It’s safe to say that over the last number of years the people’s collective relationship with the acoustic guitar has been somewhat tumultuous. There was a time when the zenith of authenticity in our domestic music scene was watching some bootcutted no-name warble his way through Hallelujah. No house party was spared the from inevitable indignity of a friend of a friend working themselves into a lather banging out Save Tonight to the packed Whelan’s of their mind’s eye. Bear in mind that David Gray’s White Ladder remains the biggest selling album in our country’s history.
It took a special talent to salvage the reputation of the humble six-string, and it came in the shape of the expansive, pastoral soundscapes of Dublin suburbanite Cian Nugent. Having first garnered international attention through his meandering, technically staggering, John Fahey indebted solo debut, Doubles. Nugent went on to flesh out his sound into fittingly gargantuan-in-scope slabs of psychedelia for follow up Born with the Caul with the help of his wonderful band The Cosmos (who feature Conor Lumsden on bass, Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh on viola, Brendan Jenkinson on organ and David Lacey on drums).
Restless in spirit, Nugent has extensively travelled Europe and America showcasing his unique take on folk and rock styles. This ceaseless forward momentum is mirrored in the shape shifting nature of his output, not least of all on his latest, the remarkable Night Fiction. His first foray into singer-songwriter fare, Night Fiction takes cues from the Velvet Underground’s quieter moments, On the Beach era Neil Young and the inscrutable modern twang of Cass McCombs, Nugent and company have delivered a stunning collection of proper *songs* to exceed even the loftiest of expectations. We met Nugent, sodden having braved the treacherous roads of Storm Desmond, to discuss the public transport, Nashville secrets and finer points of finding one’s own voice.
So, the new record is obviously something of a departure considering you are singing on the majority of the songs. It seem’s like you’ve been kind of threatening to for a while now.
Yeah, I’ve been writing songs for what feels like a while now. So when people keep on saying to me that it’s a real departure, it doesn’t feel like one to me. My mother has listened to it and she said, ‘Hmm, I don’t know if people who like your old stuff will like this. I like it, don’t worry, but I don’t know if other people will’. So, I was like ‘What’s that supposed to mean! Why would you say that?’. To me, it really doesn’t feel that different except that I’m singing.
So, why did you decide now was the time to do a fully vocal album? Was the process of getting to this point so drawn out that it didn’t feel like a particularly dramatic upheaval?
I guess so, yeah. My tastes have changed over time and I don’t think I could really do an album like the previous one again just because it’s not where I’m at. I’ve wanted to do a songs record for a long time but it had to wait until I felt I had the skill to it. When I was younger I really didn’t know how I wanted to sing or how I wanted to write lyrics and it took a while to get to a point where I could say to myself, ‘Yeah I can do this now.’
The singing thing can be difficult. Being Irish and playing rock music, it can be difficult to sing in your own accent and then you don’t want to be putting on an American accent. There isn’t much of a precedent for singing in an accent like mine, a middle class Dublin accent. When you think of people singing in an ‘Irish accent’ you think of something like a 100 years ago, working class, Dublin accent. So, I think it’s important for people to sing in their own accents and I guess I didn’t really know how to until recently. I guess it’s an accumulation of things I wanted to but hadn’t really *felt* ready.
It’s funny to think that if you’d done this from the get-go or if you hadn’t accrued so much attention off the back of your instrumental work, then you wouldn’t have to talk so regularly and in such detail about something that with other artists would just be accepted without any second guessing – that’s just how their voice sounds. Is it strange to have something as personal as your voice being put under so much more?
I suppose so. Another thing is, for the last while I’ve been doing this other band, the Cryboys, with Dylan *[Phillips]* from Dinah Brand, Eddie *[Kenrick]* from the #1s and Ruan Van Vliet *[drummer in too many Dublin bands to name]*. I got used to singing through that. Dylan has actually been really helpful with regards to writing songs and singing and he’s another big believer in the idea that you have to sing in your own accent. He’s been a big inspiration and really encouraging from when I started writing more traditional ‘songs’.
Any Cryboys releases on the horizon?
We’ve been playing for about three years and have plenty of songs and we’re always talking about how we want to record them but just haven’t really gotten around to it yet. I’m looking forward to it, I really like the songs and think they’re going to make a great record when we sit down and do it. Cryboys was a big part of getting me used to singing, kind of a gateway drug to what I’m doing now. So, because of that, none of this has really felt like too big a transition to me but I can see why other people would be like, ‘Where the hell did this come from?’
This is your first release with the American label Woodsist. How did that come about?
It was actually through Kevin Morby, from the bands Woods and The Babies, and he does solo stuff too. I got to be friends with him after meeting him in America about two years ago. He’s a very sweet, nice man and was really encouraging about my stuff and asked who released my records. So he put me in touch with Jeremy *[Earl]* – also of Woods and head of Woodsist – and put in a good word. I already had the record made at this point. So Jeremy said he’d love to put it out. Which was great since I really didn’t know if anyone would put it out at that stage.
