When it came to learning music, Callum O’Riordan had a bit of a leg-up. “I come from a relatively musical family,” he tells Post-Burnout. “My dad is a great guitar player, so he taught my brother and then, when I came of age, my brother taught me the basics and I took it from there.

“I’ve always enjoyed singing and my sister is a really accomplished singer, and I would’ve been in choirs a lot. Like, I grew up in Wexford, and I was in the Wexford Junior Choir, kind of against my will. [Laughs] My ma, she kind of wanted to foster that in me, because I could hold a note and I could hold a tune, even, and I ended up enjoying it.”

Despite this foundation, Callum fancies himself an autodidact. “I was very much self-taught, except for choir,” he explains. “Choir, you’re learning in a more formal environment. I taught myself guitar, mostly – I was taught the basics by my brother and my dad – but, really, my dad learnt guitar by himself and the same with my brother. We didn’t really get lessons.”

While Callum enjoyed playing guitar and singing, he took a particular inclination towards percussion, and, at age eleven, he got his first drum kit. “I picked around at the guitar for a while, but I never really focused on it, but drums were my main interest; I always wanted to bang on things,” he says.

“So, I remember that I went splits with my dad on a drum kit from Minstrel Music, which was the music shop out in Wexford Town, and I remember waiting. I lived out in the sticks – well, not the sticks, but in the countryside, in Rosslare – and it was being delivered sometime that day, between noon and six.

“So, I remember just sitting, waiting out the window, for that to be dropped out. So, I got really heavily into the drums for a while; I spent all of my teens playing drums. Singing, guitar, and drums are my three instruments – if you include the voice as an instrument – where I’m most comfortable. I’ve picked up piano and bass and played in bands with other instruments, along the way, but they’re really my three core.”

Callum hit the ground running with drums. “I would’ve spent a lot of time setting up biscuit tins and hit them with markers while along to Stereophonics tunes,” he says. “So, I remember my brother – who I would’ve looked up to and wanted to impress, in terms of music stuff, and I would’ve gotten all of my music for him. All of the music I loved, I would’ve received through him – and I remember him kind of trying to manage my expectations, and he was like, ‘Don’t be disappointed! It’s an instrument; it’s going to take you a long time to learn it.’

“I remember him being surprised that I could play along to Rage Against the Machine songs very quickly, and he was really excited, and we ended up playing together. He would play the guitar and I’d play the drums.”

Soon, Callum began playing around Wexford with local bands, particularly at the town’s iconic but now-closed Dun Mhuire Theatre. “The Dun Mhuire was where you cut your teeth,” he says. “I played in a metal band, where we started playing Metallica covers, and Pantera tunes, and Tool; we got into Tool at the time.

“But the Dun Mhuire was just a fuckin’ madhouse. It was insane! Like, there used to be hundreds and hundreds of people, backstage, snorting drugs. Like, teenagers! Like, thirteen-, fourteen-year-olds! It was a den of iniquity! “

After enjoying local success with his teenage bands, Callum began playing with his brother. Callum says, “My brother would’ve played in bands when I was really young, and he was still doing that, but I was playing metal tunes, whereas he was very much into Pixies and Nirvana and, I guess, the more punk side of things, whereas my friends were very much into the more metal side of things, and I just wanted to play drums, so I was like, ‘I’ll play whatever.’

“So, it was the metal stuff first and then, later, myself and [his brother] Seán and another friend of ours played in this band, called Department of Stealth, which was…[Laughs] I can’t believe we called ourselves that!”

Callum would soon leave Wexford, but not before starting a solo project. “I would’ve been writing songs and playing them to people when I was living in Wexford before I left when I was 17,” he says. “None of these would’ve made it to any recordings.”

In 2014, under the moniker Callum Orr, he released his first solo EP, Patchworks & Learning. This was followed by two succeeding EPs: Dawning Throes in 2016 and Catch & Places in 2020, and he also released various singles along the way. Today, a decade after officially debuting his solo career, Callum has finally released his first album, The Trials of Knowing.

When asked why he chose to wait this long to release his debut, Callum responded, “The answer is way less romantic. I work full-time. Music is very much, I wouldn’t say a ‘hobby’ per se, because I think that kind of undersells it – I’m very passionate about it, I’ll always do it and it gives me great joy to do it – but I’m also completely disillusioned with the music industry and I’m very insecure about my songs and the quality of them.

“Like, I did one year where I did the BIMM thing and spent a year gigging, doing covers, and making music for a living, making my only source of income be music and the dole. I just made a very conscious decision, ‘That’s not the path that I’m going to go down,’ but that’s a kind of painful choice to make.

“The reason for the gaps [in his releases] is just that I work full-time. I have lots of other interests, as well. Like, I’m very passionate and I like to pursue novel things. So, I actually wish I was less prolific. I wish I put more…Like, when I look back on the stuff I’ve released, I leave it up because somebody once said to me, and I really took this advice to heart, that, at some point, I thought it was worth publishing, so don’t betray that past you by saying, ‘No, no one should hear this anymore.’ Be true to who you used to be, as well as who you are, now. But I couldn’t bear to listen back to that stuff, now.

