It’s a routine that any commuter would recognise. For three years Daniel Anderson would rise, leave his home in Dublin and catch the train to Leixlip. Most days, he’d spend eight or so hours at work before leaving, catching the train home and preparing to do it all again the next day.
Anderson smiles at the thought of the singer-songwriter as commuter.
“The difference is there’s no pay packet at the end of the week,” he says. “There’s no obvious evidence of the work because most of the time, I’m staring at the wall working on lines and getting frustrated and bringing that frustration home with me.”
Still, those weeks and months in a studio Anderson built himself at the end of his uncle's back garden in Leixlip produced a better reward than any weekly paycheque. His debut solo album, Patterns, is a work of grand beauty.
It's not his first run out. He used to front The Rags, the Dublin band whose A National Light, an album of dark, resonant songs, was overlooked in 2010.
“It’s very hard for me to say this because I was in the thick of it, but I felt it was a really strong album,” says Anderson. “It was a good representation of that band and how we saw the city at that time. I was trying to capture what was happening in my life and moving from Finglas into town and my encounters with scenesters and becoming more culturally aware.
“Finglas can be a little insular and boxed off, and people have their way of thinking and that’s that. In town, I was coming across people who dressed differently, talked differently and had different aspirations. And I was excited about that. But that also came with a little scepticism because I was questioning the environment I was in as well as enjoying it, and that’s where that album came from.”
By the time the album came out, The Rags were no longer together as a band. “The Rags were very angsty and misguided in loads of ways,” says Anderson. “We were a serious outfit, maybe over-serious. We were very serious about making music and we didn’t feel we needed to interact with people.”
But Anderson still had a desire to shape songs and write lyrics. “Music is much more potent when a lyric hits you on top of the music. I don’t find it easy – it’s difficult for me to do. I honed the lyrics for ages on the new album.”
Growing doubts
Over the three years it took to get Patterns out, doubts began to surface about what he was doing.
“You realise your fiancee is watching you and your parents are looking at you and all around you in the air all the time is this moisture of failure. You’re walking with your fiancee and she’s getting on with her life and questions of marriage and children and houses start to come up and you start to shrink a little.
“After I finished the album, I was thinking back about this. You’re a failure until you realise that whatever it is you have inside of you can get out. I think everyone who wants to achieve art is deluded until it leaves their mind and goes to that environment you’ve been forcing against for all that time. You’re deluded until you can crack the code.
“I felt deluded until I could give someone the album and go ‘look, listen to this, this is everything I wanted to get out for the last three years’. This could go nowhere, but you can’t take away the fact that it is a body of work. It’s been a difficult three years, and I might explore something else now, but I needed to do this.”
Many times during the three years he felt low and uninspired. “My tendency when I’m writing is to say ‘you’re shite’. I have this thing in my head that it’s not good enough, and it would be self-abasement all the time, like ‘you’re not good enough’. I think you get the best out of yourself by expecting more. It’s the desire to want more than something that is just mediocre.”
Encouragement came from some unusual sources. Anderson mentions a counsellor and sports psychologist he met who mentored him on a back-to-work scheme.
“He was the first person who got it. He said ‘You don’t need to justify what you’re doing to me, just keep focused on what you’re doing’. He kept pushing me and encouraging me and talking me out of negative tendencies.”
Music helped. The Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society, Randy Newman's Sail Away ("the complexity of his melodies and lyrics"), Dory Previn, Vampire Weekend's Modern Vampires of the City, and Arctic Monkeys ("they've held on to their air of indifference to fame") were among those soundtracking Anderson's journey to Patterns.
Music, he says, never lets you down. "Look at Sam Cooke's A Change Is Gonna Come. I've heard that so often, but recently, I heard it and it felt like someone had belted me across the head and gone 'wake up'. I got it, I got it again."
Puzzled out
Anderson’s self-belief also saw him through. He talks about one particular guitar part, “the last piece of the puzzle”, which was eluding him. He’d gotten the deaf ear from any guitarist he approached to help, so he decided to do it himself.
For two months, he’d learn scales at home at night before coming back to the studio the next morning. One day, he cracked it.
“I sat back afterwards and went ‘I can do whatever the fuck I want to, I can fly a fucking plane now’. The ingredient that has to be there is a want and a desire to do it. Anyone can do it.
“I might not be the best guitarist or vocalist or lyricist, but if I apply myself and invest enough of myself with honesty and conviction, I can be up there with people who are.”
- Patterns is out now. Daniel Anderson plays Dublin's Unitarian Church on Friday, October 16th. For more, see andersonsongs.com
