Myles O’Reilly recently had a Road to Damascus epiphany. In this Pauline conversion, Damascus is Dingle, and the voice of God is a near fatal car crash.
“After the first record [Starlight Drive] the band decided to take a break and I fell in love with a girl down in Kerry,” he says. “I drove down late one night and crashed. It was a convertible car and it rolled three times. I shouldn’t have lived really... I shouldn’t have lived at all. It really made me think. I started to talk to people at face value a lot more and started to make friends a lot more and realised that small town people, once you’re open with them and share things with them, they give it back to you with just as much ease. And I started realising things about why life is important, and it changed my songwriting.”
Juno Falls were originally a three-piece sprung from the ashes of energetic Dublin rockers Blotooth, but as the years progressed Myles’s band-mates went elsewhere. “Dara [Diffily, bass player] joined the guards, which was a bit of a fork in the road. Now Juno Falls is me and whoever I have in the studio with me. It was liberating for me to find a new path, otherwise I could have grown old as a rocker.”
One thing is clear, Myles just isn’t interested in making cool music for people with asymmetrical hair and cooler-than-thou record collections.
“I want to create something universal and share this music with everyone," he says. "It’s a soother for going somewhere better or deeper and I'd love to have some daytime airplay so that people could pick it up.”
He was helped to achieve that universality for his new album, Weightless, by seasoned producer and Autamata boffin Ken McHugh.
“I had a whole lot of singer-songwriter demos and brought them to Ken," he says, "and we went at them with this studio full of ’70s instruments. He collects a load of stuff on eBay and there wasn’t one instrument we didn’t use. He really is a standard above any other producer we have in this country. You know when you’re a kid dreaming about being a musician and recording your songs? Well that’s what I had with Ken.”
Myles was chosen to support Travis on a recent British tour. He got the gig by making Fran Healy cry.
“One day I saw a dog with Fran’s head on it as a profile picture on MySpace, and I thought, hold on, this might be the real Fran Healy... and it was him. We started sending messages back and forth. Then I put up a song called ‘The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off’ and he contacted me to say he’d listened to it five times and was in tears and would I go on tour with him.”
At this point Myles discovered some cons of being signed to a record label.
“The record company (V2) didn’t want me to do it,” he explains. “They didn’t want to put any money behind it. So I did it out of my own pocket and it was great. I learned how to perform in front of big audiences and how not to be nervous in front of big audiences. I’m very shy and don’t have a lot of ego and needed to build all that up.”
As things stand V2 is currently undergoing a corporate shakeup. Myles doesn’t know if there’ll be a place for him when it’s all over, but he doesn’t sound too worried.
“There’s nothing I’ve done so far that I haven’t done on my own,” he avers. “All UK plans are off for me right now and in some ways it’s a shame, but I’m not that in love with the English industry to be honest. The bands have no empathy for each other. No getting together. No Gigsmart kind of thing. No community. No connection.”
And when you’re trying to make the big universal music you need to make a connection.