Hot Press meets The Chapters

“What is Americana, really?” muses Ross McNally, frontman of Dublin outfit The Chapters. “It’s pretty broad. I think that any sort of music that comes from America is gonna be labelled ‘Americana’.”

The amiable thirty-something musician isn’t disputing the term, which Hot Press has just applied to The Chapters’ superb second album, Blood Feels Warm; more that he hadn’t really thought all that deeply about categorising their sound. “This is a completely different sounding album to the last one,” he says. “For me anyway, this new album sounds like the stuff I like to listen to myself. The last one was kind of almost deliberately written to try and get on the radio and stuff, so it wasn’t really close to my heart at all. I’m glad that’s over.”
Although The Chapters first formed a decade ago, they only released their debut in 2009. While Perfect Stranger was well-received, McNally now says that their then record company, 3U, had too much influence on their sound. They’ve subsequently lost two members and been dropped by the label.
“Everything has changed,” he declares. “Everything about the last album was very deliberate. Even on stage, we had stylists and all that kind of nonsense. 3U were very much a rock/pop kind of label so this album is very much the antithesis of that, where we basically do whatever we want. And that goes for when we play live or even when we rehearse; people don’t play the same things again the second time. It’s quite loose and organic, and we pull and push things in different directions. It keeps things a lot more interesting for everyone involved. We’re freer.”
Things are so different that they actually considered changing their name. “We left it so long to follow up with a new album, and we’re playing a different way and in different kinds of venues. So it does feel like we’re starting again. Some people were telling us that we should change our name, but a couple of the guys were adamant that we should keep it, so we decided to hold onto it. Like, the first album happened.”
Co-produced with Joe McGrath, and financed through a successful fund:it campaign, Blood Feels Warm was recorded with the help of many musician friends over 18 months between Windmill Lane, the Hellfire Studios and a couple of home recording facilities. Having added pedal steel, accordion, harps and strings to their sound, the vibe is mostly mellow and easy-going.
“A lot of it was written in Ciaran our drummer’s kitchen. Just sitting around with acoustic instruments. A couple of songs are from the last album that we kind of reinvented. Songs that I’d written that just wouldn’t have worked with the last incarnation of the band, really. So it’s a little bit of both. And then they all developed in the studio with different people coming in.
“Niall [Lawlor] started coming in around that period and took it in a different direction with his pedal steel. It was built up over a very long period of time, like a painting almost, with all these different people coming in and adding their little bits. In a way, it was great that we weren’t doing it in a compact amount of time.”
He also had a little bit of family assistance. “My dad actually plays accordion on the album,” he laughs. “That’s a big part of my background as well. His record collection and going to see him play for donkey’s years with various roots groups. He’s actually just back from New Orleans. It’s definitely in the blood.”
Of the songs, he says, “I guess they’re about real life. Songs about having kids, people getting married, people from the last band moving on, life moving on. Stuff like that. Just living. It’s a pretty honest album, I think, just about things that happen in life.”
They may have lost two original members, but there’s still not much room on the stage when The Chapters play live. “The other night when we launched the album we had 10 people up there, but it’s normally six of us. We added a little string section and brass section for the occasion.”
The Chapters will be embarking on a short Irish tour to promote Blood Feels Warm but, with no record company calling the shots, they’ll be picking and choosing their shows this time around.
“For the last album, we pretty much gigged three or four times a week nonstop for two years and nearly killed ourselves,” McNally sighs. “Playing music that you’re not particularly into, or not that passionate about, kind of knocks the stuffing out of you. We had plenty of money to pay back to the record company so we were doing gigs we didn’t particularly want to do. So now we’re not gonna kill ourselves, we’re just gonna go out and do gigs that we want to do.”