His voice has been compared to everyone from Harry Connick Jnr to Benjamin Diamond, so with a new album full of slick, jazzy numbers, can Dublin singer-songwriter Owen Brady break into the big time?
OWEN BRADY opens the door to an imposing Dartmouth Square residence in Ranelagh with a semi-bow, backing shyly into the plush hallway as I follow him down to the basement. Though it's past noon, he's not up long, his long hair still wet from the shower while a kettle boils somewhere as he shovels coffee grains into the cafetiere. It's breakfast time for Brady, but he has a good excuse: he has been working late again.
As he rummages for jam to spread on the toast he's just laid on the open stove, the midday sun is already shining through the glass walls in the bright, spacious conservatory into which the kitchen opens. There's a computer on a desk under the clear panes, discarded headphones nestling alongside it - tell-tale signs that Brady has been up till all hours again, tinkering with tunes through the wee hours while the residents of Dartmouth Square slept soundly in their beds.
Not quite the artist in the garret, perhaps, but Brady, who is about to release his first album, readily admits to his good fortune in having such a pleasant space for his creative endeavours, though there is a caveat. "It's not ideal," he reminds me, a smile creasing his broad face, still handsomely dishevelled from the early rise. "I mean, it is my parents' house!"
Though he now lives in Clonskeagh, Brady, the youngest of four siblings, returns to the house he grew up in on a regular basis, and in the comfort of this warm room with the smell of fresh coffee filling the air, it's not hard to figure out why. "I come back all the time," he confesses, his voice low and conspiratorial as he sets some plates down on the wide kitchen table. "To eat."
To eat and to write music, which is what has me sitting in front of this young Dublin gentleman who is feeding me toast at lunchtime. With a voice that has been compared to a host of singers from Jack Johnson through Harry Connick Junior to Benjamin Diamond, and an album full of slick, jazzy numbers under his belt, Brady is already being touted as the next big thing to come out of a small country that has most recently produced big singer-songwriters in Damien Rice and Fionn Regan.
UK magazine GQwas so impressed, it slotted Brady in at Number 37 in its 100 Best Things in the World list for 2008, ahead of The Killers and Oasis. He was speedily snapped up by Sony, but has ears pricking up all over the music world, with even the likes of Salaam Remi, hip-hop producer and the man behind Amy Winehouse's Back to Black, so taken with Brady that he's now touting him Stateside.
All this and he has only just turned 27, but despite the fact that this is Brady's first album as a singer/songwriter, he has been in the music business for quite some time. "I've been singing since I was a kid," he says. "I've never had any other job." Singing has been second nature to him for as long as he can remember, despite coming from a relatively unmusical brood. "My brother's a dreadful singer," he laughs. "He's comically bad."
Owen Brady was always different, however, and it wasn't long before his musical talent was spotted. It happened at Mass of all places, when the young boy got up to belt out a hymn at a private service, impressing the congregation so much that one of those present took his parents aside and let them know they had a gifted son on their hands.
"Somebody said to my parents: 'You'd better get lessons for that fella there'," recalls Brady. His parents duly obliged, and Brady began the voice training that was to lead him to where he is today, back in the family kitchen, but with a copy of his album, Prepare to Be Happy, sitting on the table between us. It's not, however, his first album, as Brady reluctantly admits. "I made an album of Christmas carols when I was a kid," he tells me, slightly bashfully. He was 10 years old at the time, and was even invited onto the children's TV show The Dento promote his musical release, wowing TV celebrities Zig and Zag with his in-studio rendition of Smokey Robinson's Tracks of My Tears.
Such was its success, the venture was repeated the following year with another album. "It was Christmas carols again, my speciality," he says with winning self-awareness. "I was the Christmas carol king."
When his voice broke as a teenager in boarding school, music began to take second place as he discovered singing wasn't his only talent. "I got interested in sport and started playing a lot of rugby," he recalls, a hobby which landed him his first front-page picture in this newspaper, as a scrum-half for Clongowes Wood College on a legendary Leinster schools team that included Irish international Gordon D'Arcy.
Music took second place for a while, but it was never abandoned by Brady, who managed to join a U2 cover band and learn the guitar in whatever spare time he had. He also started writing songs with some of his schoolmates, with whom he formed a band during his teens. They even got as far as recording an album after ransacking their savings for the purpose. Brady recalls a scene in the John Carney film Once, where a group of wide-eyed musicians enter a recording studio for the first time. "That's what it was like," he remembers. "Going in, meeting the sound engineers who were raising their eyes to heaven at you."
