It’s a Brave try from Keenan
David’s debut album is A Beginner’s Guide
‘‘ It was a matter of being able to go out into the world and to f ****** live so I could earn the right to sing the songs.
Singer-songwriter David Keenan first came to the public’s attention when a video of him singing in a taxi went viral back in 2015.
Everybody at the time was predicting big things for him on the back of his catchy song El Paso, which David said he wrote some five years previously when he was still only 15-year-old.
Now five years later, the Dundalk man has finally released his debut album entitled A Beginner’s Guide To Bravery.
David told us: “The album is coming out the 10th of January, brother. For me, it seems like a good starting point.”
Now 26-years-old, it’s been a long and winding road for David to get to the point where he felt, he says, ready to release an album.
“It’s a matter of living life. We can’t control which way the wind blows. A lot of things had to align for me to make the album,” he proffered.
“I could’ve made it last year; I could’ve it made the year before. I’ve been releasing EPS for the last numbers of years, self-releasing them.
“But it was a matter of being able to go out into the world and to f ****** live so I could earn the right to sing the songs. I also wanted the record to be a cohesive narrative from beginning to end.
“Although every song on the album is individual, they’re all connected to this story – the story of the album. So, for that to align, I had to sit and I had to wait and I had to do the work on a daily basis and to try to coax this into fruition. Also, I had to get a band that I could trust and love – and build an understanding. That’s what took time.”
He continued: “But you’re not just born a songwriter, you have to go out and become educated in life and you have to earn the right to sign songs.
“As I said, I thought I was ready a couple of years ago, but everything happens, in perfection, as it should happen. It’s coming out in January – it’s coming out just exactly when it should come out.”
Asked about what themes or subject matters he was attempting to tackle on the album, he said: “Everything that I experienced in the last four years really of my life, in terms of leaving my hometown, moving abroad, moving to Dublin. So, they’re the geographics. Obviously travelling around the world for the first time.
Picking up different influences along the way.
“But in terms of the inner landscapes, I was addressing fears, I was addressing traumas, addressing my own beliefs, questioning things – that’s what the song is. The song is a condescended memory of all your experiences. You go out and you live life. The life informs the output, which is the song.
“But in this record I wanted to map, as I said, my own journeys of exploration within myself and ‘without’ over the last number of years – and that’s what the songs featured on the album are laid out the way they do. But even musically, I wanted to map the joys of the experience, the f ****** miseries, the heartaches, the victories, the understandings, falling in love, falling f ****** out of love, self-destruction.
“And then at the end of the record there’s sense of self-expectation by the time we get to the end. That’s what the process of recording was for me as well. It’s live album; it was recorded over a week…. It’s live, it’s all live, there’s very little overdubs on it. I wanted to capture the reality of what I was saying, what I was feeling, what I was seeing when the songs were coming, were I was at. So, the only way for me to do that was to do it live, as live as possible. So, it’s live, it’s an ‘alive’ record.”