For Those I Love: "I knew I needed to take steps in a different direction. I just didn’t know what that direction was…"

Never let it be said that David Balfe, AKA For Those I Love, doesn’t suffer for his art.

“I was filming the video for ‘Of The Sorrows’ and had put a lot of time into it,” David explains over a cup of coffee in HP Central.

“It was me returning to the way I like to work, which is very much in silos, running gun method, no big production. On the final day of shooting, I went up to Djouce Mountain in Wicklow with my producer, Dave McCabe, and the actor, Wesley Dillon, both of whom are close friends. We’d shot most of the things we were due to shoot but had one scene left. I packed up all the gear and was walking back to the car; took a slight detour because I needed a piss; had that piss and slipped and fell and broke my leg.”

Swift justice for urinating in a public place…

“Yeah,” he nods, “but in mitigation you’re not finding a public toilet anywhere out near Djouce Mountain! I said immediately, ‘Lads, I’m after breaking my leg’ and they were like, ‘There’s no way your leg’s broken, it was a small fall, you’re not screaming, it’s grand.’ I was like, ‘No, I heard the sound, it’s broken.

“As we’re walking back, Dave went: ‘I know how intense you are when it comes to creative things. I think we should go to the next location because if we leave here today and you don’t have the scene you want, you’re going to be heartbroken and I know you’re on a tight deadline.’ I was like, ‘I don’t know man, I really think it’s broken.’ Dave was so adamant, though, that I thought, ‘Maybe I just popped my knee.’ We did go to the next location but when I got out of the car and started walking, I could feel my foot twisting the other way around and I said, ‘Lads, we have to go to A&E now.’ We get to the hospital and the doctor is like, ‘Your leg is so broken!’”

As he’ll recount in a moment, breaking a leg isn’t the only agony that the Coolock, artist has experienced in relation to Carving The Stone, the follow up to his eponymous 2021 Choice Music Prize-winning debut album. An emotionally-charged response to the death by suicide of his best friend Paul Curran, did it provide Balfe with closure or was it like picking at a scab?

“I’ve probably consistently had an aversion to closure,” he reflects. “It almost feels like a negative thing to me. It feels like leaving something in the past instead of letting that memory continue to live. I’ve often taken great steps forward only to some months later finding myself taking steps back again. I’d never want to create any distance between me and my memory of Paul. Such a catastrophic thing happens and suddenly, even in the tightest of communities, you start to feel like you’re entirely alone with your grieving.

“But I also have an aversion, sonically and conceptually, to repeating myself and therefore had no desire to retrace the tragedy of the first album. I knew I needed to take steps in a different direction. I just didn’t know what that direction was…”

Cue a prolonged period of creative uncertainty and doubt, which left Balfe thinking that his music-making days might be over.

“I was writing and the music just wasn’t working at all,” he reveals. “I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can deliver a set of songs here.’ There was certainly a period where I was unconvinced that I would make a second record.”

To try get his mojo working again, David followed Will Oldham’s example and rented a remote cottage in Leitrim.

“I fell into the myth of great records I’d read so much about where people isolate themselves and break away from all distraction,” he explains. “I spoke to so many peers who were very encouraging around the idea of, ‘Go and leave the world you know behind. Separate yourself and focus on the art. “So I took all of my gear to a very, very isolated place in Leitrim. In the thirty-one days I was there, I saw just one person who randomly knocked on the door and asked where you could get the blinds that were hanging in the window. After all that isolation, it was terrifying!

“I had a gorgeous set up. I was ultra-focused and wrote from very early in the morning until very, very late at night. And every single piece of music I wrote was just awful and entirely unusable. I couldn’t make it work until the last day when I was due to drive back and had packed up the car. The only stuff left in the house was my computer and a MIDI keyboard. I sat down and said, ‘Let me see if I can tinker with any little bits.’ And I wrote the opening chords to the final song on the album, ‘I Came Back To See The Stone Has Moved’. I got back to the little room in my flat where you can touch both walls at the same time and gradually built the piece. Sonically, it was the inception of everything on this album.”

The finished version of the song samples ‘Black Waters’ by Jean Ritchie, an Appalachian singer known to her loyal following as ‘the Mother of Folk’.

“There’s been a series of oddities with this record and Jean Ritchie is part and parcel of this,” Balfe proffers. “While I was writing the album, I developed a fascination with another song of hers, ‘Go Dig My Grave’. I was trying to take the track apart, with the intention of sampling it. Then I opened my computer and saw that Lankum had released an incredible version of ‘Go Did My Grave’. These things, I believe, just float around in the atmosphere waiting for someone to pull them down. So, I re-listened to some other Jean Ritchie songs and ‘Black Waters’ worked perfectly.”

