In Conversation With Adrian Crowley

“I think this one shows a new side of me,” says Adrian Crowley of his eighth studio album Dark Eyed Messenger. “I see it as short stories set to music – and that could’ve taken another form. Each song could have been a book or a film, but I chose them to be songs.”

Since his 1999 debut, A Strange Kind, the Maltese-Irish musician has released a string of critically acclaimed albums – winning the 2009 Choice Music Prize for Season Of The Sparks, and being shortlisted on two other occasions. What they all had in common, aside from his rich and beguiling baritone, was his trademark guitar.

At the suggestion of producer Thomas ‘Doveman’ Bartlett (a Choice winner himself in 2015 as a member of The Gloaming), he recorded Dark Eyed Messenger entirely without that instrument. Instead, most of the songs feature piano, organ or Mellotron, resulting in a minimalist array of dream-like, ethereal sounds. It’s a strange diversion, but it works.

“It’s an idea I’d been considering a while,” the softly spoken 49-year-old explains. “So when Thomas suggested it, he was a little bit nervous, but it actually suited me fine. I was just, ‘Let’s do it!’ I’ve been writing arrangements for another project with Crash Ensemble and it was all hands free, speaking and singing with no guitar, something I got used to doing in a few different formations. With the album, I was more conscious of creating a kind of world for each song, and it didn’t necessarily need to be guitar, so it was a very free process.

All eleven songs were recorded in just four days in Bartlett’s studio on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

“It was great to be in New York making a record. It’s an exciting city anyway, but the studio has got this really amazing ambience, so on the first day everything felt just right. If it had been slow on the first day, who knows what would’ve happened? Maybe the record wouldn’t have been finished the way it was, and I would have had to rebuild it three months later.

“When I listened to the recordings, it conjured up those few days, and that’s one of the beauties of making a record in a short period of time. Personally, I can recall those days when I listen to the album. It’s not like it’s spread out over 12 months, and different seasons.”

Poised to do a six-week writing residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, Crowley will be touring the album in the first months of 2018. As a father of two, he limits his excursions nowadays. “My audience is spread around, so I’m all over the place,” he notes.

“I’ve told my booking agents that I generally want to keep it to two weeks, because of my family. I’m pushing it to three weeks this time to see how that goes. I haven’t toured America in a long time. I did a concert in May in New York, and I’d love to go back and tour, but I’ve been concentrating on Europe the last five years. The music reaches far corners of the planet, and it’s amazing to go somewhere and someone has heard you. In January I’m going to Germany, Holland, Belgium, Spain and Portugal… and possibly Denmark and a show in Paris as well.”

Crowley has other artistic outlets beyond his music. He’s recently been writing scores for filmmaker Niall McCann, and is also into the final stages of a novel with the working title of The Dead Hotel.

“It’s three stories interwoven, and one is the form of a very long song that is echoed in the other two, like a spectral kind of a song. I’ve been working on it a couple of years. It’s tricky to talk about. I haven’t written an end, and it keeps shifting every time I go back to the manuscript. I’ve never written a novel, but it comes from the same place as songwriting. They’re still different creatures, though. I suppose I should finish it soon. I would be delighted to have it in my hand, and have people picking it up at the merch table.”

Dark Eyed Messenger is out now on Chemikal Underground