Adrian Crowley

‘The Wishing Seat’ - a shining moment among shining moments on Adrian Crowley’s latest album Season Of The Sparks - stands out for a most practical reason. It has a chorus! But then the Dublin-based Galwayman will tell you he’s always been writing them, just not necessarily choruses as you or I know them. It’s a little like his career to date, for after spending almost a decade on the sidelines, he is finally beginning to feel his way towards the centre. Or at least the kind of centre one aspires to when writing the most unique of ‘choruses’. 

“It was funny the way it happened,“ Adrian says of The Wishing Seat’s conventional turn. “I was joking about it with Cillian (McDonnel, drummer) and Steve (Shannon, producer). When they heard it for the first time, they said ‘there’s a chorus in it, what’s going on?’ It inserted itself, that’s all. I mean I do have my own kind of choruses which are a part of a line following the same cord structure and melody of the rest of the song, but I still call it a chorus!”

It’s less than eighteen months since Crowley snuck out the sublime Long Distance Swimmer, an album which repeated play by repeated play slow burnt its way towards picking up a Choice Music Prize nomination and a growing number of fans. And while the windows of HMV’s Grafton Street flagship store weren’t quite adorned with promotional posters this time around, more than a slight whiff of expectancy surrounded the release of his fifth album earlier this month. A new sensation he was acutely aware of.

“I was conscious of it but I had to clear it from my mind. I didn’t allow it into the studio but once it was all finished, I couldn’t help but ponder that people were expecting, waiting for it. For the last one, it seemed like it didn’t really matter if I waited a year, I didn’t perceive of a rush to release it and I got used to that situation. This was the first time where I felt suspense.”

It’s not the only thing he’s become accustomed to of late. Though as modest as they come, Adrian knows his stock has risen to a point where he’s rightly recognised as one of the country’s foremost artists. Having gotten “used to being left out of any kind of list to the point where I stopped even caring about lists”, he says being catapulted to the upper reaches of the Irish Times’ ‘50 best Irish music acts right now’ last month really does make a difference, “even if you’d like to believe it doesn’t…”

You see Crowley’s music is the type you fall in love with and stay in love with, a feat all the rarer in the age of the iPod and the download. As far back as 2001’s When You Are Here You Are Family (when this writer’s interest was first pricked) and its follow up A Northern Counrty, endurance, and not immediacy became his hallmarks. And it’s primarily down to a world introduced that is all of Crowley’s making – vivid imagery pouring out of a vivid imagination – a means of writing he still finds hard to describe.  

“I love the process of how things can emerge without knowing why and then recognising things from experiences. I kind of feel my way through it and if I don’t like the feeling, I’ll stop and let something else come,” he says.

“I think it seems to be a blend of things that I’ve experienced and things that emerge from my… I was just going to say something my son always says, whenever he says the word brain, he says brrrrrrrain. I’ve been hanging around kids too much. Sorry.”

In the same way he seems to vet every word he uses to answer each question, you can only imagine the sort of care and painstaking detail that goes into penning each song. Last time we spoke, Adrian told Ragged Words how he unsurprisingly “focuses so hard on words.” Is it the case then that those words need to work equally well alone on the page, before an instrument is even picked up?

“Yeah, I do. If I’m going to be satisfied with it, it has to satisfy these different, I wouldn’t say parameters because that’s very cold but it can’t be a case of just words fitting into the spaces lent by the music. For me it has to have a sense of fulfilment on the different levels, not just on the music side. I think I might have a little bit of an obsession with having the words stand alone and I wouldn’t be happy if it didn’t work like that as well.”

“Not that I flick back over and go ‘oh yes, I’m very happy with that’ (laughs).

He is happy with Season Of The Sparks though and usually that’s not the case in the immediate aftermath of a new one. And as a UK release and European release awaits later in the summer, it’s another new sensation he seems to be enjoying.

“I think it’s my favourite anyway,” he says. “Usually after finishing an album, I never like it straight away but I feel like if I walked into a room and not realising what was being played, I might say ‘what’s that’ whereas before I would have known what it was instantly and left the room.”