The Bad Arts 010: Paddy Hanna
Paddy Hanna talks about the Trad album that became his terrific fifth LP Oylegate, fatherhood, Solaris, synths, and disastrous audience encounters.
Over a decade ago, Paddy Hanna released his remarkable debut solo album Leafy Stiletto, this heralded a new chapter in his career, outside of Grand Pocket Orchestra, and introduced audiences to a world of lush guitar melodies, vivacious vocals and an overall tenderness felt in the album’s production. Ten years on, and a discography that has never faltered in capturing Hanna’s singular voice and expressive sound, Leafy Stiletto is a timeless classic.
Hanna followed this masterpiece with three more musically accomplished, lyrically thrilling and stylistically dynamic albums that have garnered the title “a musician’s musician.” Amongst Hanna’s artistic attributes, which make his music so captivating, are his chameleonic spirit, his ability to create immersive worlds and his extraordinary aptitude to weave a hooky chorus into his vast compositions. These elements abound in his latest offering, Oylegate, a tremendously expansive synth-driven record that, as is the case with all of his LPs, reveals another side of Paddy Hanna.
The musical side of his work is endlessly mesmerising and a perfect backdrop for a sprinkling of pop culture references with Julie Andrews, Frank Sinatra, Yoko Ono and Barry White making appearances across his discography. If that’s not the definition of a dream blunt rotation, I don’t know what is. Throughout, movie soundtracks and composers such as Riz Ortolani and Ennio Morricone have provided as much influence to his always invigorating and intricate arrangements as Burt Bacharach, with whom Paddy joined on stage for a rendition of ‘Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head’ in 2019. Hanna has shown time and again in his material a natural aptitude for crafting timeless and infectious hooks woven into songs that reflect his warm and unique personality.
Speaking over Zoom, Paddy—always an entertaining conversationalist ready with hilarious anecdotes, thoughtful explorations into his creative process and some of the best horror film recommendations—discussed how Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris was vital in unlocking the door to get to Oylegate, his fruitful working relationship with Daniel Fox, his daughter’s favourite song from his wonderful fifth LP and more…such as climbing a lamp post during mid-set.
TBA: In the press release for Oylegate, you say, “I used to pride myself on my ability to take a hit and keep moving, but this felt like a knockout blow. I was done.” This was after you released your fourth album Imagine I’m Dreaming in 2022. What was it about that time and that release that had such a serious impact on you?
Paddy Hanna: When we were coming off 2023, which was not a great year either, there was just a lot of having to convince people behind the scenes that we were worth a damn. There was a lot of that, you know?
Around that time, I released my fourth record, I’d just gotten married and we were expecting our daughter. We recorded Imagine I’m Dreaming in The Meadow and everything felt super good. There was this almost cosmic sense of ‘This will be the one’ or whatever. Not only did the album underperform, it underperformed with a capital U. When it came out, I was on the radio and they asked me what gigs I had coming up and I had to say on live radio that I’d no shows booked. That was a real ouch moment. It was a combination of things from having that sense of ‘Come on, this is your moment’ to then not only is it not your moment, but it's really not your moment. Then, I became a stay-at-home dad once my wife’s maternity leave ended and was doing that for about two years. So, I was going through that and it's hard work. At the same time, I was looking at my life choices in the eye and just been like, ‘Fuck, did I fuck this one up?’. It was a tough time. I was exhausted, I was broke and for the first time I was like, ‘I think I'm done. I'm completely and utterly done.’
I was talking to someone recently and he asked me if it felt good being done because he’d spoken to a few people who’d made peace with their music and had come to feel that they were ok with that. I was like, ‘No, unfortunately, this wasn't one of those.’ I was rehearsing speeches in my head about what I would tell my kids when they were old enough to know [I make music] and I was thinking of where I would hide all the evidence that I'd ever been involved in music. I didn't want the world to know. Along with that, I had this sense of letting my family down and you've let everyone down. I was like, ‘My wife married a loser’ and things like that. It stank! I was just left alone in my head and my head was being a dick.
TBA: I imagine adjusting to a new routine of being a stay-at-home dad, having a lot more time by yourself with a baby, and being tired wouldn’t be great for anyone’s mental health.
