My mother’s death made me appreciate life so much more
Richie Egan is from Dublin but lives in Sweden these days. But with his latest release he is looking beyond that to the wider world and he doesn’t like what he sees. The man who is also a member of Irish noiseniks Redneck Manifesto is now on his fifth album with Jape. This Chemical
Sea is an electronic elegy for a broken planet and it doesn’t have many kind words for its most intelligent inhabitants either.
That said, you don’t become a double Choice Music Prize winner by bringing your message to the masses without killer tunes, and This Chemical Sea has those amidst the pathos and occasional despair.
He admits that for a number of reasons making this album was a real struggle. However, by collaborating closely with fellow Jape member Glenn Keating in Dublin, swapping music files by email, they have surfaced with a pearl.
‘Sometimes when I’m working on my own I just feel like banging my head against the wall. Glenn is great to work with, to bring ideas to,’ Egan says.
‘When you work on your own it’s like you become snow-blind and second-guess yourself all the time. There’s a great book called
Songwriters On Songwriting by Paul Zollo and in it he has interviewed songwriters such as Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and many other greats and the overriding theme is if you are actually thinking too much about what you are writing, it’s probably going to be bad.’
He collaborates with old friend Conor O’Brien from Villagers on the album and the two consummate songwriters have had many conversations about the process of songwriting.
‘We’ve always talked about working together,’ he says.
‘I had a song, Ribbon Ribbon
Ribbon, and Conor and I had hours of enjoyment at my home working on that. It wasn’t originally going to go on the album but then David Wrench (who also produced FKA Twigs and Caribou) got involved. He did a mix of it and I was blown away with it.
‘In making This Chemical Sea, a theme emerged about how we pollute the world and our bodies as well. I thought about the chemicals we put into our bodies and the ones already in our brains like serotonin and all the chemicals in the environment and I thought linking those made for a good theme and title for the album.’
It shouldn’t be inferred that this is a doom-fest. A biting wit seeps out of the album catching the listener by surprise. ‘You have to laugh,’ he says. ‘Gallows humour is the best kind, I think. It’s important to say something that is truthful but is also a bit ambiguous as well. I really took my time with the lyrics so that there would be layers of meaning for people to explore.’
All laughter subsides when a loved one passes away. Richie had to endure the heartache of his mother dying during the making of the album.
‘My mother passing away was the reason why it took an extra year for me to make the album,’ he says. ‘She was diagnosed with cancer and then five weeks later she was dead. It was such a shock for all the family. The only silver lining is that as a songwriter you refract all your experiences of being alive through your songs. When something like that happens it becomes fuel for your work in a way. You have to think about how amazing it is to be alive. I wrote a song called The
Heart’s Desire when I was doing a lot of meditating after my mother died. I was trying hard to focus on the instant that you are actually present in. All the problems that you think you have just evaporate.’
Richie confesses that his lyrics have always veered towards the dark side. But he adds: ‘Ironically, my mother’s death made me lighter because it made me appreciate life so much.
‘My partner and family are with me in Malmo. I have a baby girl so I don’t indulge in anything stronger than taking a drink. I’m not the kind of guy that is looking to go mad on drink in the morning or something.
‘You are surrounded by chemicals in the environment and then we put substances into our bodies and you just have get to thinking eventually, what am I getting out of that?’ Jape’s This Chemical Sea is
out now.