Other coincidences quickly followed.

“I wrote the song ‘The Ox/The Afters’ about this character who on the original version was never fully developed or entirely humanised. I decided I needed to give him a name other than The Ox, so I came up with the entirely fictitious John Martin. I wrote that on Wednesday night or whatever and on Thursday morning I got up and saw that Shels have signed a player called John Martin. I was like, ‘This is mental!’”

More on his beloved Shelbourne FC anon. Although still fiercely personal, Carving The Stone is a broader love/hate letter to Dublin, which finds Balfe reflecting on homelessness, decay, loss, violence, trauma, mental health and other societal woes that disproportionally impact working class communities.

We know that The Ox’s name is fictionalised but how literally should we take the rest of the record?

“It’s an amalgamation of characters from my life and parts of my own self as well,” David clarifies. “I used a little more licence to bring all the arcs together than I did on the first record. It’s the approach that a lot of fiction writers use.”

His favourite fiction writer being?

“Raymond Carver was one of my earliest inspirations as a writer,” Balfe shoots back. “I also looked very deeply at poets who use characters fluidly. An example being John Berryman. He fictionalised things to use alongside stuff that did happen throughout his life.”

To further contextualise Carving The Stone, Balfe informs me that, “I’m not a father. There are references on it to me being married and stuff but I don’t have a wife. Again, it’s that embodiment of character.”

David didn’t need to leave home for an example of how growing anger, division and grievances – genuine or otherwise – are having a cancerous effect on his hometown.

Springing up in March 2024 when it was rumoured locally that the former Crown Paints factory was going to become an asylum centre, the so-called Coolock Protest Camp may well have started out as a coming together of concerned citizens but soon attracted far-right and criminal elements.

Things reached their nadir in July of that year when violent riots erupted, the factory was set ablaze and multiple arrests were made.

“There’s a huge volume of talking points from something like this,” Balfe says picking his words carefully. “I’m very reticent to distil any of this stuff down to a singular talking point. The things leading to situations like this are so insidious that they often go undiscussed. They’re ignored in favour of the optics.”

For Those I Love. Copyright Abigail Ring/ hotpress.com

In a more general sense, he speaks about the “cultural manipulation” taking place online.

“What we’ve seen is the very slow burn of the normalisation of ethnonationalism. Initially stemming from the fringes, it slowly but surely pushes its way through to the modern media. So much of our conversation nowadays is either incredibly small soundbites or limited to the number of characters in a tweet. It’s very difficult to see the nuance of topics fully explored. That’s worked in favour of people on the extreme fringe who’ve used it as an insidious weapon to help convince people to punch down or kick-off.

“They’ve been able to engage very earnestly with people who I believe have been slowly tricked. But across the board, there’s now a kickback against that normalisation of ethnonationalism.”

So, it’s not all gloom and doom.

“I really tried to instil a sense of hope towards the end of this record, to try and unwrap the darker passages that are there and maybe map a pathway out.”

Dublin has been musically documented many times before. Does David have any personal favourites?

“Lethal Dialect’s three LD albums are some of the best portraits of working class existence and resilience ever,” he suggests. “I so wish that Paulie was still making music. I hope he knows that I deify those records.”

If he didn’t, he does now.

A Dublin institution that’s very much on the up at the moment is David’s beloved Shelbourne FC who the night before we meet had beaten Croatian champions Rijeka 2-1 away.

“One more win and we’re guaranteed European group stage football, which is massive,” he beams. “I didn’t know when we set the release date for this record that Shels would be playing the same week in Croatia. I paid my twelve quid for a legitimate stream and it just wouldn’t work. So I found a dodgy one that was bouncing in and out which wasn’t good for the nerves. I did make it up to Windsor Park for the Linfield game which was really enjoyable. There were a few conversations with the lads beforehand going ‘We have to be careful now’ but the vibe was totally fine.”

For Those I Love at Spindizzy on August 8th, 2025. Copyright Abigail Ring/ hotpress.com

The only thing more euphotic than an away Shels victory being the time Balfe spends on stage.

“I’m really looking forward to getting back to the Electric Picnic,” he enthuses. “I played there three years ago and still remember the glow I felt afterwards.”

After conquering EP, David heads out on a lengthy tour which once again embodies his DIY ethic.

“I’m building the actual set that’s going on stage,” he concludes. “I’ve been out there in the back garden terrorising the neighbours with handsaws. I overcommit and dump pressure on myself, but it always comes together in the end!”

Carving The Stone is out now on September Recordings. He plays Electric Picnic and Cyprus Avenue, Cork (October 2); Limelight 2, Belfast (3); Black Box, Galway (5); and 3Olympia, Dublin (6)

Read the full Electric Picnic Special in the current issue of Hot Press: