The composer and producer, and multi-instrumentalist Ólafur Arnalds met the Cork singer-songwriter Eoin French aka Talos after he ran a marathon in Iceland.
A friendship was struck, that quickly developed into a musical partnership, as seen at Sounds From A Safe Harbour in Cork in 2023, when the festival director Mary Hickson put the pair together for a collaboration.
Now six months after Eoin’s death, Arnalds and French’s family, friends and collaborators have been celebrating the artist’s creativity and legacy with the stunning song they wrote together ‘We Didn’t Know We Were Ready’. The song was performed on The Tommy Tiernan show on RTÉ in January under Arnalds’ Opia community banner with vocals from Niamh Regan, Ye Vagabonds, JFDR, The Staves, Sandrayati Fay, Dermot Kennedy, Laoise Leahy, Memorial, Christof Van Der Ven and most poignantly of all, Eoin’s wife Steph French.
Towards the end, was, the guy turned into like, freaking God, you know? He was just like, he was like spiritually on levels above any anyone else I’ve ever met.
Ólafur Arnalds on the last days of Eoin French’s life.
I don’t know that’s something that happens to people sometimes when they get this kind of news. But in these moments, he was able to really teach us how to be alive….
And then he taught us how to die as well. He showed us how. I know how I want to die – It’s exactly like that. It’s incredible to witness that lesson, to have the humour until the very last second, you still are able to crack a joke or to find some light in the situation or to find room in your heart or someone else’s issues, you know? It’s so selfless and beautiful and it’s just a great reminder of how I would like to be as a human.
In our chat with Ólafur today, he recounts meeting Eoin, their creative time spent together and the instructions he received from Eoin before he died to finish the album they made together, which will be released this year.
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Ólafur Arnalds interview on the Nialler9 Podcast Transcript:
Niall (04:55)
Well, Ólafur, it’s really lovely to chat to you. For people like myself based in Ireland, you were involved very recently in a kind of a celebration of Eoin French. We’ll get into the song and everything that came with it in a little bit, but just talk to me a little bit about when you first met Eoin.
Ólafur (05:19)
Me and Eoin and met in Iceland actually. I think we had been like very briefly in touch over Instagram and stuff like that somewhat previously, but we met right after he ran his first marathon. I was sitting in a bar and in comes Eoin – like, sweaty. Yeah, we just hanged, he was coming to me, the friend who I was with at the bar straight from the marathon.
I think he was with the drummer from Talos there. Yeah, we chatted all night and then we met kind of properly, Sound From A Safe Harbour, like in a more creative way. That’s when we started working and making music together.
Niall (06:04)
Yeah, so Sounds from a Safe Harbour, Mary Hickson is majorly involved in that. It’s very much it’s a festival, but it’s also a collaboration. It’s a place for artists to play and create together and collaborate. What was your experience there? Was that your first time? That was 2023?
Ólafur (06:22)
Yeah, I did a five day residency there with, I don’t know, 50 other artists or something. It was amazing. That’s a beautiful, inspiring, like cocoon that Mary creates there. It’s funny because we’re not in a very inspiring place. We’re just like in hotel conference rooms, basically, or hotel meeting rooms. But just the way it’s set up and the way she kind of, she’s a puppet master, you know, she likes to put people together, she knows who will work well together. And the first morning on the first day, she put me and Eoin in a room together. Like “you guys, you guys need to work together”.
Niall (06:59)
Okay. But you’d met as well at least. you know, that’s something, but I mean, obviously collaboration is something that you are keen on. So, I mean, did you have, I mean, how do you approach something like that when you kind of, you maybe know somebody, but you don’t really know much about them. What did you do? What did you do? How do you start these kinds of collaborations?
Ólafur (07:17)
Actually just by having a coffee and chat, you know, I’m always of the opinion that you just need to be friends, you know, if you’re friends, if you get along, if you like each other, and if you have good chemistry, then the making music part is easy, you know. So yeah, I think we just hung out for the first session, then we jam a little bit. You know, it took a lot of breaks, you know, not not getting straight into it and just focusing just jamming a little bit, then going out for lunch, you know, or jamming a little bit and going out for coffee and just talking about life.
