Junior Brother has released a great new music video for the song ‘This Is My Body’, from the forthcoming album The Great Irish Famine, which is out September 2nd via Irish label Strange Brew.
After ‘No Snitch’, ‘This Is My Body’ addresses the decaying, changing nature of our physical vessels, as people navigate relationship over time.
Directed by Ellius Grace, the video sees actor Bryan Quinn embody various objects in and out of the home to underscore the theme.
“The song is about being a human being. The anxiety of self-image, and the sheer heights of absurdity humans go to denigrate ourselves, all for only being utterly human. If we’re lucky, we find our soulmate, who can heighten this self-loathing in the loathing self – But a soul mate mates with soul, and that can only grow stronger as body bobs and weaves through a nourished life.”
Ronan Kealy
Junior Brother tour dates are here and look like this:
21st August – Footsbarn Theatre – Ballynabuck @ 7:00pm, Dingle
24th September – Night & Day Festival 2022 @ 7:00pm, Castlerea
28th October – The Button Factory @ 7:30pm, Dublin
Tickets are available HERE
Irish Famine Tracklisting / artwork
- Opening
- Tell Me I’m A Fool
- No Country For Young Men
- Daly’s Well
- Life’s New Haircut
- Good Friday
- Given In The Dark
- King Jessup’s Nine Trails
- This Is My Body
- No More Dogs
- Landlord’s Hum
- No Snitch
- The Long Meadows
Produced by: Julie MacLarnon and Ronan Kealy
Mixing and Additional Production: John “Spud” Murphy
Recorded onto 2″ Tape at Analogue Catalogue Studios, Rathfriland, Co. Down. Additional recording completed in Guerrilla Sound Studios, North Strand, Dublin and Winton Mews, Rathgar, Dublin.
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This Is My Body Lyrics
This is my body now, like it or not.
The price of exercise when the exercising stops.
She said she’d love me with a body or without, I find that hard to believe, when I look down and I can’t see my feet.
This is my body now, I think I must accept.
Feed a man for seven years and he’ll widen his neck.
And now I’m stood here, in front of my own reflection
Stripped from head to toe,
How can she love a human potato?
Now my lips are bare. I’m ready to be kissed.
My clothes are on the floor, and there’s no hiding anymore.
She said she’d love me with a body or without I find that hard to believe, when I look down and can’t see my feet.
I find that hard to swallow, when the words ‘I love you’ follow,
I can’t get on board, when I split clothes she can’t afford,
Stripped from head to toe,
how can she love me?
I don’t know
This flesh will perish, and no love lost.
And we’ll get nourished, and at no cost.
This flesh will perish, and at no cost.
And we’ll get nourished, and no love lost
Speaking about the themes across the album Kealy further explains, “I was very conscious to bring each element of the debut into this follow-up, but dramatically dig ten times deeper and stretch ten times further down into each avenue”. “No Snitch” soars amidst darkly comic self-reflection (“This Is My Body”), anxious reflexes on modern living (“No Country For Young Men”), and the painful role the past plays in a nation’s present (“King Jessup’s Nine Trials”).
Both startlingly dynamic and profoundly accomplished, The Great Irish Famine reflects fall-out of trauma both personal and universal, national, and international, minor, and mountainous, historic, and contemporary – all uncompromisingly conveyed through the magnetic, emotionally potent vision of a one-of-a-kind artist at the top of his game.
An idiosyncratic, challenging and richly lyrical singer/ songwriter, Junior Brother is the pseudonym of Co. Kerry, Ireland singer Ronan Kealy. Chosen as The Irish Times’ Best Irish Act of 2019 and nominated for the 2019 Choice Music Prize for Album of the Year, Junior Brother has built a rabid following thanks to unmissable live shows, and music both excitingly forward-looking and anciently evocative. His strange stories unfold with reckless abandon upon a distinctive guitar and foot tambourine accompaniment, influenced as much by the avant-garde as music from the Middle Ages and his home place in rural Ireland.
