The Road Less travelled

"We could drive forever/ Listening to these half-remembered songs/ There's a light behind the dial/ The road stretches on."
The Revenants, 'Aldebaran'.

"Come on, wheels, take this boy away."
The Flying Burrito Bros, 'Wheels.'

A glorious, lazy Sunday evening. Spectacular, almost supernatural sunbeams transfix Howth Head, Ireland s Eye and Lambay Island. We are high up in the Dublin mountains, driving. Behind the wheel is Stephen Ryan, singer, songwriter and guitarist with The Revenants, whose new album Septober Nowonder has at long last also seen the light of day. Our drive is both aimless and purposeful.
And what more apt way to interview the author of Aldebaran , and the sundry other driving-related songs on the new record, than in the front seat of his car? Travel has always been a prominent feature of Ryan s songs; even in his previous band, the Stars Of Heaven, he displayed a penchant for trains and rail motifs and sang about far flung places like Extremadura and TeTouan, while the Stars cover of the Flying Burrito s classic quoted above turned up on the soundtrack to the Steve Martin/John Candy film, Planes, Trains And Automobiles. Now, as a Revenant, he hopes one day to make a record with a car in every tune . Maybe he should call it Automobiles Synonymous.
Aldebaran , one of Ryan s most lyrical and fully realised songs, is a tale of star-crossed lovers on the move, their epiphany soundtracked by the car radio. Before it was given a proper title the title refers to a particular star visible in the night sky it was known on set-lists as the Driving Song , yet Stephen explains that it is not really about an actual journey so much as a frame of mind; or even the politics of driving, if you will.
There s a line in the song: sometimes the strangest thoughts occur unbidden , he quotes. You re driving along and observing everything and then these things flash through your mind that never would if you were sitting at home prosaically doing the chores. There s something about the rhythm of the engine that has that effect. Driving s good for me; other people throw up!
Another song, When You Fly , is both an emotional and geographical travelogue, with Ryan name-checking Andalucia, Vienna and the River Danube. The obvious question to ask concerns the degree of autobiographical detail in the lyric.
I haven t travelled as much as I d like to, he admits. I don t have that many quality travelling experiences to harp on about so I thought I might as well squeeze one into a song. The Danube is a really wide river. It goes due east and just on the Czech-Hungarian border it suddenly does a complete 90 degree turn and goes south. It s amazing to see.
Another of Europe s great rivers, the Rhine, is the setting of the album s opening track, Easier This Way (a revamping of an old Stars Of Heaven song, whose version can be found on their recently released Unfinished Dreaming compilation).
Easier This Way was written directly after a road trip to Vienna with the Stars in the late 80s, Stephen recalls. It was memorable for us . . . if not for our audience.
So you were Big In Vienna!
Well, we definitively found out not, he opines. We mistimed our arrival. We got there at the end of the show instead of the beginning! We had to go ahead and play it anyway because if we didn t we wouldn t get paid, and if we didn t get paid we wouldn t have had enough petrol to get back!
You d still be there now!
Sometimes I think I still am, he deadpans. The thing about playing in a band and travelling: I always thought it was dead romantic. You d read about bands who were travelling around Europe and jetting off to the States. It always sounds like amazing fun. But when you actually do it, you don t really have that much time there. We were only in Vienna for about 12 hours, but I got a taste for it and so I went back there again later, off my own bat. I got a train from Prague.