And we made a song that first day already. It’s always like that with me and Eoin, we would meet up and a song would be done in 15 minutes. There was something very instant there in that sessiom, instant creative companionship somehow.
Niall (08:06)
Can you define that or know what it is or, you know, why that was?
Ólafur (08:17)
No, I can’t actually. I don’t know what it was, but every time we sat down together, a song came out. I think it was maybe partly where we were kind of similar in a way that we didn’t really need to talk much, you know? And we were very, comfortable with each other in silence. And I think when you have that, you don’t need to discuss things too much. I think the other senses become a bit heightened and you’re maybe a bit more receptive to creative ideas and creative input or inspiration.
Niall (08:59)
Yeah. So then the song that became, ‘We Didn’t Know We Were Ready’, Like when did you start to bring everyone else in? Cause obviously everyone else is there as well in this, at this event, festival, this hangout, you know, that’s the whole idea. You can bring people in and kind of work with them.
Ólafur (09:17)
So yeah, that song, started with me, Eoin and Niamh [Regan] in a room together. Again, this great and uninspiring conference room at the hotel in Cork. We had the song, like we had the melody, we had the piano and some song draft lyrics. And very early in the song, we felt like the song was very inviting to like traditional rounds type of singing.
And of course, the first people we think of then is Ye Vagabonds, you know, so we brought them in, and they kind of brought that song to the next level with their kind of knowledge and ability of creating those kind of rounds.
Niall (10:31)
So, then you perform it downstairs, as you can see in the video of the performance down in the lobby of the Riverlee, where you bring everyone together and it’s very much like you can hear the bones of that song is really, it’s present already, it’s ready, it’s there. So, you know, something Mary Hickson talks about is like, you know, performing it in front of people when it’s not, you’ve only just written it essentially, does that change it somehow?
Ólafur (11:11)
I didn’t really feel like it was not ready in any way. But that was the song. We had done it. Anyway, that was kind of the point of the song, something we talked a lot about. Honestly, it felt like the lyrics in the song just came to us. And when we were writing it, I think our only insecurity was that we didn’t really know what it was about. And it took us a while to figure it out.
One of the conversations we were having was like, it felt like it was about this, like the very process of creating it and being unsure about it. And it was, it’s often like, but when you’re creating something, you actually make yourself suffer so much for it. Artists tend to just be so miserable and, you know, they hate their own stuff and like get so mad at the creative process. And after al that’s done. You sometimes realise it doesn’t actually matter. And you sometimes just change your view completely to like a destructionist view where like, I’ve just put some black and white notes together in a certain order. That’s all I’ve done. Why am I suffering so much for it?
Niall (12:30)
That’s helpful to bring it back to that.
Ólafur (12:33)
Like, none of this fucking matters. It’s just music, you know? We were kind of swinging between the two of these things. And so it became a little bit the point of the song to like not worry about it so much. And the lyrics kind of say that, you know? But it was great. Like when we performed in the lobby, it just felt like we’re doing exactly what we should be doing. We’re just playing around with an idea.
Niall (13:04)
Yeah, it’s really beautiful. But obviously, you know,the song has taken on a whole other meaning in a way, because, it was a shock for a lot of people when Eoin passed last year. It was kind of kept fairly well on the wraps until it was, was the news came out really.
I’ve talked about Eoin’s music and talked to him, you know, such a lovely guy over the years and just, you know, warm smile every time you see him and you always got a sense of this quiet magnitude in him.
So It was a bit of a shock for, especially for a guy so young to pass and, and then you hear all of these stories that he has loads of music ready and he was kind of working the whole time and he planned his funeral and all that stuff. So I believe this was a part of that celebration of his life as well. So that must have meant something to him as well.
Ólafur (14:02)
No, absolutely. We worked pretty hard. Yeah, mean, weirdly, we became close friends through the process that he was going through. And I was going through with him because we started working on this record about a month before he was diagnosed.
So the first couple of songs that we have like for now, ‘We Didn’t Know We Were Ready’ and a couple of others we made a few weeks later. They have a very different tone and quality to it than the songs we made through the whole process until the very end. We were working on the record until the very end. It’s a unique creative process, that’s for sure.
