Declan O'Rourke would like to get inside other people's heads when they listen to his songs, he tells Siobhán Long
'It's the detail that's important," he insists. Declan O'Rourke may be one of the music business's latest debutants but he's unequivocal about the art and act of songwriting.
You'll find no trace of "moon in June" rhyming couplets amid his lyrically complex debut album, Since Kyabram. "Trying to transfer an image into somebody's head is what I really enjoy," he says. "A lot of songs these days can be very vague, with as little detail as possible, so that they can be identified with the largest amount of people possible. I love the cinematic, visual thing in songs. It can be hard to convey, but the beauty of it is that nobody's going to see what you've seen. It's totally individual. I'd love to get inside people's heads when they listen to my songs to see what they're seeing or thinking; I'm sure it's totally different to what I imagine."
Since Kyabram takes its title from a small town in Australia which O'Rourke visited while he was living there with his family as a young teenager. It was there that someone handed him a guitar, and the significance of that particular gesture wasn't lost on a young O'Rourke, who lapped up the chance to learn his first chords. Since then, he has wasted little time. As well as writing and producing his solo debut in 2004, he has recorded on Sharon Shannon's Diamond Mountain Sessions Presents, sharing a platform with Steve Earle, Sinéad O'Connor and Natalie Merchant, among others. Support gigs with everyone from Bic Runga to Bob Dylan have signalled the dramatic rise of a young musician who has wisely kept a tight grip on the reins of his own career - so far.
Having had the chance to cross the equator at a young age, O'Rourke is quick to credit his early travels for giving him a perspective on ways of living totally different to the life he had experienced back home in Ballyfermot.
"It must have had an effect on my outlook on life," he says, "because anyone who travels gets a chance to see how other people live, and to see that maybe they're not so different, or at times, that they are. I know that it must have had an effect on who I am. At the time I remember asking why we had to go there, but I wouldn't regret it for a minute."
O'Rourke's grasp of the art of fiction and of storytelling was honed from his early school days when he loved reading stories aloud to his mother from his schoolbooks. He laughs as he recalls how she called his bluff on one occasion.
"I read my Mam a story from one of my school books and I told her it was mine," he smiles, "and she told me it was very good, but when I did it again 10 minutes later, it was a different story and I got a clatter! Maybe that was a very important lesson about not ripping people off!"
Since Kyabram is a collection of lyrically dense material, scaffolded by some sublime string arrangements. Book-ended by images of water, it conjures a picture of a songwriter who has distilled more than his share of experience for a late twenty-something.
"I remember a teacher telling me that the way I wrote was very descriptive," he recounts. "I had a great teacher, a Christian Brother, who taught me a lot about writing, things that I still remember and use today; like not starting every sentence with 'I'. Simple things like not needing to start a story from the beginning. You can start at the end and keep it interesting. Little things you pick up along the way all help."
Nick Cave treats his songwriting like an office job: signing in every morning, and sticking with it diligently until he has put in his daily eight hours. So does Burt Bacharach. Other songwriters wait until the muse hits and then succumb to the songwriting process for as long as the inspiration remains. O'Rourke is not long enough in the tooth yet to have favoured any particular approach, but he's wary of anything that would lure him in the direction of colour-by-numbers songwriting.
"I try to vary it as much as I can, to keep it interesting for myself too," he explains. "I'd hate to work to a set of rules. It never comes to me the same way anyway. Every time is a totally different experience, but what's lovely is that you learn to build on that experience. Nearly all of the ideas I've had have come to me when I wasn't trying. Usually you can be in a certain frame of mind when that happens, even for a few minutes, and being in that zone, you can sometimes come up with a whole idea or a whole verse and a chorus. After that though, I'll generally leave the song down for a while, in the hope that something further will come to me. I let it sit subconsciously for a while, and hopefully things start to click into place in their own time."
Since Kyabram hints at a young writer whose personal life has been disastrous, replete with failed romances and tales of lonesomeness. Surely it can't all be autobiographical, can it? O'Rourke laughs at the suggestion that he has been living through a plethora of personal cataclysms in order to fuel his solo debut.
"A good amount of the album is autobiographical alright," he admits, "but other songs just run with a clever idea, or are sparked by a feeling. It's as if a part of my brain is constantly watching what's going on in the rest of my head, and waiting to see if something interesting pops up."
His love of what he calls "organic music", from classical to blues, folk, soul, jazz and traditional music stems from his fundamental affection for good lyrics. His own songs range from the bare-boned Marrying The Sea, with its unapologetic nod to the sean nós song tradition, to the lush, sweeping strings of Galileo, a track which has created his very own hallmark on both daytime and night-time radio.
"I was keen to show a portfolio of what I'm doing on the first album," he explains. Medieval scientific geniuses are rarely fodder for sublime pop songs though.
"Galileo was sparked by a friend who gave me the line: 'Who paints the sky?' From there, I thought about whose voice was telling the story in the song, and eventually, I thought it might be Galileo. People like Galileo had rock-star status in their own time, and they've had such an effect on the world to this day, in so many ways. From telescopes to microscopes, his impact on medicine and daily life is huge, and we don't often think about these things. Compare that with anything we're going to do: it's simply incomparable. I find that fascinating."
O'Rourke was recently nominated for three Meteor awards, in the categories of Best Irish Album, Best Irish Male and Best Folk/Trad Album, which points to a songwriter whose appeal is distinctly wider than the standard three-minute pop wonder.
The artwork on O'Rourke's website is all his own too; does that hint at a musician who's likely to depart in other directions over the coming years? "I would definitely like to do more drawing," he says modestly. "I find that relaxing, and I think I'm okay at it. I'm just interested in higher learning. I'd like to learn a lot more about the world. I'm interested in philosophy; I'd like to travel the world and I love music, but it might not be the only thing I'll do in my life. Maybe the secret is to make a lot of money so I can go off and travel, without having to worry about making a living!"
