Ger Eaton: “For me, the music I’ve created has always been the solace I’ve had, the thing I have to hold onto"

Ger Eaton delivers an album unlike any other in the current Dublin music landscape, evoking as it does the likes of Glen Campbell, Jimmy Webb, Brian Wilson and Paul Giovanni’s Wicker Man soundtrack. It also comes complete with bucolic field recordings, contained in a series of wonderfully pastoral interludes.

It’s a debut record, sure, but Eaton is far from a debutante – the man’s been around and then some. Back in the mid-’80s, his first band Premonition were signed to EMI. Often compared to The Smiths and The Housemartins, they were perhaps more influenced by the mod/soul of The Blades.

Later, Ger formed psychedelic outfit Las Vegas Basement; was a member of Les Marionettes and The Carnival Brothers; and is currently a member of Irish music royalty The Pale. He has recorded and toured extensively with Mundy, Duke Special, Jack L, Pugwash and Fionn Regan, and played everywhere from Glastonbury to Later With Jools Holland – all while usually being the best dressed man in the room.

Ger labels Season Changes as ‘Renaissance Pop’, describing it as “an old-fashioned break-up record that mirrors the seasons, charting the often-inevitable decay of a relationship, from the glowing bloom of its springtime right through to its wintry conclusion.”

“I decided from the off that the lyrics would be raw and honest,”, he adds. “I felt I owed that much to myself. Musically, I wanted the arrangements and instrumentation to bring a lushness and drama that would wrap the words in an appropriate musical cloak. For me, music has always been a place where I can both lose and find myself; a solace and my phoenix.”

It certainly achieves all of the above. Indeed, the detail across the album is wonderfully intricate, right down to the dying seconds, where a Salvation Army-style brass band close the record with not a sample in sight.

“The idea of putting the brass band arrangement at the end came from The Wicker Man,” Ger explains. “So we arranged it, scored it, got the players in, and created that kind of a feel. Everything’s recorded, even the tuba. I got a tuba guy online. He’s the only person I got that wasn’t actually in the room recording, but everything else was done by us.”

The talented posse – Ger’s brother Kieran on flutes and recorders; Ronan Dooney on “an armoury of horn instruments”; multi-instrumentalist Duncan Maitland; and Sean Coleman, a childhood friend of E from Eels – assembled in Sean’s (a fixer of valve equipment for decades) cluttered workshop, to record most of the album. Other parts were done in Duncan’s place and Ger’s own set-up, but he insists that “we never went into a professional studio.”

Doing exactly what it say on the tin (in this case the rather wonderful Josh Fogarty artwork), Season Changes rambles from spring through summer, autumn and winter.

“It’s the course of a relationship,” Ger clarifies. “From the bloom in early days of relationships, when you meet somebody first, everything is magical, and you just want to see them all the time. And everything you do is wonderful, and even the annoying things seem beautiful and amazing. But I suppose when you’ve gone through a long relationship, and it’s broken up and ended, it naturally makes you a little cynical about relationships. You think nothing’s forever.

“I was thinking about how the evolution of a relationship mirrors the seasons. Winter obviously being the death of things. But it’s not a simple acceptance. I think the one song in there that might have a slight level of acceptance is ‘Phoenix (Reborn)’, particularly its last line, ‘My losing run brings me closer to the truth of this Phoenix reborn’.

“For me, the music I’ve created has always been the solace I’ve had, the thing I have to hold onto. That’s why those of us who love music, love music – it’s the mystery of what’s going to come next. You just keep doing it, because it’s what you do.”

• Season Changes is out now.