“But I always do like the last stuff I’ve released; like, I like the stuff I released in 2020 and since then, but I wish I had the luxury to be so dedicated to it that I made the decision to go at it, full-time, and just dedicate my whole life to it, then I would spend a lot more time tinkering with things and making sure things were right, and writing the right songs, and writing twenty [songs] and pairing it down to ten, rather than writing twelve and pairing it down to ten. So, yeah, it’s because of other interests, and the fact that I work full-time, and I actually wish I left more time between them.”

The catalyst for The Trials of Knowing was Callum’s mother’s cancer diagnosis, which conjured up themes of mortality and spirituality in his mind. “The cancer diagnosis was really grim,” Callum says. “It was Stage 4, so they were starting to put time limits on her life, and I just panicked; I would say I was in a stage of panic. I think I’m still sort of resolving it. It just turned something on, where I was like, ‘Oh, my God. I can’t believe that I’m going to die and everyone I love is going to die.’

“I think you just write about things you know and [exercise] them. Some of the songs were written before we found out, two or three of them, and they’re a lot more happy in tone or a bit brighter in tone, or they’re just love songs. But I guess I was writing the songs because I was really worried – like, worried to the point of panic – and I remember Scott Hutchison, who’s probably my favourite songwriter, he used to do this analogy where life was like a canvas – it’s a complete mess with splodges and gouge marks, and it’s a complete mess – but what a song does, it doesn’t change any of that, but at least it puts a frame on it.

“You’re taking this mess, a complex of thoughts, and going, ‘Here’s something about that that’s true;’ like, here’s something I’m thinking about, and you can actually learn about yourself from what’s been bubbled up from your subconscious. It’s trite, almost, to be like, ‘Writing music is healing,’ but I really think it is. You write a thing and you’re like, ‘God, it’s really good to sing that out of me,’ and you also get an asset from it. You look back and you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s what I think about this! I didn’t realise I thought about it that way.’ Like, you can get the same end result literally from psychotherapy, as having somebody frame it and getting you asking a question that goes, ‘Oh, fuck! I didn’t realise I actually am really worried about this and I thought I was worried about this.’

“I think writing a song can be the same. Because you have the constraint of a time and a metre, you’re forced to be like, ‘OK, I need something to rhyme with this,’ and the choice that you make, of what word you’re going to rhyme with the previous word, that doesn’t come from the ether; that comes from your subconscious, and when you string a load of that together and there’s a soundtrack to it, you can be like, ‘Oh! I’m really worried about that, and I’ve made a bit more sense about this mess that’s internal.’ So, I’d say that’s where the themes come through, is that I’m writing them because I’m constantly thinking about it and I’m looking for a way to externalise it and put a bit of shape on it.”

Callum feels that working on The Trials of Knowing has made his older songs seem more inconsequential. “This is the first time in my life that I’ve ever experienced dread,” he says. “I’ve historically written songs about love, and romance, and heartbreak, and stuff like that because, up until then, that was the worst thing I’d ever experienced, was, ‘Oh, someone has rejected me,’ or ‘Oh, I feel heartbroken,’ which, in the face of this, is trivial, I think.

“And, also, the lockdown afforded me more time to spend with the songs a little bit, and I’ve just been releasing music for ten years. Release an album! Get it done! I believe in the album and I don’t want it to die, even though I don’t listen to them as much as I used to, I still want to be a person who’s released an album! [Laughs] I think that’s an important milestone for a musician, is to release an album.”

The Trials of Knowing was co-produced between Callum and his friend Ailbhe Reddy, who he credits for helping to strip back some of the unnecessary excesses and make the overall product more streamlined and cohesive, something which he plans to continue for album number two. “I’m terrible for getting into my room and just writing a tune and recording it in parts and layering it and, ‘Bigger, bigger!’, and, when it comes to playing them live, I’m like, ‘Shit!’,” he says.

“What I’m going to do, definitely – I did it a little bit for this album, but very much for my next one, which I kind of have half of it written – is go and gig the songs loads before you record it. I love sitting away and tinkering away at the song and building it, and I don’t want to say that that’s innately bad, but what I will find fulfilling and what I think results in better recordings, is you build the thing outside of being recorded and then the problem you’re trying to solve by recording is, ‘How do we capture this thing that already exists?’, rather than trying to build it from the ground up.”

Callum Orr’s debut album, The Trails of Knowing, is out today and available on all streaming platforms. You can follow Callum on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Callum will perform a launch gig for the album at The Workman’s Cellar, Dublin on July 20^th. Tickets are available from Eventbrite.  

Tune into POSTBURNOUT.COM Interviews… tomorrow on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Music Podcasts to hear our interview in full where we go into further detail about everything discussed, as well as minimalism vs. maximalism, the Wexford music scene, Dave Grohl vs. Taylor Swift, Steve Albini, the music industry, emo music, and much more.

Aaron Kavanagh

Aaron Kavanagh is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Post-Burnout. His writing can also be found in the Irish Daily Star, Buzz.ie, Totally Dublin, The GOO, Headstuff, New Noise Magazine, XS Noize, DSCVRD and more.