The Goo 1
JUNE-JULY 2022 When did production begin for Coco
oning Heart? I started at the very start of lockdown. One of my film projects at the time got cancelled and I was really down about that. My partner decided that she would start to draw and weave and knit, I had nothing to do, so I finally decided to learn a new instrument. As soon as I did, I started making songs. My bar is really high in that sense and when I started making my own music, the songs never exceeded that bar. I was a little bit disappointed in myself, I was thinking I didn’t want to release a song if it’s not as good as one of my peers. When I came back to them recently, I was surprised. They are really lovely songs, I have to put them out. I was just so insecure to express myself, it took me two years to get over that. Cocooning Heart speaks of loss and coping, were you trying to emulate this on the record? I certainly was. I don’t think there’s a better way to expel trauma than to speak about it and especially to sing about it, there’s an extra level. I think you can magnify that with emotion, how sad am I, how depressed am I, well let’s find out. If I sing about feeling terrible, I learn a little bit more about myself. The whole thing was a cathartic process for me to realise the feelings that live inside of me. Is creating music like therapy for you? Totally like therapy. I made a film recently about a musician, Liam Weldon who is dead now unfortunately. I focused on his selection process for making music, he needed to believe the lyrics, he chose songs that made him feel better about himself. Another singer called Fergus O’Farrell, he tried to make an album but sadly he passed before it was finished. He was still singing and only stopped after losing his voice, he passed a week later. But it’s those people in my life who had reasons why they were singing, it made me realise, I’m in the full of my health, I have as many reasons to sing as they did. How are you different, as a creative person, now that the album is finished? I needed to create this record in order to gain this new found confidence. I think this album is incredibly vulnerable, it’s like showing people my diary, I wake up with the fear COCOONING HEART - DOOLIN ARTS OUT JUNE 2022 every day. There’s always going to be a troll and when I was in my twenties I would have been more anxious about what they had to say, but now I literally don’t care. This utility to express myself will definitely leak into other aspects of my creativity. It already has started to appear in my other film work, how I choose to portray people or the sound track. Actually my neighbours Eddie and Elsie, they’re 86 and still madly in love, they raised two boys who have long since gone and they’re living on their own like love birds. Eddie leaves her a rose on her pillow in the morning and then sings her a song in the evening. I asked him recently, “what song do you sing her?” and he goes, “Ah well it’s a different one every evening”, so I asked if he would sing for one of my projects and he sang a beautiful Sanatra song. But expressing those vulnerabilities has definitely taught me to be a better filmmaker. There is a presence on this record reminiscent of early Leonard Cohen albums, was he an inspiration for Cocooning Heart? I don’t listen to a lot of Cohen but I was aware that I’m using a baritone voice and it’s soft. There's a romanticism that Leonard and I share, I was very aware of that. This is very much an album about what I know most about, love. The love I have for my wife and how confusing that can be, the soaring heights as well as the rock bottom feeling that can happen. It is a romantic album in the same way that Leonard Cohen would have embraced that romanticism. Can this album be played live? Yes! There’s a live version I have enjoyed playing with a friend of mine out in Doolin, Simon O’Reilly. There’s three pillars to the gigs, the voice, a bed of ambient music, and then a visual style. I hope all of these can combine seamlessly. I hope the live shows will be more of a reward than just listening to the album itself. I hope to bring people closer to the feeling that the album evokes. PAGE 25