More about: David Keenan

Honouring the poetry that goes into songwriting, Close Reading is a series of intimate conversations about all the books, films and thoughts behind some of your favourite songs. Diving into the lyrics and picking apart the lines that make you want to sing along a little louder, Lucy Harbron is sitting down with some of the most exciting songwriters around to hold a magnifying glass up to the lyrical form.

Inspired and informed by the Irish greats, David Keenan’s work merges common life with moments of myth and magic. Recently wandering further afield to Barcelona, his upcoming second album What Then? is coloured differently, full of bright hues and moments of spiralling surrealism as he creates a painting from words. Swaying between deep introspection and grandiose people watching, the album comes with a cast of characters that David is still only figuring out. Talking about saints, surrealism and siestas, David and Lucy dove in...

To start, do you want to tell me the origin story of the new record…

I think I should start with the first song – ‘What Then? Cried Jo Soap’. It starts with an inhalation of air and I think it’s only with the gift of perspective that I can get a bird’s eye view on what am I actually saying here. It’s the first song on the record because initially I thought Jo Soap was this androgynous entity that was going to narrate the whole record for me, taking me on a trip through dreamscapes and I would be led as a bystander.

But as it went on, I realised Jo Soap is Jo Soap because I didn’t really have an identity after the first album as I overtook who I thought I was, or I was behind, or something happened that caused a shift. I didn’t know who I was anymore so now I think ‘What Then? Cried Jo Soap’ is me saying who am I? What drives me? What repels me? What do I need to face instead of myself? And then as a collective, Joe Soap is a term for the public, so I’m asking who are we now being faced with the great trauma of the last 18 months. It’s layered but when you get down into it, I’m facing my shadows in this song, in and amongst the anxiety. It’s existentialist. It’s me questioning everything that I believed up to that point, and I think that inhalation is me preparing myself to go deep down into my subconscious and get digging in the light and the darkness. 

Immediately when I listened I was struck by how abstract some of the parts of this record are compared to your last album. One reference that stood out was when you talk about Francis Bacon, as his work include some really dark abstract surrealism. It seems like for so many artists, abstraction is a kind of guard when they don’t know how to talk about something.

Yeah, there comes a point where language just doesn’t do it for you anymore. Painters have influenced me in how I write and Bacon’s insight on his approach helped me put words to these compulsions I have when I sit down to write, the words are the paint. The juxtaposition between this and the last record was that I wanted to shift my approach altogether, and like Bacon, he said he wasn’t trying to illustrate the world but to condense reality; condense experience. It’s ecstatic truth like the German director Werner Herzog says. And the way I relate to it on this record is that you elaborate on fact to reach a deeper form of truth and meaning.

On your website you’re building a gallery for the album. Has visual inspiration always been a massive thing for you or have you been leaning into it more recently?

I think certainly in the last two years. It’s like listening to classical music or jazz; the words get in the way some times as words are just conveying emotions while music or a painting can talk without that. On my travels I seem to make a bee-line for galleries, even reading the descriptions of the paintings is so illuminating, it’s as exciting sometimes as the painting itself. I’m a compulsive note taker so I’ve got all these scraps I’ve hoarded from galleries, then you come back and figure out what they’re saying. 

I’m the same. Over lockdown my friends swapped art as a way to stay inspired by giving each other fresh prompts. Not being able to go out and seek inspiration, writers are so lucky to have those notepads of prior inspiration to mix up together, I guess it’s no wonder you ended up with such a surreal and visual record working from all these different bits from different sources.

That was actually the catalyst of the art collaboration with 11 different artists from around the world. I was just really intrigued in seeing what each individual’s interpretation of the song would be, giving them complete freedom to react in any way. So in the end, I have my own interpretation of the songs but you become informed by these total strangers, teaching me something about the record. 

You say you’re constantly gathering inspiration, but are there any really key writers or artists or films that you return to when you need failsafe, guaranteed inspiration.

You know what’s just screaming in my head – Father Ted. I mean, you’re talking about a feeling and when I’m traveling, Father Ted is comforting to me. There’s two voices in my head, one’s going Orson Welles’ The Other Side Of The Wind, which really inspired me with the way it distorts time. I wanted to achieve that on this record, where time doesn’t exist, it’s rhizomatic where you can listen to it from any point. But being a constant note taker, it’s exhausting and I have to try really hard to turn it off, but Father Ted provides that, it gives me a laugh and laughter is important.

Even that makes so much sense as you mix images of daily life and day-to-day voices with really grand religious and mythologised references. It’s almost like you’re sat in a café spying on someone, imagining their life but on the grandest scale.

You can see that in people, you know, people have been the same we just wear different clothes. But seeing a mannerism in someone can trigger a thought or something I’ve seen. There’s a character on this record, ‘Grogan’s Druid’ – Grogan’s is a bar in Dublin and there’s guy I used to see at the bar and he looked like an old Christ but he wore Dunlop runners which I thought was beautiful. You talk about the balancing act between grandiose references and grinding it down in the ordinary, so you have this Christ-like guy in a Dublin bar wearing Dunlop Runners and a white T-shirt. I like to give a paradox, you can dress someone up a certain way and they can just be empty of full of shite, but it’s about recognising the beauty and the magnificence of people when you notice it. 