Really? That’s pretty shocking considering it’s definitely the most traditionally accessible thing you’ve done so far. Did that uncertainty on the part of others make you second guess the decision to sing?
It wasn’t great to have some of the first feedback I got, this being feedback from people who liked my earlier stuff, be negative. So it did make me doubt myself. I can understand why people who are primarily into instrumental music might not take to it immediately. It’s not something that bears worrying about though I don’t think. I think it’s more important to be into it yourself than anything else. I could have done another instrumental album, but I don’t think I really would have been that into it.
Did you know that as soon as you were finished Born with the Caul, that you wanted to diversify for the next release?
I didn’t really know what I wanted to do then. It took a while. After the record came out I did a tour with Angel Olsen. For those shows I was playing without a band with pretty much an even split between instrumental stuff and singing. Through doing that I realised I was enjoying singing songs more.
Would you that tour opened your eyes to the different feeling elicited through playing a song-driven set to an audience compared to a more drawn-out, experimental set.
I don’t really know. I guess a lot of the time, with both sets, I’m kind of too caught up in the actual performance itself to gauge how well anything is going over. I think the main thing wasn’t exactly going, ‘Oh, I want this to go over better with a folk crowd,’ it was more that I was just tired of playing instrumental stuff. Since the beginning of playing instrumental you’re always aware it’s a bit of an ask for an audience to say ‘do you want to listen to an acoustic guitar for an hour?’ but I was so used to that *[style]* anyway that if I was going to pack that in for the sake of an audience, I would have packed it in already.
Excluding the audience reaction, do you find the act of what you’re doing now provides you, the performer, a different experience? Is it much of a difference for you between playing a 20 minute track alone or playing one of the newies with band?
Well certainly playing with a band in general is very different. It’s always more exciting to play with a band since there is something to feed off. I mean, the singing is more challenging on both a technical level and on a nerves level. Maybe I was feeling a bit unchallenged by playing acoustic guitar stuff. I’d gotten into a bit of a funk with it.
Just going through the motions? I know that might sound a little too harsh…
A little bit sometimes maybe. I’d just kind of gotten a bit stuck creatively with the instrumental stuff, I kind of just lost the inspiration to do it.
I wonder within this kind of ‘new-folk’ guitar scene you’re involved in, is there still a culture of exchange of playing techniques. Do people sit down as players as opposed to songwriters and swap secrets?
Well, William Tyler for example is a proper Nashville player. Solo he does more finger-picking stuff but I love hearing him play in a more straightforward lead capacity like the stuff he does with Lampchop or did with the Silver Jews. He’s a really beautiful guitarist in that style. So I’ve definitely asked him to show me some Nashville stuff and he’s showed me little tricks, but I’ve never really got to properly pick his brain about it. Me and Steve Gunn made a record together and of course throughout that I’d be asking him, ‘What’s that thing you did there?’ or we’d be talking about tunings. It’s the same with Ryley Walker, we toured together and we’ve certainly picked each other’s brains and traded different stuff.
Do you think with those conversations you’re engaging with each other more in terms of trying to get the most out of the instrument rather than as songwriters?
I mean I think they feed into each other. Seeing how other people write songs, sometime it does start with a guitar part or whatever. With the new record a bunch of it started as stuff Ryley and I would send each other. We’d send videos back and forth, I’d send him something and he’d say ‘Yeah, that’s good!’ and then he’d send me a video back, and he’s *really* good at guitar, so some of the stuff he’d send me back I’d be like… Jesus! It was really inspiring. I didn’t want to feel like it was all slipping away, it was a good way of keeping me working at it.
As a player you mean?
Well, yeah. But you have to have something to play.
When you began the writing process for this record and decided that it was going to be a vocal-driven, did you have to condition yourself to go about writing a different way? Were you always note-taker or did you have to consciously change your process?
Well with doing Cryboys I’d been writing songs, so I got into a little bit of a routine with writing. I knew I wanted these to be a little bit different a style of song, I didn’t want them to seem like a song I’d do with Cryboys but with a different band, which I imagine might be a little bit confusing for people considering nobody has really heard Cryboys! They are kind of more rock-y songs and I wanted this album to be a little bit quieter. I had kind of gotten into a bit of a habit of writing lyrics in my phone or singing a bit of a melody into an iPhone memo as I’m walking down the road, just piecing things together over time. I’ve never really been one to sit down and write a song in one go. Even with writing instrumental stuff it’s always been a matter of piecing it together over time until it worked as a whole.
So, With some of the longer stuff, say the Houses of Parliament from Born with the Caul, there are several distinct sections in that. In the process of writing something like that would you essentially write a number of independent songs and fit them together?
