Dublin singer-songwriter Paddy Hanna gave up on music in the couple of years before his fifth album Oylegate was made.
Family and friends convinced him to keep at it, and Gilla Band producer and collaborator Daniel Fox also encouraged this album, after a trad-style release was abandoned.
And we are thankful for it, as Oylegate is the return of an auteur artist who follows his own songwriting nous and nose.
Oylegate was written while watching Solaris with the sound off at home and is “a journey through the euphoric highs and crushing lows of parenthood”, on piano and it features Hanna’s trademark classic songwriting-tinged craft, and the superlative ‘Harry Dean’ and ‘Oylegate Station’ – songs that have a “contrast of warmth and detachment, of intimate revelation and surreal detour.”
The album was named after a small town in Wexford.
Below, Paddy shares his thoughts on each of the nine songs on the record.
1. No Sleep for Life
My original intention was for this to be a solo piano tune, however, once we broke out the arpeggiators that changed real fast. There was an outro that was written for this song but it was left on the cutting room floor as Dan (Fox, Producer) felt it went on too long. It might be cool to release a full version in the future, we shall see.
2. Oylegate Station
I met a lovely chap in Wexford town and we got to chatting about this song, he said to me “what’s the story with Oylegate station? there’s no real station in Oylegate”. Rather mysteriously I told him that perhaps there is. We parted ways with that mystery still in the air.
3. Harry Dean
I’m of the opinion that I’m a better singer live then in the recording studio, this might seem like an odd point but let me explain. While onstage you have a crowd to vibe off, perhaps your at a festival and your having a good time, so while it may seem like there’s much more pressure on you singing live, I find it to be the opposite.
In the studio the pressure comes from getting the perfect take, and that can put a large amount of strain on the voice, also you have to contend with the fact that the take your happiest with will be the take that goes out into the ether for all to hear, so if you don’t nail that take it will haunt you forever. This was the situation I was presented with while recording Harry Dean, the pressure to get a great take really got to me, so much so that I booked an entire day in the studio solely to do the vocal on this track. In order to get me to sing at the level of confidence required, Dan would shout “More Michael Bolton” into my headphones. It was his only instruction and he repeated it till we had the take.
4. Thumbtack Thicky
I don’t tend to write songs about getting back at someone, like ‘Shoutout to my ex’ by Little Mix or something like that, but I found myself one day realising that a person with whom I used to be friends with no longer had power over me. Let me try to elaborate on that without naming names.
Very early on in my career I had a close friend who turned out to be a manipulative scumbag, in my innocence, I would share ideas with him and we had great plans to start a band together, what I didn’t know was that he was using me to harvest said ideas and put them to his own use.
Once I became surplus to requirements, he kicked me to the curb and went on to have a fairly decent career. This essentially ruined my life, and it took years to recover from the betrayal, psychologically he broke me down as the best manipulators can, he lived in my head like an unwelcome occupant for years, he had robbed me of my confidence.
However, about a year ago, while making this record and having been held up emotionally by my wife and family, I found myself laughing at the thought of this individual. In that moment, I realised he had no more power over me, and that he was all but booted from my subconscious. In that moment three things happened, I gave my wife a big hug, I changed from walking to skipping and perhaps most importantly, I came up with the lyrics for this song. The ending words are “I’m done talking about it, I’ve got the last fucking word and it feels real good”.
5. Tuscon Arizona
How do you interpret someone else’s grief? Now there’s a question. I found myself in a situation where I was deeply moved by a friend’s grief and wanted to write about it, but I have to say I felt selfish about it, who am I to take their situation and weave a tune out of it? As a compromise I took my friends situation and reimagined it as a story of a vampire’s last day on earth. The song is a cypher too, I encourage you to try and solve it.
6. Caterpillar Wine
This song has been rattling around since 2018, originally it was intended for my album The Hill from 2020, but we felt it needed proper orchestration and that it wouldn’t have fit with the rest of the record, flash forward to 2024 and it finds new life as a synth tune, turns out we didn’t need lush orchestration after all, just a Juno and a fender Rhodes.
7. Martha
I have gone on the record about this tune all ready, but allow me to repeat myself, I DO NOT LIKE THIS SONG. However. Producer Dan Fox liked it very much, and he fought tooth and claw to keep it on the album, and I’d be a fool not to take his passionate defence of the song to heart. If would appear though that he head a point, folks seem to really like the song so I was right to let him humble me.
8. Pure Imbalance
So here’s how this tune came about. While I was putting together a demo for ‘Pure Imbalance’, I recorded a click track using a Korg drum machine I had. I liked the idea of using an old drum machine for clicks rather then a shitty Pro Yools click track.
Anyways I pressed record and went to make a cup of tea. When I got back there was about 7 and a half minutes of click recorded, so I started recording piano. The tune itself was of average length, about 4 minutes, but as I ended the song I saw there was 3 and a half minutes of click left, so I started improvising on the piano. When I sent the demo to Dan I told him to give the song a listen but ignore the 3 and a half minutes of random vamping at the end. It turned out however that the random vamping was his favourite part of the song, so after some convincing we recorded the song just as it was in the demo. This, my friends, is what a great producer brings to the table.
9. I Won’t Be Afraid
My original version of this song was written on an acoustic guitar and was a stripped back, bare bones kind of tune, in fact it was so bare bones that it languished in my demo vault for years, it just never found its place in my mix of songs.
So, I was very surprised when Dan selected it as a song he liked from the 20 or so demos I’d sent him, I suppose this surprise interest of his encouraged me to explore the song further. While mucking about with the song I tried to add some piano lines to it, what I didn’t know have we was that the gain on my preamp was dangerously high and when I hit a key on the piano it made a horrifying bass racket, this proved to be a eureka moment. In order to cut through the bare bones element of the song, I layered it up with purposely near rattling abrasive synth sounds, and before I knew it to song came to life before my eyes. Accidents are something to be cherished when making music, always remember that.
Paddy’s Irish tour starts April 17th and takes in Wexford, Belfast, Cork before Festivals shows at When Next We Meet and Beyond the Pale.
