Wonderland premiere “Father Brown’s”, the latest album-teasing single from Irish polymath Kean Kavanagh, and hear from the man himself about his journey towards releasing his debut full-length.
Among the upper echelons of the cohort of Irish musicians currently living and plying their trade in London, Kean Kavanagh has had a quietly indelible impact of the capital’s musical circumference. He and his long-time creative counterpart Kojaque first made a splash with their label Soft Boy Records, and in the years since Kavanagh has been shaping a hugely commendable artistic identity.
Since the brilliance of 2020 mixtape “Dog Person”, the singer-songwriter, instrumentalist and producer has undertaken a stylistic shift. Gearing up for the release of debut album The County Star, due 6th June via new label Heaven-Sent, Kavanagh has taken influence from the renaissance of Americana on both sides of the Atlantic, blending its revelry and emotional potency with the beauty and decadence of Irish traditional music.
The third glimpse of the album comes in the shape of “Father Brown’s”, a potent and atmospheric observation of immigration hypocrisy. It’s a gentle and perusing cut, slyly scintillating, full of swirling textures and an elegy of melodic inflections.
Wonderland take an exclusive first look at the intimate live performance video for the cut, and hear from Kavanagh about his musical and personal journey, the visual identity of his new era, and his expectations for the forthcoming album.
Watch “Father Brown’s”…
Read the interview…
Hey Kean! Talk us through your musical background and early influences?
Myself and my sister were born out in Texas where my parents had emigrated, so when we moved home to Ireland the music playing around the house was a real mixture of both places. Would have been hearing Hank Williams and Shania Twain and then a lot of more contemporary Irish artists, my father seemed to keep pretty up to date with what was going on. Prefab Sprout was my first favourite band; my sister, my brothers and I would go mad for “The King of Rock and Roll” over and over again.
How did you find yourself within the music industry? How do you reflect on your journey so far?
Myself and my friends started a label in Ireland called Soft Boy Records in 2015; we’d all been learning to record and produce songs and beats and were at the point where we wanted to start putting them out and trying to get booked for gigs. The label allowed us an air of legitimacy that we could use for promoting everything we were working on and the community that we were building at the time. It’s beautiful to see the different directions that everyone involved has gone into since those early stages of the label; everyone has gone down their own personal rabbit hole of style and songcraft.
As a producer stepping into your full-bodied artist era, what is the most challenging component? How do you deal with the concept of the spotlight?
Having to be very online to promote work that you’ve given so much to and are so proud of is a tricky one – you’re dying to share what you’ve created but the means of sharing it can feel very hollow. For me that’s the beauty of performance and of playing shows; you get this connection that for me cannot be replicated online; an organic joy that you can access anywhere from singing a song down at the pub to being on a stage with a band. That’s what has always given me the most purpose as an artist because those moments require and emphasise the importance of physical community. Still, I think we managed to have a lot of fun online between Peter McGann, myself and Pa “The Hips” Campion.
Congratulations on your debut album, The County Star! How are you feeling about the release?
Yeah I’m buzzing. It’s very gratifying to see a concept slowly come together from the initial writing sessions to the last few months where the visual side of the album came together. So many more people came on board and gave their time and effort to create the world of the album these last few months and it’s given the whole thing so much life and momentum, I’m feeling grateful.
You’ve been in the industry for quite a while now — why did it feel like the time to share your opening full-length?
I think a lot of different things just came together at the one time. I felt a sense of urgency to make this one like I hadn’t before. In May 2022 I suffered some sort of vocal injury while on tour with Kojaque that left me unable to sing with any real ability for a year. It made me think deeply about what I wanted to do and the entire time I thought to myself, ‘if I can relearn how to sing, I will not take it for granted’. So I kept plugging away and writing songs and then myself, Karma Kid and Baz Kaye went on a writing trip to Peter Brien’s house in Belfast and that’s where the team behind the music really crystallised and the foundations for this album were built. Karma Kid had been encouraging me also to be a bit more personal with what I write about; he gave me the cue to write my song “The Magic” about the experience of that year being unable to sing and I think that writing that song allowed me to let people in a little bit more on this album.
The album sees you sonically near unrecognisable for your earlier music. What promoted the shift? What were the musical pull points?
