Music

Dermot Kennedy: 'A lot of songwriting just isn’t good enough’


The Irish singer-songwriter talks to Nick Duerden about busking, his hip-hop influences and writing from the heart

Thursday, 4th June 2020, 12:56 pm

Updated Thursday, 4th June 2020, 1:00 pm
‘It’s kind of nice for a while just to sit still’ (Photo: John Mckain)

Songwriting, says Dermot Kennedy, is the craft of attempting to access that most potent part of yourself in order to reach your deepest emotions, and to then be as sincere as possible in expressing them.

“But sometimes,” he goes on, “you just don’t have the energy for it. Being in a studio with a bunch of people mumbling a load of phrases [at you]… it doesn’t always work. I find I need to give myself the space to breathe. And to be honest, I’m happier alone.”

To find himself sequestered in his parents’ home back in Dublin, then, does have certain benefits. He has set up a home studio in what was once the spare bedroom, and it is littered with the paraphernalia typical of a musician: guitars, microphones, bits of paper on which are scribbled hopeful rhyming couplets.

In the fortuitous position of being the author of a hit album – his debut, Without Fear, was released last autumn – he has had little time even to attempt to reach his deepest creative emotions – until now.

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‘I’ve always wanted to be different’ (Photo: Leonardo Veloce)

“Trying to live in the moment the few months before lockdown was definitely difficult,” he notes. “So it’s kind of nice for a while just to sit still.”

The 28-year-old is the latest in a long line of earnest troubadours currently monopolising the charts. His album debuted at number one, while its lead single, “Power Over Me”, which hits the median soft spot between Ed Sheeran’s artful navelgazing and Rag’n’Bone Man’s R&B-inflected rhythms, has rarely been off the radio. His new single, “Giants”, follows in a similarly robust vein.

‘If you want to do this for real, then it has to be unique. And, for me, that’s [expressed] in the way that a love of hip-hop influences everything I do’

The fact that Kennedy has been plying his trade for more than a decade, only to rise to prominence at the very time when the charts are full of people who look, or sound, roughly like him, has not passed him by.

“I think about it a lot,” he frowns. “Is it a coincidence that I fell into the bracket that is most saturated right now?” He lifts the baseball cap that sits low on his forehead, and scratches his hairline. “The singer-songwriter-with-guitar format will always exist, and there will always be people like me inspired by the likes of Van Morrison and David Gray. But if you want to do this for real, then it has to be unique. And, for me, that’s [expressed] in the way that a love of hip-hop influences everything I do.”

If that influence is mostly kept understated on an album that otherwise adheres to the classic tropes of singer-songwriter fare – heartfelt lyrics, and a voice keening with melancholic ache – there is good reason, he insists.“I wanted it to be quite subtle, but I do use mostly programmed beats in the studio, which nudges it out of the singer-songwriter lane and makes what I do unique. My love for hip-hop, for spoken word, that’s important to me. I’ve always wanted to be different.”

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Born and raised in Dublin, Kennedy studied classical music at university, but spent his formative years on his city’s Grafton Street, where he busked. “Learning to busk is an art form in itself,” he says. “You have to treat your spot like a shop, because you want people to be drawn in. If I played a Ben Howard song, which I love, people wouldn’t stop, but if I played an Ed Sheeran hit that everybody loves, they would stop. I hated having to make that choice every day.”

He hated it because, at heart, he was a romantic. “I had this beautiful idea that if what I did was good enough, then it would blow up, and the world would pay attention. It never did.”

He is wrong, though, because the world did blow up for him. Busking made him enough money to occasionally record his own songs in the studio, one of which, “An Evening I Will Not Forget”, made it on to a Spotify playlist. “It was a completely algorithmic thing,” he says, “but it meant I went from getting one or two plays a day to something like 10,000.”

He subsequently signed to Island, released his album in September, and became very successful very quickly indeed. His current UK tour, postponed until the autumn, sees him playing big venues most acts don’t get to play until their second, or third, albums. “It’s been amazing,” he agrees.

‘Hip-hop is so exciting to me’ (Photo: Lucy Foster)

But it has all come at a cost. Kennedy is now a marketable commodity, if not quite a malleable one. His favourite singer-songwriters – artists such as Damien Rice, Ray LaMontagne and Bon Iver – are tortured souls who found they loathed the spotlight the moment they stepped into it, and each has worked hard to remain deliberately obscure ever since. Kennedy himself doesn’t want a return to obscurity, he says, “and I suppose that’s because I’m definitely ambitious, and I do want to succeed. But the art in all this is of paramount importance to me. If the art ever suffers, then I’ll address it.”

He seems particularly keen to shirk the singer-songwriter tag, far keener to be aligned alongside, and collaborate with, artists such as the Brit Award-winning Dave, and the US rapper artist J Cole.

Hip-hop is so exciting to me,” he says, his face animated. “I see far more sincerity in hip-hop, and far more storytelling than you would see in my lane.

“There are so many artists right now, technically my peers, who just go to sessions all day long with someone in LA or London or New York, people who say to them: ‘How about this for a hook: I miss you baby’, and then it’s straight into the heartfelt chorus. Sorry, but that’s completely see-through, and it isn’t powerful at all. To me, it’s insulting to those singer-songwriters who dig to the deepest parts of themselves and drag it out in order to display it to the world. So a lot of the songwriting today, it’s just not good enough.”

Kennedy’s aim is to be good enough, and to constantly find truth to mine.

“I’ve had a certain amount of difficulty in my life, and I haven’t yet got to the point where everything is happy and carefree,” he says. “But then again, I don’t think I have to go through life hurting myself on purpose in order to get a song out of it. There’s enough hurt out there in the world already to get sufficient inspiration from.”



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