The Goo 1
JOHN BRERETON Interview FEB-MAR 24 Driven Snow ar
e Emily and Kieran. Emily was in Republic Of Loose and Kieran is still in Delorentos. They are married. They have kids. And now they have a band. Together. It’s the togetherness that shines through on every note over their gorgeous debut album, A Kind Of Dreaming. The music is gentle, loving and comforting while the lyrics are, in the main, love letters to each other or lost friends, regaled in a direct honesty that only cast iron relationships can weather. We zoomed in for a chat with the duo ahead of the release of the album in February. This album is definitely a lockdown ‘baby’ but your creative circumstances were different than most other bands. Kieran: I think people are sick and tired of talking about the lockdown at this point now but basically what happened for us was that Delorentos stopped. We always sang to our kids at bedtime but with all this time on our hands we thought that it would be really cool to do some recording of some cool versions of nursery rhymes or making great songs into nursery rhyme versions. So we did a couple of demos and we were delighted with those, they were very quirky and kind of interesting. And then we played them to some friends and they loved them and wondered why we didn't do our own songs in this style. So we wrote 5 songs and went up to our mate Tommy McLaughlin’s Attica Studio in Donegal with the kids and my parents and recorded them. We went back up every 6 months or so and laid down another few until we got to the finished point. It’s been a slow process but it’s worked out perfectly for us. It’s a chilled out album, was the recording process similar? It's been really easy and lovely and enjoyable. Recording with Delorentos is totally different, everyone works hard and is totally focused on every aspect of the recording and the instrumentation but this felt really natural and casual. Emily is a really good arranger and cuts to the chase immediately. That alone is really freeing for me. The first couple of songs were very much “here's my songs Emily, what do you think?” By the second batch of songs Emily was writing choruses and changing lyrics. One particular song I was struggling to finish was ‘Tonight They’ll Find Me Lost’. Emily had just lost a very close friend of her own age to cancer so one day she went into our recording room, spent a few hours working on it, rewrote it lyrically and melodically as an emotional tribute to her friend and that was it, done. We really kind of started to get a rhythm and the album turned out great. It never felt like a chore, which is just lovely. I loved the straightforwardness of the lyrics. Emily: I tend to steer away from things being a little bit too cliched. I love poetry and I read poetry all the time (I'm an English teacher) but I do feel sometimes if you are putting in metaphors or figurative language for the sake of it, it can be a little bit formulaic and then it just doesn't sound genuine. You do have to have a certain amount of poetic quality to your lyrics in order for them not to sound too jarring, but I think there's something about the fact that we're writing DRIVEN SNOW about stuff that is really just for us, that it comes across as more conversational or more raw. You’ve played a few gigs but are ramping it up now with the release of the album. Will those conversational traits transcribe to your live show? K: I think there's something really grounding about being in a band with your wife or playing gigs with your wife because you're going to be the most yourself you can be and it has been really interesting playing shows because we're both the most ourselves that we can be and again, that's just been freeing and easy. It's actually the most nakedly honest and direct we've ever been as performers. We started doing Instagram live, playing songs and having the chats, and it’s really worked well for us, really good viewing figures and people have liked that format and our chemistry and have become firm fans. As well as our own gigs we will be performing our live set as part of Bressie’s Podcast tour throughout Leinster in theatres so we’ll be wearing suits, suspenders and nice shoes for those gigs which will be fun. Driven Snow's album A Kind Of Dreaming is out now. PAGE 31