Niall (14:54)
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. You know, knowing that as well for Eoin, I’m sure it had something else, you know, we can’t even imagine. Was it always a plan then to release music with Eoin, yourself and Talos together?
Ólafur (15:11)
Yeah, I think we knew from a very early stage in our collaboration that we were making a record, not just a song or two. We were making a record. I don’t know how we knew that or why we felt that so strongly, but we felt like we touched on something really special and something unique together. And that just needed to be a record.
Niall (15:35)
Did you know what the plan with that is yet or is there a plan in place yet?
Ólafur (15:41)
Yeah, I’ve just finished it. In fact, I finished the master yesterday. He asked me before he passed that I was lucky enough to make it out to Ireland and be with him for the last few days. And we managed to sit down and make these plans, which is incredibly fortunate given the circumstances to actually be able to talk about it and know what his thoughts are on the process so I’m not completely left alone with all our material. And he did ask me to finish it. He asked me for a certain record label. There was a lot of specifics in this plan that he had obviously thought of!
Then I spent the last six months after his passing finishing this record. And a lot of the songs were very clear what they needed. Some of them were basically ready and some of them we never had the chance to record proper vocals for, even finish the lyrics for.
Those were definitely the more interesting things to try and work on and finish and a little bit nerve-racking sometimes to thread the line of like, to make sure I’m still staying in line with what we decided and what we wanted to do.
Niall (17:10)
It sounded like he had very clear ideas of what he wanted as well. You’re honouring him as well in doing so. I must feel quite a privilege to do that, carry on the work that he was doing with you.
Ólafur (17:26)
Yeah, it is. It’s a privilege and an honour to be asked or to be trusted with this. There’s a very special type of trust that kind of embodied my whole process in the last six months. There’s a knowing when I had to make creative decisions, especially when I had to make hard or difficult creative decisions. Weirdly, I didn’t have to think about it too much.
I think that’s kind of the most interesting part of the whole process. There’s just a very deep knowing and trusting in the process and how we work together. And I just have to tune into that energy and continue working in the same way. Then I was just kind of sure that I wouldn’t make a wrong choice. And then it’s also incredibly just fortunate for me to be able to have this platform for my own grief. And I was able to process the whole thing very much through finishing this record.
Niall (18:34)
Sure. Yeah. Yeah. And then of course, you know, when January comes around and this opportunity to perform, ‘We Didn’t Know We Were Ready’ On RTE, the TV show The Tommy Tiernan show in Ireland. Talk to me a little bit about that. Like, I mean, did that come together very quickly? It was, it seemed like it was something that was just, okay, this was happening all of a sudden. That’s the impression I get anyway.
Ólafur(19:00)
I mean, yeah, that’s it. That’s nice to hear. That’s the impression you, I think you always want to give. Not telling people about what’s actually going on behind the scenes and how many months it takes to make that happen. But no, it was natural. We decided, me and Mary decided kind of early on to go back to the same group as performed the song the first time we performed it at the RiverLee. Because the song, ‘We Didn’t Know We Were Ready’.
It became a hybrid or a modular set up where we would perform at different locations with different groups of people. It didn’t really feel like it belonged to just me and Eoin and Niamh and Ye Vagabonds, It just felt like it was a song that belonged to creativity itself. And therefore it would just be performed by anyone who felt like they needed to sing that..
So it had gone through a few different iterations with few different singing constellations and stuff. But we went back to the original there with Memorial, The Staves, Dermot Kennedy. And then we added also a couple of people who sang it with us at Opia Festival, which is Sandrayati, JFDR and more.
Niall (20:24)
For me, I get a very cathartic feeling from it, you know, it’s deeply moving. I find it very moving. You know, I definitely cried the first time I watched it and I was like surprised by, you know, it was just so moving. It was just felt like such an elegy to Eoin as well. And obviously, you know, his voice coming in at the start and it very much feels like, wow, I can’t imagine a more fitting tribute to somebody like Eoin who, you know, clearly was working on his music to the end and his friends and family and collaborators all come together and perform this beautiful original song that really is very touching.
