a few days, David has shored up at Hot Press HQ and proves more than fine company.

David Keenan. Copyright Abigail Ring/ hotpress.com

He starts by reflecting on the tour.

“These are grassroot venues where everything grows from,” says Keenan. “There was some support for them during lockdown, they were getting payments to put on gigs, but I think that should be consistent. I’m not speaking for the venues. I just happen to be passing through, but you pick up on the magic of the bara. The walls are breathing, you’re hosted upstairs, given a lovely meal. And then I’ve been singing on the street at the end of the gigs, singing two songs to the stars to guide us all home.

“It’s reminded me of why I did it in the first place,” David continues. “I have to get out and do the mileage, because I’m a travelling musician. I’ve never done anything else, I need to play. There are no promoters involved, it’s just me and the venue. No band, just my acoustic and electric on a trolley that I got in Guiney’s and an old suitcase with merch. But I needed this, especially with the album coming out in November, after which there’s a plan to tour in Europe and beyond.”

How are the new songs landing?

“Every night, I’m saying, ‘This is the Clonakilty choir. This is the Listowel choir. This is the Derry choir’. Because the songs are coming back, the songs that are out there. Even if people are coming to it for the first time, by the end of the first or second chorus, they’re with me in terms of the bits they can sing. I’m really feeling it for the first time in a long time.”

Recorded in three studios, with the deluxe version of Modern Mythologies encompassing 16 songs, across a diverse set of styles, the record is something of a behemoth. His wild days in the rear-view mirror, David looks match-fit and is still seeking magic, the doggerel of living and a sense of belonging. He refers to the dozen songs on the standard album as a narrative of that hero’s journey, which is also deeply layered with captivating breadcrumb trails.

“All the songs are direct experience,” he expands. “But I’m trying to look for what’s going on under the surface.”

Indeed. Tracks like ‘Radiate A Smile’ and ‘We Live, We Learn, We Love’ are a chasm-deep excavation of people and places in Keenan’s world, the latter reminiscent of Dundalk alumni Jinx Lennon.

“That fucking subconsciousness has to go somewhere,” he laughs. “Jinx, when I listened to him years ago, is there, as well as Public Enemy and Scary Éire, and an episode of Rhythm and Flow Brazil! I have become more comfortable in my skin. I had to be willing on this album to fail and just do things that felt worthy in my own head.”

That diverse potion of influences is alloyed even further within the mythology of Oriel.

“I did a documentary called Focla ar Chanbhás with Paddy Hayes,” David nonchalantly drops. “We went back to the lands of Oriel and the Táin Bó Cúailnge. There’s a description of a bard in a seventh century Irish manuscript as someone whose learning is unlawful, but he has his own intellect and that kind of suits me. I didn’t go to college, but I learned from listening.

“I learned from reading, I learned from fucking playing, and I learned from going place to place, which I’m doing again. But if I feel identification, I have to go back and study it – song, satire, poetry, storytelling. So I was delving into all that. I think in Ireland, there’s this return to nature, people singing in their own accents, and people looking at their own doorstep.”

When it wasn’t fashionable, you were singing in your own accent. He smiles.

“I was told, ‘You’re not going to get anywhere with that’. I remember doing open mics and getting fucking fag butts flicked at me. But my grandfather always said to me, ‘Sing in your own accent. It’s yours.’ I also took from that, find your own voice as well. Find the things you feel are real, that are saying something to you, not just some surface level story.”

The imagery on the record is, at times, glowingly profound – across the horse-trading banter of ‘Suriname Or Bust’ or ‘Lives Left Out To Dry’, with its lines, “Green eyes sublime she came alive / With a machine gun and a dachshund / Having been remade in my literary blue.” Magic stuff, David.

“Thank you for realising that”, he offers. “I was demystifying something for myself on this album. That was me on a train in Barcelona going to town. There was an English woman sat in front of me with her friends, and she said, ‘When Roger left, Susan stopped eating’. I didn’t hear anything else, but the head started thinking, ‘What happened to Susan?’ I imagined Susan coming back as this kind of Barbarella. A fucking warrior queen being reborn with a machine gun, and enacting revenge on the keyboard warriors who might have fucking tried to dampen her down.”

The standard record finishes with ‘Incandescent Morning’, a paradisical tale of the divine feminine.

“When that song was coming,” David reveals, “I was getting the shivers, because it’s so erotic, but not in a derogatory way, rather it is so fucking pure and beautiful. I wanted to reclaim intimacy and sex from the fucking pornographic. When it came, I knew that was the end of this album, or the end of the 12 songs.”

You’re proud of this record, David.

“I am,” he affirms. “I stand behind every lyric on it. There’s no filler. I’m proud of it because other people said it wouldn’t work with the different recording sessions and putting it together. I felt I had freedom and permission to put songs on the album from different sessions and different styles. ‘Poison Water’ is like a dance song.

“Because after the documentary, I got so much off my chest, I realised that I love writing tunes as well. Like, it’s not just about the poetry or the story or the lyric. I fucking love tunes. And I want to dance to some tunes, you know, that eggshell is cracked now. I feel I’ve given myself permission to not just be one version.”

The album comes wrapped in some boss cover art by the mighty Perry Ogden.

“Perry’s an artistic hero,” David elaborates. “Just the rawness in his images, the authenticity. I had Perry on board, but I still didn’t have an album deal. And then my grandfather died on the ninth of October, and four days after his funeral, I got an email back from a label in the UK who said they loved it. They wanted to put it out, and are connected to Warner, but the name of the subsidiary label is Good Form, and my grandfather always used to say, if anybody was decent – ‘Good form, your man.’ So, I thought, ‘Yeah, I’m on the right path.’”

Modern Mythologies is out now. See David Keenan's upcoming tour dates here.