If I started singing the Barney song, every child would cry
Gavin James’s voice is a wonder of the music world, and his quivering falsetto could bring a tear to a glass eye. It is there in all its glory on his new album Only Ticket Home, released last month. However, the Dubliner admits his prize asset is also a bit of a curse.
‘If I started singing the Barney song, every kid would start crying,’ he admits with a laugh.
‘The songs might be a little happier in some ways on the new album, but if I tried to change or write to please an audience, I’m sure I would mess it up.’
Gavin, who broke though in 2012 with the song Say Hello and hit Ireland’s top five in 2015 with debut album Bitter Pill, says he wrote or completed most of the songs for Only Ticket Home, his second studio album, in January and that the timing may have added to its melancholy feeling.
‘The time I get to write mostly is always around the Christmas time and coming into January – I wrote the bulk of this album then too,’ he says.
‘I had written the chorus of the title track a couple of years ago and it was the last song we finished for the album. The verse is so melancholy and I didn’t want the title track to be sad. I wanted it to have a bit of a beat. I wrote the chorus thinking it might be as if you are in the pub after 10 pints of Guinness late at night and you’re having a sing song. Every performer feels a little nervous before their album is released, but I feel as happy as I could about how it has turned out.’
He needn’t have worried, even a little. He thinks the album ‘is out of this world’, so on the day of its release, he launched a CD copy of it from the Phoenix Park into the stratosphere attached to a weather balloon, with the help of ‘two scientist buddies’. And Only Ticket Home has certainly taken off – it has been streamed more than a million times since its release a little over a week ago, and Gavin’s three shows in Dublin’s Olympia Theatre in April next year sold out in a matter of hours. He has also just been announced as the headliner for this year’s New Year’s concert on Dublin’s Custom House Quay. Speaking about what giggoers can expect, he says: ‘I try now to do half a set acoustically and half with the band. I want to see if I can give people the best of both worlds.’ Although Gavin has spoken to me previously about how he was bullied as a teenager, he says he is by nature a happy-golucky person. He does, however, have friends who do struggle with mental health issues, and songs such as Put You Back Together from the new album touch upon the subject. ‘I know people who sometimes suffer from different types of depression and I wrote that song to make them feel better,’ he says.
The gregarious Dubliner has clocked up hundreds of air miles since he started his musical journey. At 27, he is enjoying playing to ever larger, more appreciative audiences worldwide, even when he feels the crowd might not be fully getting the gist of his onstage banter.
‘Every time I go away to different places, nobody understands a word I say half the time, but it would be much harder not to be myself,’ he says. ‘They’re not there to hear me trying to be smart or funny on stage anyway – no matter how much I’m enjoying myself, they’ve shown up to hear the songs.’
Only Ticket Home is out now. Gavin plays the New Year’s Festival Concert on Custom House Quay on December 31. See www.gavinjamesmusic.com for more dates.
‘Fans show up to hear the songs – not to hear me trying to be smart or funny on stage’