Ólafur(21:03)
Yeah, it felt like, and we kind of consciously started up in a way where we start with Eoin singing the song himself, which has come from a backing track that I had. And then we have a few of his creative colleagues coming in and singing with him, supporting him. Then Eoin’s voice leaves and we get his wife, his partner, starts singing, supported by some of her best friends, Sandrayati and JFDR, who are kind of there singing with her, supporting her, giving her the confidence to sing this. And then at the very end, the whole group of friends is coming and supporting.
Symbolically, it sounds like we were kind of Eoin’s legacy or carrying his music, his creativity forward first through his friends, but then through the greater community. I just that ritual of performing it in that way specifically gave us quite a lot. I think all of us. And a lot of the people there hadn’t been in the same situation as I have, which is like for the last six months, I have been working on this music very actively. I’ve been doing all these things. It’s been kind of constantly cathartic. At some point, you get almost a little bit desensitized to the severity of the emotional situation that you’re in.. But I think for everybody, this felt like a very significant moment in grief and also in honouring and just like carrying on his creativity to forever, not just to that moment, but to the future.
Niall (23:03)
It definitely feels like a real positive incantation almost. So you also recorded it that day in Windmill Lane, right? So I mean, doing a live TV performance is one thing, but then getting people together in a room. I mean, how do you centre yourself when there is so much, you know, feelings of grief and loss around that? it’s, I mean, there must have been… It have been something that didn’t happen immediately once you all arrive, like how do navigate that?
Ólafur(23:37)
It always works out when you have a good group of people. People can support each other through it.
We started just soundchecking the microphones, so we started singing the song. We hadn’t really done any ritual before we started. The sound engineer just asked for some sound and we started singing. And everyone just started breaking down. Mary [Hickson], bless her. She was like, “all right, come here. We need hug.”
And she put everyone together in a group hug. And then we came back to it with a very different, like, it was so important to tune in together and be together as a group to talk about what we’re doing, not just start. It was my mistake, probably to allow that to happen. Maybe it needed to happen or whatever. Another thing is like they had put up the mics in like a straight line with a separation. So it’d be two singers on each mic. And there was like two meters between singers.
It’s something in studios just for the sound quality that you have better separation between groups of singers. Then we started singing the song like that and everybody sits like cross-armed 2 meters apart.
Like instantly I go like, nah, that’s not going to work. We need a huddle. We need to huddle. The poor guys, they’ve been setting up the microphones the whole day, the day before with a freaking measuring tape – every microphone is perfectly placed and in about three minutes we’ve ruined everything.
We’re like, we need the mics together in the middle, we’re all going to sing in a huddle. But bless them, they just did it. So we sacrificed some sound quality, but we got it back through the feeling that you get from just holding each other and singing together. It was a recording where that was just more important.
Niall (25:35)
Yeah, and it does feel like that. It’s like, you know, that’s the power of people singing together is, it’s hard to it’s hard to quantify and it’s super important. And, you know, when people do that and you really feel that in that song as well, it does feel like you’re you’re celebrating and you’re uplifting as well at the same time. Something. Yeah. Melancholic, but also like really beautiful as well. So, yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s just it’s just such a beautiful song and I’m still going back to it obviously now and you know it does it’s very I find it very impactful myself.
What have you learned from your time with Eoin that you would take with you into your into your future or your creative future and and this song itself I mean what what have you learned from it or if you can even quantify that…
Ólafur(26:23)
I mean, I learned a lot. Some of the things I learned are very big, big life lessons, huge life lessons. I think he showed us, especially when, you know, towards the end, was, the guy turned into like, freaking God, you know? He was just like, he was like spiritually on levels above any anyone else I’ve ever met, I don’t know that’s something that happens to people sometimes when they get this kind of news. But in these moments, he was able to really teach us how to be alive. How to love for your family or for your friends and your community, the importance of nurturing community. and reminding your friends that you’re there for them. Even in your own darkest moments, you can still remind your friends that you’re actually there for them, you know?
And then he taught us how to die as well. He showed us how. I know how I want to die – It’s exactly like that. It’s incredible to witness that lesson, to have the humour until the very last second, you still are able to crack a joke or to find some light in the situation or to find room in your heart or someone else’s issues, you know? It’s so selfless and beautiful and it’s just a great reminder of how I would like to be as a human.