Paddy Hanna: Yeah, it was not good and, of course, you've got to prioritise the little ones. I was pretty much done but not in a good way because I know there are people who pack it in but they do so in a way where they’re like, ‘Yeah, I had my fun and now it’s time to move on to the next journey.’ I wasn't there, though. You don't stick around as long as I have without being either really stupid or really tough. I'd like to think I'm not the first one but this time around my normally strong jaw couldn't take the knocks anymore and I was just finished.
TBA: If I feel like I’ve done a bad job on a particular piece I can get very in my head and self-conscious and want to never write again. Music is an integral part of your identity and as a songwriter your work requires you to root around your head and do a lot of self-reflection, which is really hard. During that time, when you were finished, were you scared to write again?
Paddy Hanna: Yeah, sort of. It was a strange series of events. Before I gave up, I had what can only be described as a period of manic creativity which, for me and I'm sure this might be the case for many people, happens when you come to the end of a cycle, like a creative cycle. In this case, I'd finished my fourth record and it had come out and, as I mentioned, it's annoying because it did well eventually but when it was released, no one even realised it was out. By the end of the year, it was on a few end-of-year lists in some decent publications, but folks just didn't hear it and it was a little annoying. I took it as, ‘I fucked-up, it's no one else's fault, it's my fault, I fucked up.’ Then, I had this extreme defence mechanism of ‘I must create!’ By January or so of 2023, I'd formed two bands and wrote an Irish traditional music-like concept record. I’d written that and talked to Daniel Fox about this and was like, ‘Let's do this trad record.’ He'll tell you all about that, he has all the notes on it! I had all the demos and then I had a total burnout. I was trying to get two or three different projects off the ground and I had this total burnout and ‘You're done’ freak-out and I abandoned all those projects. It was complete burnout and total self-destruct mode.
That lasted for several months until my wife, my dad and Daniel Fox, I wouldn't say they all came together but there was a sense in the air of ‘We might need to step in and help Padge here. He's looking a bit funny.’ My wife has always been my rock and really knew who she was marrying and was like ‘I didn't marry a quitter’ and Danny Fox said, ‘Come on, you can't just let these ideas slip away.’ My dad told me, ‘I want to bankroll your next record because I've seen the way you are at the moment and I don't like that you've abandoned all this stuff and I want to help you out.’ I remember when he said that to me, normally when someone comes to you with something like that you're like ‘Deadly!’ but I was just like ‘I don't know,’ and I didn't speak to him about it for a couple of weeks.
Then, I got to talk to Daniel and he said ‘Look, if you're gonna do something, let's talk.’ I started to formulate a plan in my head; If I was going to do this, first of all, I'd have to scrap everything I'd been working on because even though they're ambitious and there were some decent hooks, it was too crazy. I had to scrap it all and start from the beginning. The budget would have had to be like the one for Pet Sounds because of all the things I wanted to do such as having different guest performers. It would have cost an arm and a goddamn leg! Rather than spending a load of money on stupid things, I figured I’d buy a few mics and a decent Preamp and that way I could record the bulk of it myself for a fifth of the cost of what I had planned. I demoed the new record and it was basically like a training montage because I needed to learn how to write again and figure out what I was going to write about. It was almost like starting from scratch.
I started playing piano because I was like, ‘Okay, I'll write on piano,’ but I had nothing to write about, unless it was writing about having a kid and there’s a limited spectrum of material there. I knew that I needed to take a different approach. I would write through the tiredness. I'd wait until my daughter went down for her nap and run into the other room and play piano for an hour until I heard crying and then I was like, ‘Well, okay, nap time's over!’ Or, at night, if I had any juice in the tank when my wife would be watching Love Island, I’d go in and slowly start cooking up ideas. Initially the ideas were a little unfocused and I still didn't know exactly what I was doing. Eventually, one random night, I didn’t know what to write about so I thought I’d find a visual aid and went on to YouTube and found a page with loads of Russian movies from the 1950s through to the ‘80s. It had the Tarkovsky movie Solaris from 1972 and I just put that on. That's such a vividly expressive film and I'd play music while watching it on repeat.