As my voice recovered, I had to figure out what types of songs and singing suited my voice and what felt good to me, and I went back to singing a lot of songs that I heard when I was really young in the house, singing Hank Williams and Townes Van Zandt tunes that were in a bit of an easier register. At the same time I had recently moved to London, missing home and listening to a lot of the incredible new music from home that has been coming out the last number of years. I thought there were elements of an Irish sonic identity that I could bring into the sound of this album that would work really well with the lyrics and emphasise the sense of place within them. Fionn Ó hAlmhain played uilleann pipes on Father Brown’s and Texas Tea, Áine Mc Geeney played tin whistle on The Whistle and Rónán Barra played fiddle on The County Star, and these performances really gave the whole thing that sense of place. The pipes in particular are so evocative to me; they bring me straight back to hearing the pipe band play and march around O’Moore Park when I was a child or listening to Moving Hearts in a car going on our holidays.
The visual identity of the record is unwinding in such a striking way. What informed its direction?
The idea of a lone figure on a pitch under floodlights was always what drove the identity of this album for me; this Texas Lone Star, fallen from the sky and landed smack bang in O’Moore Park. I think you can really hear that character at his clearest in the lyrics of “A Cowboy Song” and “Father Brown’s’. I was born in Texas and moved back to Ireland when I was very young, so this idea of America was always a very dreamlike thing; I had no memories or experiences to go off of other than this past life that my parents had lived and the pictures and ephemera they’d came back with; my little baby pair of cowboy boots, a Wilson baseball glove, a photo of my parents dancing at a rodeo.
I wanted this album to capture that fantasy of Americana, that idea of a far away wonderland, and blend it with the reality of my own life and experiences growing up in Portlaoise; to mix the familiar images of a Gaelic football team with this sort of weird American surreality. The Irish Elvis actually encapsulates this so perfectly; almost everyone who grew up here will have known one in their lifetime, men who chose to live their lives not so much as an Elvis impersonator but as Elvis himself. The more we wrote and developed this character into the video concept of the album, the more he seemed to be the County Star himself and the songs began to feel like the stories of his youth. We were incredibly lucky to get Peter McGann to play Pa “The Hips” Campion; how ridiculously funny he is aside, everyone on set was moved time and time again by his performances and the depth that he brought to the character. I want to shout out Kojaque, Rob Bass, Aoife Leonard and Conor Hayes in a massive way, the best team there could ever have been for these shoots, and David Willis as well who did such a beautiful job on the album photography.
Wonderland premiere “Father Brown”. Talk us through that track and video: the meaning, making and intention?
The lyrics came from a conversation I had with my father at some point last year. He was driving through Stradbally one morning with a friend on their way to work and his friend told him a story he hadn’t heard before; the Massacre of Mullaghmast on New Year’s Day in 1578. 400 men from the tribes of Laois and Offaly were lured to Mullachmast in Kildare under the pretext of peace and were massacred by English forces in collaboration with the colonist Francis Cosby. Only one man was said to have escaped; there’s an old pub not so far from Portlaoise called the Bleeding Horse that’s been closed for a long time and that’s where his horse was said to have keeled over and died from exhaustion.
Later that day, my father was in a sauna in the local leisure centre and two men he knew were there laughing at the news that an inflatable boat full of migrants had gone down in the Mediterranean. One of them, a former Garda, said he would have shot bullet holes into the boat himself had he been there. My father reminded them that it was many of their own that had to get on the cattle boats to Holyhead when this country couldn’t support them, and they weren’t turned away either. How short are your memories? How many more died on ships to America?
It’s a disgrace to our own history and our culture, that an Irish man or woman would suggest sinking the boats of those looking to come in; it’s still to this day that Irish people are emigrating all over the world, how is it that we can go anywhere and they can’t come here? All my own family went to America and to England in the 80s and 90s looking for better money and for jobs that didn’t exist at home. We should have more understanding than anyone of leaving our home in search of a better life and the conditions which might lead to that.
The video sees myself and piper Jack Duffy performing the song live at the wake of Pa Campion. Long live the King.
What does the wider album tackle thematically?
The story of the County Star lives a little bit in my own reality and memories and then a little bit in a fantasy world; dreams of a far off place or even just a bigger town. And the character of the County Star becomes something beyond myself as well. I would say there’s a bit of heartbreak in there and a lot of love generally. Texas Tea is pure ego; the song is about the relentlessness of growth at all costs through the eyes of an oil man or maybe it’s oil itself.
What do you hope the record achieves? What do you want listeners to take away from it?
I see a lot of beauty in where I’m from in Portlaoise and the community that exists there, and I hope that the album can help people to take the value of their own stories and history seriously.
What else is to come, this year and beyond?
We’ve got two album launch shows coming up in London at the Lexington on June 17th and in Dublin at Bello Bar on June 20th. We may have some festival surprises in store too and a big tour to announce – don’t even take your eyes off your phone for a moment until you see that.