Niall (28:02)
It’s a beautiful thing to hear and it’s very inspiring in many ways, like the music as well. mean, we could almost leave it there, I think, but I will ask you about your own plans for the rest of the year.
Opia is, you know, that’s community as well. That’s something we touched on. So what’s been happening there with Opia?
Ólafur(28:33)
Yeah, our record is going to come out in Opia, mine and Talos’. This is going to be the first time that I release my own music on Opia. And this was something that Eoin had kind of asked for because he did a festival with us and really loved seeing how that community was working.
Yeah, it’s been a really beautiful year with Opia. Last year, we did a lot, obviously. think this year we are slowing down a bit. I think we want to just focus a bit more on the community itself, the community building, not necessarily have to release so much music because it’s not just the record label, know, it’s first and foremost, place for our community to happen and exist. And we’re just trying to support those community initiatives that often are coming from other people just from within the community, like workshops or you know, they’re doing like composer challenges sometimes where they kind of egg each other on to make like a challenge of like how to write a song within certain boundaries or something – like creative challenges, basically. The magazine. But yeah, we also have some great releases coming up, like The Vernon Spring is coming out on Opia.
Niall (30:02)
And you have some of your own stuff with a new project with Loreen coming up as well, don’t you?
Ólafur(30:02)
We have our new project called Sages. This is our collaborative project. It’s coming out on March 7th, the first part of that. But there’s a bit more coming later, but it’s going to be, I think safe to say it’s going to be a slow burner. We’ll probably end up releasing two songs every two years.
Niall (30:28)
I mean, it sounds like that’s something you should be doing after the year you had as well. You know, take it easy, you know, take the time, be mindful to do, you know, what you need to do. There’s you know, you’ve been through a lot as well. And if you’re working with somebody who’s passed, there’s a lot to learn from that. There’s a lot to take stock in. And I think, you know, festivals like Sounds From A Safe Harbor and Opia, the idea of community and music now is so much more important than maybe not that it ever was, but it is super important to just underscore it a bit more. You know, we can all spend time on the, whatever it is, the hamster wheel of, of creativity and, and touring and, the music industry and how that works. The streaming platforms and all that kind of stuff. You can kind of maybe feel a bit disconnected, even if you’re never more connected than you ever, than you ever have been. So, you know, it’s something to be mindful for I think.
Ólafur(31:23)
This is exactly why we started Opia. I wouldn’t say community is more important now than before, but like you said, it’s more important now to remind ourselves of it. It’s more important now to remind yourself why we’re here in the first place. On a good day, the most communication I’ll have with someone listening to my music is a number on my Spotify for Artists app or something like that.
You know how the app actually ticks when you get a stream, if you the app open, it’ll actually like vibrate in your hand. Like they’ve gamified it. They’ve like, or, you know, just connected streaming or listening to music with like a dopamine rush of looking at numbers. It just feels so wrong to me.
Niall (32:11)
Yeah, I’m reading the Liz Pelly book about Spotify at the moment, Mood Machine, and it’s very much like the idea that, you know, we’ve all, all, every artist is now in the same competitive market kind of thing, like there’s no escape from it, everybody’s thrown into the attention economy together. And, know, and then that’s not how, that’s not how music works, you know, you know, music is an emotional thing as we’re talking about, we’re talking about you it’s something that touches people. It’s a community. It’s like, but it’s not just, you know, the numbers on the screen and the number of streams you have and all that kind of stuff and playlists and all that stuff. yeah, I think it’s just really important.
Ólafur(32:51)
We’ve gone very far away from like a drum circle, you know? That’s always what I think about like the caveman with their drums in the circle, like, yeah, the whole point was just like, well, we don’t we can’t know what they were thinking back then. But throughout the thousands of years, like music, if you still look at music today, in indigenous cultures, it’s still about ritual is still about the community. It’s about getting together and communally bringing your systems to a higher level. That’s what it is. It’s not about the fucking number on Spotify. It can’t be. If it is, then we have to stop, you know.
Niall (33:32)
Yeah, yeah, we have to go touch grass musically and creatively anyway, so for sure.
