For Crowley, growing up in rural Galway during the 70s and 80s, personal imagination was certainly key. Country life leaves a lot more blank time and space to be filled in so is it possible that this distance and isolation in his early life has some effect on the work of his adulthood?
“Yeah, I think it does,” he says. “I’m not sure in what literal sense but I find more and more that I feel the effect of growing up on the edge of the Atlantic, all the time. I always go back to it in everything, even if it’s just to compare where I live now. I think that kind of thing can make you very independent, can make you think very independently. For a start, there’s no peer group. There’s very few kids around your age, outside of school. Yeah, I suppose it must have had a really big effect on what I’ve done later in life.”
While never quite settling into the famed Dublin singer-songwriter scene around the turn of the century, Crowley instead found a home with the Fence Collective in Scotland. The loose amalgam of singer-songwriters, based in the sleepy fishing-village of Anstruther, near Fife, is headed by King Creosote and Crowley describes the welcoming feeling there as unlike any he has experienced elsewhere.
“That really was an epiphany going over there for the first time and being a part of what they do,” he says. “There’s something very psychological about stepping away like that, discovering something and seeing what you do out of the context of where you’re from. It’s a real magnifying glass.”
“There was a side to the whole thing that’s really hard to describe, but it is very friendly. Really, really giving. Not one it of bad attitude or bitterness or egotism. It was amazing. It’s not like I’d got used to those things, I never came across any kind of adversity or negativity before that anyway but it’s just to see that amount of people in one spot, in a really small place, with so much positive energy, it was overwhelming. I hadn’t seen that before. They were all very welcoming. So much great music to discover as well and great audiences to discover as well. People that were so happy to be there and really interested in listening. It’s a kind of dream, you know?”
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUtawMJxLiw?rel=0]
In some ways, the link to traditional folk music and culture that is quite strong among the Fence Collective is mirrored in the countryside of the west of Ireland, where the art of story-telling is far from lost. Crowley agrees that particular skill might have an influence on him now. “Yeah, that’s true. It’s something I love anyway and I just realised that I love it a few years ago. Not coming from any particular tradition that I know of, it just comes down to the simple fact of loving to tell a story and loving to listen to one. I think that has relevance to what I do as well.You have to sketch it out and place into someone else mind. You have to be able to tell it in a way that is not too self-conscious I suppose.”
While Crowley’s confidence might falter at certain times in the making of a given album, there is little time for self-consciousness once the record is out in the world. Events like winning the Choice prize and signing to legendary Scottish label Chemikal Underground have provided him with the external touchstones needed to restore confidence and confirm ambition and the reaction to Three Birds has been universally positive. Looking back on the lengthy process of making it, Crowley finds that even the hardest moments were soon overcome and he realized the only pressure on him was coming from inside.
“There was a point last year when I hadn’t finished yet and I was wondering when it was going to be done, but that was no big deal,” he says. “I was just eager to see whatever it was, to see it in a tangible way. You kind of need that because for something that exists in your mind for months and months on end, it’s only human nature to hope that very soon it is going to bear some kind of fruit. That you can look at. It’s like a cycle and I think we’re all made into cycles of different kinds and if there’s too much of a long wait, we feel like there’s something wrong.”
Thankfully, that wait is over.