I wound up looping Solaris and writing in a sort of stream-of-consciousness way with whatever came to mind and Oylegate slowly came together that way. We eventually found the tone of it and Daniel said we needed to go full synth on this one. I’d send the demos and he suggested that we get a loan of Alan Duggan's synth collection and that was the direction we needed to go. At the start, it was just me and him in a room and that's how it worked. That’s how the album got started.
I demoed all the record in my gaff. I did it all to clicks and then brought all the clicks into Yellow Door Studio and we traced over everything because he wanted to keep the roughness of my demos. That was a clever producer move on his part because I wanted to refine the tunes but he wanted to keep them rough. There are some weird bits like, there's one song called ‘Pure Imbalance’ that's maybe 7 or 8 minutes long, I sent 15 or so demos over to Daniel and he picked his favourite 10, and that long one was his most favourite song.
Right away, though, I said to him, ‘Well, don't get too comfortable with that tune because all the stuff at the end is just me fucking around! I don't mean for that to be in the song.’ He thought that was the best part! I was like, ‘Yeah, ok, but I'm not gonna put an 8-minute song with me messing around on the piano on the album!’ I rewrote the song, adding a little break with a guitar solo and sent it to him. That version was three-and-a-half minutes long with a ‘Wichita Lineman’ kind of thing in there and he told me that he preferred the old one. He wouldn't give up and eventually, I was just like, ‘Okay, okay, we'll do the 8-minute version,’ and we kept it exactly as it is in the demo. All the stuff you hear in it, all the kind of “do do do do do do do” stuff was like traced over from the demo and he went note by note. That's an insight into the relationship between the producer and the artist there, I suppose. There's a level of trust we have.
TBA: I interviewed you a few years ago and you said something that I think about all the time, especially when I’m cooking, which was that you don’t always like to make changes or rewrite stuff and that the accidents are the bits around the edge of the pot when you're making gravy where the flavour is. Oylegate is filled with so many wonderful textures and melodies, I was wondering if there was a particular song that, after you’d written the traditional album, kick-started this LP?
Paddy Hanna: I will say that two of the songs on this album were initially intended for the proposed trad album. I lifted them for this and then the rest of the songs I wrote fresh for this album. It's a good question because there's usually a song that dictates the feel of the record. In the case of The Hill it was ‘Colosseum’ which I remember jamming with Daniels Fitzpatrick and Fox and Adam Faulkner in West Cork. With that song, we found the feel for that tune and that was the album's tone right there.
For Oylegate, it was probably the last song on the album ‘I Won't Be Afraid.’ When I got the Preamp, it was a really cool Preamp but I didn't fully understand the settings and I had the gain setting up way too loud and I hit a low note on the piano and I was just like ‘Fuck, yeah!’ It had this deathly piercing sound and I remember playing that to Fox and being so excited because it sounded so fucking brutal on the ears. You'd listen to the album and you wouldn't think that the last song is the one that set the tone for the rest of it, but it set the tone in terms of the potentiality of us really leaning into the synths. A lot of the songs actually started quite loungey. The song ‘Oylegate Station’ was originally like ‘Music To Watch Girls By’, it was quite ‘60s and then one day I decided to try playing it in a staccato style. I liked that and it became synthy.
There was a lot of that. The song ‘Harry Dean’ was originally like Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence’s sort of “la dee dee da dee da la dee da la dee da” and then I eventually found a nice little R’n’B hook for the chorus. It took a while, but I figured out how to be playful again and I learned to be patient again. It always helps to have a bank of tunes if you're having an off day or if you're tired. You can pull up a demo from three years ago and be like, ‘Oh yeah, there's something there, I just haven't found it yet.’ I would demo and come up with stuff and then a lot of the time I'd be so wrecked and have a little dip in. To use another food term, you have a look in the pantry at the dry goods or the jars of preserves.
The combination of having the tone set and then trying to work on the tunes…because with both ‘Harry Dean’ and ‘Oylegate Station’, I'd almost abandoned them. I felt that they weren’t quite right for this record and that down the line I could dust them off. Fatigue, in many ways, was my best mate on this record because it made me go back to the drawing board more than I often would. A lot of times I'll be like, ‘Yeah, fuck it, let's keep going. Let’s add more hooks, more tunes,’ but this time I was forced through sheer exhaustion to go back to the drawing board more than I should.