Early on in our journey, we are stalled at a traffic lights in Ballyroan, the very heart of Nissan Micra-land. In front of us is the most wondrous car; a great, big shining beast that I imagine lifting off the tarmacadam into the sky, and sailing in silhouette across the moon. A Pontiac, reckons Stephen.
Septober Nowonder is full of wonder too: wonder about particular people in his life ( Sarah , LIV ) and places in the world (from Ranelagh to Vienna) and in turn it inspires wonderment in the listener. A song like The Commander In Chief is typical of Ryan s ability to reconcile craft and complexity with passion and poignancy. You could listen to it a thousand times and still not fully grasp its enigma.
The Commander-in-Chief is some sort of Roman Emperor, says Ryan. The narrator of the song has been banished from the capital city and he s lurking around some outpost of the empire he s an exile, basically. And he s writing a letter back to an old drinking buddy, trying to catch up on the news; trying to get some information sent back past the censors . . . I ve no idea why that song came about! But I like it a lot; the way it hangs together.
But the why? That opens up a whole discussion on songwriting . . . as in what s the point of it ? The bottom line is that a song should be entertaining. Pop music is fairly trivial. But at the same time, very intelligent people get completely obsessed about it. So why is that? I mean it s never going to be high art. No matter how good polemicists like your Paul Simons or Randy Newmans are, it s never going to be poetry. And it never should be poetry either.
But sometimes a line and a melody gel together and can be really, really powerful. I m not talking about classic popular music as written by Gershwin or Jerome Kern, or whoever, because musically they are very sophisticated. I m talking about recent stuff: three-chord country tunes. Never go beyond it. Never find the fourth chord.
When it comes to memorable tunes, Ryan is the devil himself. Yet it s taken The Revenants six years to release the follow up their tremendous debut, Horse Of A Different. The question on everybody s word processor is, of course, what kept him?
I had severe writer s block for about a year and a half, he explains. I couldn t write anything. There were radio and management people in the States who had heard the first album and wanted to hear more. I felt under a lot of pressure. That was one reason for the delay.
The other was that, having luckily gone through a period where I did manage to write a lot of songs, we still had to record them. I d say it took a good two years between the start of recording and the record coming out.
You can put the slow pace of recording down to the band all having day jobs a state of affairs which has its advantages in that the band work at their own quality-not-quantity pace.
The fact that it s taken such a long time to get the second album out means that we ve been able to work not just on the individual songs re-editing and re-thinking them but also on the sound of the album as a whole, he says. So some songs that I think are very strong just wouldn t haven t worked in the context of the record they would have been too much of the same thing. I wanted to get some sort of variation in there.
My style of writing doesn t vary much to begin with: slow ones and fast ones, basically! In this case, there s more slow ones. We do have about five songs left over from the session. Hopefully, we ll get them out pretty soon. There s others where I might have to reluctantly throw in the towel.

One of the biggest differences between Horse and Septober is in the style and texture of the guitars. The departure of the great Doug Steen to Spain, where he lives in domestic bliss with his wife forced a musical reappraisal. If Doug was Keith Richards, his replacement, Conor Brady, is more Ry Cooder; the impulsive unpredictability of the former giving way to the more studied, rootsy approach of the latter although there are also touches of Gary Moore and Television s Richard Lloyd in evidence. Stephen, though, acknowledges that The Revenants have mutated into a somewhat different proposition to their original incarnation.
The way the songs are structured has changed a lot: there s a lot more space in there, he says. I can hear myself consistently for the first time ever. I m not battling against the guitars. And I ve moved away from songs with just rhythm chords all the way through. It took me a long time to figure it out.
And there s not that many choruses on this record. There s songs that sound as if they have a chorus but if you go back and analyse them, they don t. Easy , for instance.
Another song in search of a chorus is the closing Scott Miller Said , another enigmatic number, named after the leader of 80s American underground act Game Theory, and currently trading under the name The Loud Family.
He writes amazing tunes with smart words and he s a great guitar player and a great singer, gushes Stephen. But his songs have a really strange structure. They don t go where most songs go and I love him for it. A lot of people scratch their heads and say, what s that? .
I suspect people will say the same of Scott Miller Said itself, with its odd structure and puzzling lyrics which take in circus caravans and Simon & Garfunkel references.
It s just four verses in a row, with no chorus, which is why it sounds weird, Stephen responds. There s no separation. And then there s the lyrics. Sometimes when I can t carry an idea through for a song, I decide to switch to an impressionist mode where I just lash a few things together and if they scan, they re in.
Having wound our way down the mountain, back through the leafy, sleepy suburbs of south Dublin, the skies open up. A hard rain falls. I stop the tape. Stephen refuels. It s been a truly memorable ride. Come on, wheels, take me home today. n
Septober Nowonder is out now on Independent Records.