A little bit yeah. The Houses of Parliament came up from the band jamming parts at practice. I’d record all the practices and listen back and think this part is good and this part went into that part and it worked well. There was an early recording of that, which was mostly improvised, but was almost the structure of how the song ended up being. With the longer songs it was never intentional to have them long at the start. It was just a matter of seeing how long did they need to be. When you’re playing them, you realise you need all these different bits. If you were writing you don’t decide to make your sentences longer than they need to be, you try to say things in as concise a way as possible. But sometimes, if you’ve a lot to say, sentences can end up going on for a long time. I wanted to do shorter songs, that was definitely a decision I made. I really wanted to do ‘songs’ in the more traditional sense. And maybe for the next record I’d kind of like to maybe go – well, I don’t really know what I’m planning – but maybe have the structures be a little bit more unusual or try and bring in some of the older stuff, I don’t really know yet.
So you feel like you’ve achieved something with record that you’d set out to do in the first place.
Yeah. I feel like in order to move on I needed to do this one *this* way.
Do you think that just through the virtue of employing lyrics it’s easier to be more concise? Does the instrumental stuff have to be longer because you’re limiting your tools of expression? Obviously lyrics have their own oblique nature, but do you think it’s easier to say what you want to say through the words as well as the music?
Yeah there is that. But as I said, with this album there was definitely an effort to keep things short, to stop ourselves from keeping things going on too much.
Do you feel like you’ve let things go on too much in the past?
Well not too much. There were definitely places where I thought ‘this could end up being a long song’ and I didn’t really let them because I wanted to keep it within the format as an album as a traditional thing. That said, there is one long song on there.
It’s funny though, even within that long song, you’ve got a middle section that is probably one of the poppiest sections on the record.
It is kind of a short song in the middle. It just worked out that way.
The last record was released as Cian Nugent and the Cosmos where this one is just under your name. What was your reasoning behind that?
Well because it was a singing songs album. Like I said, with the previous album they were songs that we wrote all together, whereas these are songs that I wrote on my own and brought to the band and we arranged them. It just felt like more a solo album. I’d written all the songs on my own, there wasn’t too much jamming them out in practice and seeing where they went. Obviously that band are really great and they arranged them in a way that suited the songs. It felt like the right thing to do. I also kind of felt that putting something out as Cian Nugent and the Cosmos made it seem kind of like a side project – in certain circles it was like the last record wasn’t really looked on as a ‘proper’ album. That’s just my own guess, but it looks stronger to have it under one name.
Do you think it felt like more of personal statement because of the introduction of lyrics.
I think it kind of did.
That’s interesting to hear you say considering your background in instrumental music. A lot of people operating in a similar sphere would maybe pooh-pooh the idea that singing somehow makes a piece more personal or profound.
I think a solo song that’s instrumental is going to be very personal. But, the last record, half of it was the Houses of Parliament which we wrote all together. Just by the nature of writing something all together it’s not going to be particularly *personal*. That’s not to say that it’s any less strong. I wouldn’t say there is anything inherently impersonal about instrumental music. Like, the first album was just under my own name [Doubles] and that was very personal to me. I think that’s just the difference of it being a band vision as opposed to just to the one person. Not to lessen their vision in any way.
And finally, drawing on your wealth of experience as a suburban man, what’s the most remarkable thing you’ve ever seen on the DART?
It’s a tough question. I remember once I got my hair set on fire on the way to school when I was about 14. One time I was on the DART with Steve Gunn and John Truscinski, we were all staying out in my Mum’s house in Shankill and we were getting the DART into town so we had guitar cases and stuff with us, snare and cymbals and so on. This rough looking lad came on and walked up to us and said ‘Sorry lads, I have to ask yiz, are you coming from Bono’s, are you the lads playing on his new album?’ So, without really thinking I said yeah so he was like, ‘That’s fuckin’ amazing man’. So he wandered off and sat on his own for a bit and a couple of minutes later he comes back over with a little notebook and says, ‘Listen lads, could I get your autograph?’ So I obviously didn’t really know how to react to this so I just wrote my name as I write my name as usual. Then your man handed Steve the notepad and he just did an indecipherable scribble. I knew right away that that is obviously what you’re supposed to do. Afterwards I was worried, because he had my name, part of me was scared he’d track me down like ‘Why’d you lie to me, man?!’ but then I also kind of hoped he’d write in to Hot Press or something, break the story.
You could have just as easily been coming from Enya’s gaff as well…
Could have been! Although if the guy thought about, I’m sure he would have been able to think there’s probably going to be a taxi involved if you’re going to Bono’s house. Presumably he’s not mean enough to make you get the DART.
Cian Nugent’s Night Fiction is out from Friday 29th January on Woodsist. He plays a launch gig on Friday 12th February, playing with the Cosmos, and with support on the night from Al McKay (of Dick Diver) and Bad Sea.
Words: Danny Wilson
Photos: Cáit Fahey