TBA: As well as the album sounding so big, I enjoyed the quieter moments like ‘Caterpillar Wine’ and ‘Pure Imbalance’. Each of those has such an endearing quality whether it’s the delicate electric piano motif in the former and the lyrics to ‘Pure Imbalance’ drew me deep into its world. I’d love to hear more about those songs.
Paddy Hanna: ‘Pure Imbalance’ was Daniel Fox's favourite one that I was talking about earlier. It’s about my daughter which is funny because I would play her the demos when I'd be driving her about the place and the only time I would have to listen to the rough mixes that Danny Fox would send over was in the car. She'd give me her feedback and I would tell her ‘This is your song, this is the song about you,’ and she'd get really pissed off and say, ‘That's not my song!’ She'd say that because she liked ‘Harry Dean’ the most, so she was like ‘No, that's my song,’ but I’d try to tell her that she can't just pick what her song is! That's also how I knew ‘Harry Dean’ had single potential because she would just start singing along when it would come on and if a two-year-old can spot a hook then we might be onto something.
They were sort of, if you want to use the term, explorative in the sense that there’s a slight retrospective nature to them while also looking to the future in both of those songs, I suppose. ‘Caterpillar Wine,’ was going to feature on the trad album. You got the exclusive on that one! I don't think I've told anyone what the trad songs were. That's probably one of the oldest songs on the record, it goes back to before The Hill came out. It's one that I tried to put on a couple of things but I thought that it needed to be orchestral or it needed a fiddle and a baron and whatnot. Eventually, I realised that what it needed was synths, a really sweet Fender Rhodes and a piano doubling-up. Those two songs were both little Danny Fox's favourites, he was really pushing for them.
TBA: Writing with Solaris as a visual prompt, did you find that you’d have to go to a certain scene while working on a song because they became linked during the process?
Paddy Hanna: Not really. I was very happy to just let the film play. I don't know what it was, it was a distraction more so than anything. It was great for getting out of your head because sometimes your head is not an encouraging place to be. This is something I've been talking about a bit recently in interviews, you know, the idea of what is anxiety?; What is fear?; What are all these things? It's all largely your body trying to protect you, isn't it? Don't go over to that ledge because you might fall off. Or, don't try to express yourself because people will laugh at you or judge you. They’ll say you're weak or whatever.
As a performer or writer, or anything really, it's like ‘Don't get on that stage, don't risk embarrassment.’ It's the same kind of defence mechanism that tells you not to do stupid shit like ‘Don't put a fork in that plug socket!’ Your brain or your body doesn't know any different. It's your heart and your head that are constantly at battle; your passionate artistic side is at war with the nanny side of you that's just like, ‘Now, now, Patrick, don't be misbehaving’ and I guess that's why having a rather glum Russian sci-fi movie took me out of that mindset for a little bit.
TBA: Have you watched it with the sound on yet?
Paddy Hanna: No and I don't know if I want to. I like the disassociation with it, I know the characters' faces so well, I know their expressions. I get the general gist of the film; they're freaking out over a spaceship. I would assume the gentleman is pining for someone who's not there… Or are they? It's all a bit of a mystery. As a work of art, it helped me immeasurably in that it helped me find my voice and maybe I didn't ultimately understand the artist's true meaning. Does that even matter, you know? That's what I always say and it’s why I always get kind of annoyed, well not annoyed, when people ask me what songs are about. I'm just like, ‘Your guess is as good as mine! Take a stab at it. Who am I to tell you what a goddamn song's about!’
TBA: While you were recording demos at home, particularly when you were working at night as your daughter slept and your wife watched Love Island, did you find that you had to use your voice differently? Did you have fun playing around with vocals, in general, across the album?