Talking about grander references, my favourite track on the album, ‘Philomena’, has connotations of sainthood with the name. Was that your thought there?

Philomena was my grandmother. This song is the heartbeat of the whole album, it’s the pulse of it all. ‘Philomena’ is the safe zone that you wander away from but you can come back and you’re safe there. It’s the return of compassion on the album, starting with me waking up and coming to with the realisation that this is not where I want to be and wandering off, looking for my grandmother to tell me a story. It’s very childlike but it’s me feeling lost and alone, wanting to come home to myself, longing for that embrace from my Grandmother and to go back to the council estate of my childhood. I’ve realised that memory is an elaboration, it’s changing all the time, but here I’m looking for innocence, this song is a coming home.  

Musically, I think it’s a transcendence and recording it helped me transcend a lot of pain as I met my grandmother in the recording studio again and she gave me permission to heal. This record was work, you have to have a lot of walls and traumas, and then you have to carry it all, becoming the mouthpiece for all these emotions and characters you’re harbouring until you release them. Musically at the end of Philomena you can hear it, this rising up. My grandma wrote poetry but she destroyed all her notepads in the '60s. Maybe this song is me wishing she could’ve been seen in the way I am, so it’s letting us be seen together. There’s a lot of healing in the song.

It’s interesting that you say about the childish nature of it, as Philomena is the saint of infancy…

I didn’t know that!  She used to sing me to sleep with a nursey rhyme – ‘mama will you buy me a, buy me a, buy me a, mama will you buy me a, buy me a banana’ – which is in the song. So yeah, I feel that. Saint Philomena. I didn’t know that, I’m not really up to date on my saints, despite being a recovering Catholic. 

Obviously there’s loads of Irish references in your work from iconic literature to dialects, how do you feel about your heritage and is it super important for you to have it in there or does it slip in naturally?

I think it’s changed. I lived in Barcelona for a year and I got a bit of distance from Ireland and got to look at it from afar for the first time really. My grandfather said to me as a kid to always sing in my own accent, and maybe I wasn’t even conscious of that but your childhood and your adolescence are what you are, and always will be. When I moved to Dublin in my early '20s, I was fascinated by how close I felt to all these ghosts I was reading like Behan and Joyce and Beckett and Yeats and all that. I think it’s a very natural thing, if you aren’t Irish you can probably hear it more than I can, but it’s important to me.

What is it to be Irish? It’s always changing but there’s a real graw, you know a real love for the fact that I am Irish. There’s a lot about Ireland that makes me very angry, past and present, but there’s a lot of love and giddiness, it’s what I am. 

It seems like you did a lot of the creative side of the album out in Barcelona. Is there anything you got from relocating that was really vital or you know you wouldn’t have done if you were still in Ireland?

I think I got a lot of colour from Barcelona. The colours and the environment and constant heat, it’s just different. You’re waking up to a different sky, different colours, a different language. I don’t speak Spanish very well so I could just walk around taking in so much less, but I didn’t feel less impacted by the place in terms of inspiration, seeking out Picasso and the music. I wrote and recorded the album in Ireland and then went to Barcelona as a blank canvas again, but less anxiety-ridden. By the end of it, the question ‘what then?’ becomes less perplexed and more assured, a statement of intention. Moving to Spain helped me just park it and move on, embrace the colours and the environment and take it in.

It’s interesting because it seems like a lot of artists moved to Spain in less anxious parts of their lives, Francis Bacon saw out the end of his life there. 

I went there for love, but I ended up finding a lot of self-love as well. The landscape along the coast looks like honeycomb, you get into the sea and you can see schools of fish - you know, I wouldn’t mind dying there myself. I also find the siesta does something to the psyche of a people: they’re less uptight.

Your back catalogue is one I reach for when I need inspiration. You seem to have this incredible backlog of references and knowledge that you pull on. So I wondered if you had any inspiration for writers or artists on how they can start building their own mental library?

I was asked this question a few years ago and I think I said something like study the greats but, fucking hell! What really helps me is stepping away from what you think is your main thing, don’t have these constructs in your head of what you think will be inspiration. You know, me sat looking at skateboarders, or at a painting, or even just making a mess – it’s all inspiration and the inner child has to feel comfortable enough to free roam.

When I was younger I used to think you’d sit down and light a candle and the muses would come. But the muses are inside you, it’s in doing the work that they come out and start playing. There’s some great music out there, there’s some amazing art: go to galleries, listen to jazz. There’s so much there, get out and fucking seek it out while trusting it’s still something there inside you.

David Keenan Recommends...

To Watch - Samuel Beckett – Krapp’s Last Tape / Father Ted

"That character was inspirational. People should just see it. But don’t forget Father Ted, can’t recommend it strongly enough. It’s medicine."

To Read - At Swim-Two-Birds - Flann O'Brien

"It’s a story about a book within a book and the characters come alive and time is blurred. I went back to it at the start of all this and thought he’s onto something there."

What Then? arrives 20 August.

More about: David Keenan