Hard Station
(38/100 Greatest Irish Albums)

If there was one album that convinced Bob Dylan to include Paul Brady in the club of “secret heroes” he listed in the liner notes of Biograph— and let’s not forget the only other members of this somewhat exclusive coterie were Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen— then it was 1981’s Hard Station. Astonishing as the album is, it becomes more so when you consider that it was a debut of sorts, the first big move away from singing traditional songs that Brady had made. Fron ‘Crazy Dreams’, through the title track to the magnificent ‘Nothing But The Same Old Story’, Hard Station is replete with dense, moving, often excoriating songwriting. The irony that within a generation the shoe would be on the other foot, with the once-victimized Irish now having “hatred and fear in their eyes”, will not have been lost on Paul Brady.