“Stay here in Ireland, put your troubles into song.”
Dave Balfe returns with the first song from his post-debut album project.
After song teasing and beermat placements, we now have a new For Those I Love song.
There’s much speculation about how Balfe would follow up a deeply personal self-titled album which was tied to the passing of his close friend.
‘Of The Sorrows’ is our first clue, a song which addresses the economic reality that forces young people to move away from their homeland, the push and pull of pained emigration – “I’ll never leave / I have to leave,” Balfe screams in a howl of catharsis, as the song builds to an Irish-trad infused crescendo.
His pain is personal, but not unique, as it’s keenly felt by fellow Dubliners, and those who see the city’s best of brightest people and places replaced by dereliction and homogeny.
Paul Kenny added additional production and Cathal Caulfield played fiddle playing.
The title comes from the Irish myth Deirdre of the Sorrows.
“When I wrote “Of The Sorrows”, it felt like I was bargaining with myself. It was one of the first songs I’d written to myself, for myself, while still trying to embody the feelings and thoughts of my closest peers. At its heart, “Of The Sorrows” is about a city rapidly boxing you out, and the choices you make in order to stay.
I started to shoot the video for “Of The Sorrows” on Christmas Day. I traded a couple hundred hours, a broken hard drive (had to start again), my sense of patience, and a broken leg I got on the last day of filming. But I could make peace with that deal. It felt good to give so much life to a project about a dying city.”
The video was made and directed by David Balfe, who really is a visual artist as much as he’s a musician it must be said. The monochrome video underscores the song’s theme with shrouds over many recognisable Dublin city landmarks including the former Hangar club, The Flowing Tide, the Pepper Canister Church, the Ambassador Theatre among them.
While the cathartic lyrical content was key to the record’s message, the music itself has also been singled out for repeated praise, skipping as it did between the off-kilter, ethereal and the celebratory. “Of The Sorrows” carries similar gravitas, featuring the considered, direct wordplay that has made Balfe’s name already. We hear the voice of an elderly Irishman reflecting on the gravity of abandoning his homeland. Choking on his own sadness, he points at the Ireland-themed posters on his bedsit wall: “I had to leave it but I want to die in it.” Like many of his generation, Balfe has had similarly conflicting thoughts about emigration.
He feels rejected by Dublin, but struggles to wrap his head around leaving: whichever path he chooses feels like a painful compromise. Although taking flight feels like an appropriate response to what can be a suffocating existence, one where you can bankrupt yourself “just to stay where you belong”, how, he asks later on in the song, his voice cracking with vulnerability, “could you leave without putting up a fight?”
“I don’t know if it’s possible to stay and live a life in Dublin where there is even a modicum of comfort,” he says, further complicating the picture, “without actively making the city more difficult to live in over the long run.”
Such thoughtful, nuanced writing and thinking characterised Balfe’s debut for September Recordings, a soul-bearing set of songs about his love for his friends already considered by many to be a modern day Irish classic.
After the significant impact of that record, why the prolonged time between its release and today’s new single? “There was a time I did feel like I didn’t have anything to say as I have no interest in populating space for the sake of it,” Balfe says. “Then one day it all just started to come out.”
You can trace the genesis for “Of The Sorrows” back not to one single moment but to the accumulating dread felt walking around his home city of Dublin. It slowly dawned on him that he couldn’t leave his apartment without pummelling observations, couplets, and ideas into his notes app.
If he were to commit to a follow-up, Balfe couldn’t face revisiting the same topics: re-traumatising himself was not an option. After realising that a second album was an artistic necessity, he patiently turned these scrawls into verses and, in his cramped home studio, produced instrumentals to make musical sense of how he was feeling.
Further new material will follow from For Those I Love in 2025.
Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005 . He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Cara Magazine, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, founder of Lumo Club, club promoter, event curator and producer of gigs, listening parties & events in Dublin.
