On the last day of January 2020, against the advice of many people around him, Irish singer and songwriter David Keenan went to Paris. He took with him some clothes, a manual typewriter, a heavy heart and weighed down shoulders. He was, he tells me in the basement refuge of Simon's Café, in bustling George's Street Arcade, on a warm Dublin afternoon, "shook within myself". A few weeks before, Keenan had released his debut album, A Beginner's Guide to Bravery, and while he knew he should have been promoting that, the offer of spartan but comfortable bed and board for the month of February at Centre Culturel Irlandais was too tempting to refuse.
Besides, he needed solitude, and the thoughts of no people, no extraneous noise, no expectations, gave him the willpower to navigate his way through what he terms “a sense of loss, of identity, a comedown from a number of years of things just building, building, building. Paris consisted of me staying in that room a lot of the time. I did some exploring and out of the solitude, the anxiety and the clarity, came most of the songs for the new album.”
Keenan is talking about What Then?, a collection of 11 songs that burst at the seams with characteristic colour and detail. Mostly forged in the chill of Paris but informed by Keenan’s worldview, family background, internal monologues and, perhaps most importantly, his vulnerabilities, the songs highlight turmoil as much as explorative self-awareness. A pivotal point occurred in mid-January 2020, at his debut album launch show at Dublin’s (then-named) Olympia Theatre. His “building, building, building” comment refers to the pressures of staging a show in three parts, and he fretting about how the backstage knitting of various theatrics and props might affect his onstage performance. “I remember looking out into the audience at that gig and seeing someone in the crowd dressed like me, and that was the moment when I said to myself that whatever this is, it’s the end.” That gig, he adds, “was a culmination, a bookend. So then you embrace something new and a fear comes with that as well as a knowing, because I didn’t want to make A Beginner’s Guide to Bravery Pt 2.”
Walking on streets in Dublin, Dundalk and Kilkenny, I'd pick up on the hysteria but in Spain I couldn't understand a word, so I felt more peaceful there
He returned to Ireland in March of last year, just as everything came tumbling down around his curly locks. Along with a bag of unwashed clothes and the manual typewriter (on which he had written the bones of a poetry book, Soundings of an Unnamed Bird, published by Inisciuin Press, and which he describes as “a sparring partner to carry round”), Keenan had shadows following him, poking him, annoying him. His first port of call was his hometown of Dundalk. He then stayed in Kilkenny for a short while, but soon realised Ireland couldn’t give him what he wanted at this particular time of his life. And so he upped sticks altogether and travelled to Sitges, which in the 1960s was mainland Spain’s countercultural hub. “Spain was a rehabilitation,” he says, smiling broadly at the memory, “colour came into my life for the first time”. Not only that, but while in Sitges there was no intrusive Covid chatter. “Walking on streets in Dublin, Dundalk and Kilkenny, I’d pick up on the hysteria but in Spain I couldn’t understand a word, so I felt more peaceful there.”
Asking why he couldn’t settle in the midst of a pandemic seems trite (after all, who wasn’t unsettled throughout most of 2020?), but he says he just wasn’t satisfied with the tenuous grasp on who he was. Allied to this was the sudden death last year of a close friend, a musician who had played in his band. “I needed to get away from Ireland. I wanted to do something lyrically different. I had a point to prove to myself – that I could do it, that I could dissect different areas of myself.”
Keenan pithily synopsises some of the songs on the new album, eager to explain how cathartic an experience it was for him to write such vivid material. The almost title track, What Then? Cried Jo Soap, is about “trying to stay on the beam, finding balance in your life”. Beggar to Beggar, written in Liverpool when he was 18, is a bouncing folk/pop song steeped in “memory, reminiscence, innocence”. Philomena, with its cinematic lyrics of “Surreptitiously, I read fear upon the face of the coward in the corner, who would sell you for buttons in a heartbeat” is about Keenan’s grandmother (to whom his poetry book is dedicated). It is, he says, “me coming home to that maternal embrace, looking for that”. Another track, Me, Myself and Lunacy (once a mooted title for the new album) is an entreaty for “self-acceptance”
I get to play music for a living, I have a place in Dublin that I like to keep half-liveable with my girlfriend, and that makes me happy
Keenan wears his heart and soul on his sleeve; because of this he is open to scorn and cynicism from people that don’t get him or his music and utmost admiration from those that do. The nub of his character, we reckon, is free-spirited but rooted in deeply personal, forthright truths, while his music is akin to flights of fancy anchored, for the most part, by tight arrangements. In other words, he isn’t for everyone, but what the past 18 months has taught him is that he, himself and sanity are the most important things to look out for.
“I have gone about fulfilling my life beyond music, looking after myself better, physically, mentally, holistically,” he affirms. A part of that, he adds, is down to self-preservation, which includes distancing himself from “acclaim and validation from outside sources. I get to play music for a living, I have a place in Dublin that I like to keep half-liveable with my girlfriend, and that makes me happy. I have a good relationship with my family, and that makes me happy. Walking around Dublin makes me happy. There was a time in the past where other things would also have made me happy, but that was all fear-based ego. I’m just more settled in myself this time around. Maybe it’s experience, maybe it’s the loss of somebody close to me.”
He has an abundance of new material, he admits, but right now he is more looking forward to playing songs from his two albums “in a room full of people. That will be the real test because the world these songs exist in, what they represent, is a very engaging one.” He is back on terra firma, he enthuses, living again in some shape or structure of a zone. He senses that his life is going to change again with the new album – not in the context of stardom, which, he emphasises, is a toxic concept, “but in terms of where I’m going to live next. I don’t tend to stay in one place for too long”.
Here we go again? “It’s a calling, and I think, on analysis, that travels informs my writing. The last four or five years have been me in one place for a few months, gathering my acorns and then heading off to hibernate somewhere else. The environment informs what I’m doing, so I’m excited to see what’s next.”
It’s not escaping, he clarifies, it’s just exploring. “Wherever you go, you gotta bring yourself with you, right?”
What Then? is on release through Rubyworks Records. David Keenan tours Ireland in December, playing at Cyprus Avenue, Cork (December 6th); Dolans, Limerick (December 8th); Roisín Dubh, Galway (December 9th); Spirit Store, Dundalk, Co Louth (December 10th); and 3Olympia, Dublin (December 12th).
Teenage years: 'A little victory here and there'
"There was nothing I liked about myself when I was a teenager. I didn't feel that I ever belonged in the world. I lived in fear, anxiety, I walked on eggshells. The only place I ever felt any empowerment was in a song – it gave me the imagining of the life I liked to live, trying to get a little victory here and there. Things like an open mic, a new song, a new book, somebody or something to make me understand. You can hear that a lot in the early songs. I'm sending out sonar blips to people who might be on a similar wavelength: is anyone out there, is there any evidence of living in this town, does anyone understand? I was always trying to find self-acceptance. It's an ongoing process, but I trust myself more with myself these days."
