Strum as you are

Adrian Crowley may not be one of Ireland’s bestselling singer-songwriters, but he’s definitely one of the most respected. Although he’s recorded albums with Steve Albini, been name-checked in Rolling Stone as one of Ryan Adams’ favourite artists, and won the Choice Music Prize in 2009, he’s really only become aware of his enviable reputation in recent times.

“Whenever I hear that someone I admire knows of me, and knows what I do, that’s always a great feeling,” the softly spoken 44-year-old admits, with a slightly embarrassed shrug. “You meet a lot of people in music, but there are certain people that you hold in particularly high regard that you may never expect to meet or for them to have heard of you. When you do meet them, or hear back from someone who knows them, and it transpires that they know everything you’ve been doing for the last ten years, it’s always amazing. That happens to me all the time now, though I only really started discovering it in the last year.”
We’re meeting downstairs in the Dawson Lounge (Dublin’s smallest pub) to discuss his just-released sixth studio album, I See Three Birds Flying, over a quiet drink (“this is the first daytime pint I’ve had in months!”). A deeply contemplative, gently evocative and highly literate affair, with some gorgeous strings underpinning his sonorous vocals, it has already earned him some of the best reviews of his career.
Born in Malta but raised in the West of Ireland, Crowley came to music relatively late in life. He only began playing publicly in his late twenties, and he was 30 when he released his debut album (1999’s A Strange Kind). It’s possibly because of this that the creative process remains fresh and exciting to him, and something he’s still
figuring out.
“In a way I wanted to forget everything that I’d made before and approach this album like it was my first record,” he says. “Subconsciously there are things that are growing creatively within you all the time, but you still have your own style. Even if you’re trying something new, you’re trying it in your way. So I suppose, despite myself, I’ve been developing something and it made its mark on the record I’ve just created, even though I felt I was in new territory.”
While it doesn’t herald any noticeable change of musical style or direction, at least not to a casual listener, to Crowley’s ears there are still some incremental steps forward.
“I was tempted to rock it up and go a completely different direction from the previous record. I even entertained that idea for a few weeks. In
the end you have to go with what you feel is
really you.
And it can be helpful, I think sometimes, when you sort of come around to it by contrast from trying something else, and then it’s starkly obvious what you’re supposed to be doing. I wasn’t questioning anything. I just realised that whatever I had to do was asking to be done.”
Although likeably modest and possessed of a wry, self-deprecating sense of humour, he takes the art of songwriting seriously. I See Three Birds Flying is testament to that. A deep, thoughtful and multilayered collection, not a single song sounds like it was casually knocked out in the studio.
“In my mind it was a totally different landscape from the other albums,” he says. “At the very start, I imagined the whole location of the record to be in a city. It turned into a combination of places that I’d lived in and people that I knew. Some of them are still around, some aren’t. Flashes of things that happened literally, and flashes of fiction, and everything mashed together in some kind of way that feels like it’s me. Imagining internal dialogue and actual memories of things, past and future and present all interchanged. It’s just a very exciting way for me to explore in writing. The thing that needs to be there is a story. That basic function of something being relayed to you. And they felt like different stories to what I’d worked on before.”
When he’s not recording, Crowley spends much of his time touring around Ireland, the UK and mainland Europe (it’s been a few years since his last US tour, though he plans on returning soon). As the father of a two-year-old daughter, does he find it difficult being away from home so often?
“The morning of departure is always quite difficult, though I’d say it’s more difficult for me than anyone else,” he smiles. “Especially when you’re travelling by yourself, you tend to ponder on things a bit longer. But once I’m in motion, once I get out of the taxi and onto the plane, then everything kicks in and I get efficient I suppose.”
As we speak, he’s just returned from a ten-date solo tour of Europe.
“I actually managed to see some of the cities I was in this time. Some of them I didn’t. Like Antwerp; I arrived in the evening in Centraal Station and there was somebody there to meet me and take me to where I was playing, which was just around the corner. So I played the gig and the next morning I went back to the station to board a train to Brussels. I usually try to take photographs or make little video clips of wherever I go. But in Antwerp, I just had one street and
one facade.”
Do he road-test new material when he’s touring?
“Some of them I do, but I usually try to treat the two worlds differently. There’s some overlap. The virtual reality of a recording is quite different from the actual performance side of things. It’s kind of nice to lose yourself in the recording process and explore things that you can’t do in any other circumstance. But when the time comes to play them in front of people, it’s almost like you reinterpret them for that situation. That keeps it living, like a spark that reignites in a different way. I find the whole process exciting and mysterious.”
While he has other creative outlets –he published a short story last year in the Sunday Miscellany anthology and is a trained, if inexperienced, actor – most of his time and energy is consumed by music. In a first for him, he recently scored the soundtrack to Irish director Paul Farren’s forthcoming feature, Where The Sea Used To Be.
“The storyline is really sweet and simple. It’s about two brothers who’ve been kind of estranged. So they come together at Christmas and the film is like one day in their life story, and it’s just a journey on foot across the city to Howth. But you’re never told it’s Dublin or Howth. It’s really beautiful and you’re always conscious of the proximity to the sea. You can hear the seagulls and see some beautiful vistas.”
He wrote the music under a tight deadline.
“They came to me very late with a rough cut of the movie. There was a deadline because it had just been accepted into a festival, but the music wasn’t in place yet. They had some friend who’d been working on it, and for some reason he wasn’t able to finish it. So they realised they needed a fresh approach.
“They gave me five days. I went home up to my attic and played the film over and over again, and started playing music along to it. I really loved the experience. I knew that if I didn’t start off in the right way then I wouldn’t be able to do it because there wasn’t enough time. So I just searched and searched for the right approach and feel. There was so much to explore. I latched onto certain things and the whole thing came together. What I came up with doesn’t necessarily sound like any of my records. Maybe you might recognise a few things, but there were things I did for the first time for that soundtrack.”
Crowley comes across like an artist who’s fairly happy in his own skin. He’s producing work that he’s obviously proud of, and says he feels privileged that he can make a living recording and touring his songs and music. While he definitely wouldn’t object to being more commercially successful, stardom isn’t the ambition.
“Stardom?” he laughs. “It’s hard to know what that means, even. I think it’s good to shine in some way and have some kind of feeling that whatever light you have can be seen somewhere far off. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in your face though. As long as it’s got integrity and is something lasting. That’s what would make me happy. That’s what does make me happy.”

I See Three Birds Flying is out now on Chemikal Underground.