Paddy Hanna: Yeah and I wouldn't say I was more confident, I wasn't, but I had more time because I didn’t rush myself. Pretty much every record I'd done up to this point, the bulk of it would be done in about three days. Then the rest of it is speckled in over time. I’d say 80% of the album would be done in about three days, usually. With Oylegate, we took our time. I was able to explore a little bit, particularly when it came to some of the nice vocal harmonies. When it came to singing the lead vocals, however, a lot of the time I was so insecure about just getting the right take. The ‘Harry Dean' lead vocal, the lead vocal on ‘Tuscon Arizona’ and for ‘Martha’, I was freaking out over recording those vocals. The lead vocals for those three songs all had to be done in a fancy studio and I had to say that I needed a whole day to get them.
I would try for ages to get the right take at home but it wasn’t working. I need Fox in the room and I think seeing pictures of my family on the walls wasn’t helping me feel dramatic. When it came to doing the quiet, introspective vocals, those were some of the best times for me making this record with the lights dimmed and being alone in my little home workspace and getting really close to the mic, getting the Preamp setting as warm as possible, I could do that all day. I love doing that. When it came to singing the bigger vocals, I felt duty-bound to get it right. The curse of the singer is that, unless you're a total narcissist, some of your vocal takes will haunt you till the day you die. There are so many vocal takes that I'm just like, ‘Did I get that right? I would do it differently now,’ and this and that. But, I suppose, it goes beyond singing. As the songwriter and the singer, you risk being the pompous one twice!
TBA: The vocals throughout the album, but particularly on ‘Tuscon Arizona’, sound amazing.
Paddy Hanna: It took a while. I took so many stabs at them at home. I said to Fox, ‘We need an extra day in the studio. It's going to take a while and I'm going to be a dick, but I need to be a dick to get it right!’
TBA: Is that something you worry about when you’re doing live shows?
Paddy Hanna: Yeah, I really do. I don’t like playing instruments live because I'm worried the guitar will go out of tune or the piano will fall over or something like that. I'm much happier with a microphone and nothing else. You know what I mean? I've paid my dues at this point, I don't need to show the world that I'm capable. I'm capable, I just don't like doing it live! I don't need to break out into a solo. I'm good. Also, when you're playing with someone like Daniel Fitzpatrick and Daniel Fox, you're damn right that you're going to be anxious about your own musical ability!
TBA: In saying that, you’ve given some of the most memorable performances I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen you wrap yourself up in toilet roll like a Mummy, you’ve left the stage to bring items from the lost and found bucket to try on mid-song. Has there been a moment where you’ve thought to yourself, ‘Oh, God, I’ve gone too far this time’?
Paddy Hanna: Oh, I'm sure I have. That's what I like doing, though. I like the totally raw who-knows-what-the-fuck's-going-to-happen type shit. That's what I want to do with our live shows going forward, I want to step away from the instruments and just go full performer. You can expect a lot of that going forward.
I did do a gig where I climbed a lamppost during the set and when I was up there I realised that no one in the audience cared. I was like, ‘Well, you climbed the lamppost for nothing there, son!’ That was a while ago at the Kinsale Arts Festival.
Oh, let's get this one out in the open, I opened for Joan As Police Woman in Whelan’s in 2018 or 2019 and it was one of the worst gigs I've ever played. I'm not trying to put this on Joan As Police Woman at all, but it was a midweek show and the audience was mainly people of a certain age who were probably checked out from work and tired. They probably bought tickets for this gig six months beforehand, not realising it was on a Wednesday, and they didn't want to be there. They wanted to be at home watching Love Island and on comes the support act, Old Padge, and I sucked a massive lemon for the half-hour of my set. The decibel level did not change from the moment I walked out on stage till the moment I left the stage. It was just loud conversation filling the room. The only time there was any sign of life that anyone was acknowledging that I was on stage was when people heckled me. They didn't like the hat that I was wearing, they shouted ‘Look at your stupid hat’ and it was just a regular hat. It's not like I was wearing a big cowboy hat, it was just a hat. They were giving me shit and I finished the set and I wasn’t in the best of humour. I decided to go to the merch desk and I'll watch Joan As Police Woman and try to get the night back on track.