In the days before it was possible to produce your own album on a laptop at 3am in your parents' conservatory, young musicians had to take a more traditional route to get their work out there. "We'd save up money, shop around and find the cheapest studio, drive down to the middle of Offaly somewhere, and spend a couple of days at it down there," he says. "That was the way you had to do it in those days," he laughs, glancing over to the computer that allows him to bypass these steps now. "You can do a better job now on my laptop out there than those guys would have, and they charged you!"
THOUGH THAT teenage album has long been lost - "I hope it's buried!" says Brady - his musical impulses have not, and once school was out, Brady decided to continue his studies in the area, ending up with a music degree from UCD, while also keeping his singing lessons going. All this classical training had its advantages. "If you're singing classical music, your voice is getting better and better because that stuff is the most challenging to sing," he says. "It's just self-improvement really, that was the whole point of it."
With such formal training and an enduring love for classical music - he even has Pavarotti's autograph - wasn't Brady tempted to pursue a professional career in serious music? "I'm sure I thought of it a number of times, but there's not enough freedom to do what I really want to do there," he says. "I'd say if I'd stayed in classical music I'd be limited to arranging stuff rather than writing stuff, which is what I've always wanted to do."
He has also long had an attraction to jazz."I always loved the freedom of singing jazz music, you can do what you want." Once his formal education was complete, Brady sought out new genres and musical experiences, building his repertoire and knowledge to feed into his writing and performances. "I always wanted to do what I'm doing now, so I joined different bands, working with as many different musicians as possible just to learn the trade," he explains. "There was one band I joined that had an eight, 10, sometimes 16-piece brass section. I enjoyed it specifically because I was thinking 'This is a good way to learn how to work with a brass section'."
Playing with so many different bands in so many different circumstances - from serenading diners in Italy to regulars at his local pub, O'Briens of Leeson Street - has allowed Brady to make a living from his first love for many years. It has also brought him to a few far-flung venues, including a Florida bar where he became a regular St Patrick's Day attraction. "They tip good in the States when they hear an Irish accent," he says cheekily. "It was more about the segues than the music!"
All these experiences as a performer and musician have fed in some way or other into Prepare to Be Happy, a sun-soaked, sweetly chill album that reflects how much separates Brady from the emotional intensity of the singer-songwriter stereotype. Even his Sony record deal, nine-month recording stint with Sade keyboardist Andrew Hale and the steady buzz currently being generated, seem a far cry from the angst-ridden, tortured trails to recognition hacked out by so many of his counterparts.
For Brady, it all seems to have fallen into place with remarkable ease, and his uncomplicated affability and comfortable surroundings give the lie to any insistence that one must suffer for one's art. But with his album about to hit record stores and a planned promotional tour culminating on April 18th in Whelans, Dublin, isn't he even a little bit anxious about what lies ahead? He shrugs. "I'm happy with the album - I don't get nervous about things you can't control!" Animated, yes, although when I suggest this might be due to the fact that he's reportedly on the brink of international stardom, he laughs.
"No, I just had a whole pot of coffee on my own, that's what's going on!" Brady, it appears, will take it all in his stride, and there's a sense that no matter how Prepare to Be Happyis received, he'll continue to make the kind of music he wants to - a style even he has difficulty classifying. "Jazz, soul, a bit of electronica, pop - I don't know! Genres are always mad," he says. It's a sound that's not often associated with the Irish songwriting scene, but there is much about Brady that is less than typical. Whether Irish audiences - and those further afield - want to hear it is the question waiting to be answered.
Whatever happens - and you get the sense that, given Brady's vocal talent, easy-on-the-eye appearance and general good fortune, whatever happens can only be good - Brady will continue to make and write music. It is, after all, what he's always done. "Even as a kid, even when I was listening to music, I was always whistling alternative lines on top of it," he remembers. "I still do today. I've been approached in public a couple of times and been asked to stop."
If Brady's star rises, as is being predicted, it's more likely they'll be asking for more, but Brady, while confident, is not buying the hype. "It's just me and the guitar," he shrugs. "I don't know where I fit in. Maybe not even in this country."
And if success takes him away from leafy Ranelagh and the full fridges of Dartmouth Square? "I'll go wherever the road takes me," he smiles. "It's got a nice habit of bringing you to faraway places, I wouldn't be one to get in the way of that.' '
Owen Brady's album Prepare to Be Happy will be released in April. His nationwide tour starts on April 14th in Dolan's, Limerick