I'm walking through the crowd and this guy asks the lady beside him what she thought of the support act and she goes, ‘I didn't like him at all.’ I hear this and I just snap and turn around and scream at the two of them, ‘Oh, yeah. Well, I thought it was pretty good!’. You want to talk about instant regret? Then I slither over to the merch desk and I'm just there like, ‘Oh my God, you just shouted at two people. Why don't you go and apologise to them?’ I went back to them and I could not have come off as more insane. I'm like, ‘Hey, I’m sorry about screaming at you. I'm just having a pretty rough night,’ and I insist on shaking their hands, and there's no way that my hand wasn't clammy. There's no way the nerves and the anger did not result in a very, very clammy hand. I remember I shook the guy’s hand and you know when you shake someone’s hand and they barely even clasp yours, they just hold the tips of your fingers almost like a claw? She shook my hand like that.
Honestly, I don't blame her. She just said I was shit, I screamed in her face and walked off and then I came back and wanted to shake her hand! Those are not the actions of a sane human being. And so, I'm putting out a Bat signal; If you were one of those two people, what did you think about that? To make matters worse, after the Joan As Police Woman set there was a massive queue at her merch desk and there was no one at my merch desk. Instead, people were using my merch desk to put their pints on.
TBA: Ah, no. That’s awful!
Paddy Hanna: I know. If you thought my fourth record bombing was going to do it for me, that night almost pipped that to the post on the humiliation scale. That was a tough one.
TBA: Finally, Paddy, years ago you recommended Riz Ortolani’s soundtrack for Cannibal Holocaust to me a few years ago and I immediately fell in love with it. I was wondering what films or albums you’ve been enjoying recently.
Paddy Hanna: Movie-wise, my wife was having really bad pregnancy nightmares when she was expecting our son so our horror movie viewing figures dropped significantly. I'm very behind at the moment. I liked In A Violent Nature, I think some people hated that but I loved it. I liked Hundreds of Beavers, I enjoyed that very much.
I've been trying to get into Aphex Twin recently. I was listening to Drukqs and there are songs on that album I wish I’d heard when I was 17. Then, there are songs on it that I'm like, ‘Yeah, this is probably why I didn't listen to it when I was 17.’ What you would call the kind of classic Aphex Twin sound is not something I particularly like, but then you have those ambient tunes or the ones built around the strings or the piano that he's bashing and stuff like that. I really love that. I'm on a bit of a journey in that regard. The Brutalist soundtrack was kind of fun and it's funny to think that the guy from the bank Yuck wrote that.
I watched The Beekeeper with Jason Statham and it was not good. Usually with a Jason Statham film, you know what you're getting into but even this time I was a bit bored by it and he was trying to do an American accent and I didn’t like that.
TBA: I heard they were filming the sequel in Dublin, I believe they were somewhere around Temple Bar, recently.
Paddy Hanna: What the fuck does he do in Temple Bar?
TBA: Perhaps there’s a car chase down the cobbles?
Paddy Hanna: That's like the line, I don't know if you've ever seen Never Say Never Again, it stars Sean Connery, and it’s sort of an unofficial Bond movie from the ‘80s. It was him and Kim Basinger and there's a scene where he's talking to a character called Fatima Blush, who's one of my favourite film characters. Literally 90% of the voices I do, or impersonations, are based on Fatima Blush; ‘You naughty boy, I'm Fatima Blush,’ that kind of thing. Anyway, she's got a gun on 007 and at one point she says, ‘You know that making love with Fatima was the gr-r-r-eatest pleasure of your life,’ and Sean Connery goes, ‘Well, to be honest, there was this girl in Philadelphia,’ and she just tells him to shut up. The point is, he says of all the loving conquests he's had that there was a girl in Philadelphia. And I was just like, ‘What was James Bond doing in Philadelphia?’ Do you know what I mean? Was he on holiday having cheese steaks or going to see the Liberty Bell? No disrespect in Philadelphia, but it's just not a very Bond kind of place, you know?
TBA: It’s not very exotic!
Paddy Hanna: Yeah, exactly. If Jason Statham is this unstoppable John Wick-type of guy, what's he doing in Temple Bar?
Oylegate is out via Strange Brew on April 11th. Paddy Hanna plays Whelan’s Dublin on Thursday, April 17th. Tickets available here