While he was the frontman of the successful indie rock group The Dead Flags, Billy Fitzgerald found the band’s parameters somewhat restrictive. They released their first and only album, Gentlemen’s Club, in 2010, which, despite critical acclaim, left Billy feeling unwholly satisfied with its rapid timeline and overall result.

After the band split, Billy envisioned a new alt-pop-driven solo project, which became Mr Billy Fitzgerald, and wrote an album’s worth of material. At the time of publication, the project’s debut album, A Grand Romantic Gesture, is finally out in the world after a long journey. Last month, Billy spoke with Post-Burnout to discuss the hurdles he had to jump to make it a reality.

The first part was overcoming some instilled dogma about what “proper music” was. “I think I spent ten years, from sixteen to whatever, thinking there was a ‘right way’ to do everything, and I just had to find people to do it, and it never occurred to me that anybody who tells you there’s a right and a wrong way to do it is wrong,” Billy explains. “It’s all just: What works? What do you want? What’s the best you can get out of what you have? What are you aiming for? It’s all different.

“Like, if you listen to Mac DeMarco, who makes all that really lo-fi stuff, and it objectively sounds terrible, on one level, but it sounds absolutely cool because it doesn’t sound like anybody else, but, also, he’s just making an album in a day in his apartment with a four-track or something, and it’s so cool and it’s so interesting, instead of, ‘Well, you’re not allowed to release that, now, because it doesn’t have the stamp of approval from the drum sound people.’

“But that conservatism, you see it on YouTube a lot; you just get, ‘This is how to make great sounding drums,’ ‘This is how to play guitar properly,’ ‘This is how to write a great song,’ and it’s like, no. Everyone has opinions, and they’re really cool to listen to, but I hate the idea of me, as a young songwriter, thinking, ‘Oh, I’m not doing it right,’ […] instead of having the confidence to say, ‘Eh, that’s how I want it to sound.’”

Then came a sabbatical from music to distance himself from his old way of thinking. “When I started off the album, one of the things was taking a year off music altogether,” Billy says. “I knew I wanted to do it [to make the album], but I was like, ‘I need to take time.’ But one of the things was to be a fan of music again.

“I realised I had been kind of listening to random stuff and hadn’t been checking out new stuff or going as deep into certain things as I wanted to, and the brilliant thing was, I was just started listening to a hell of a lot of different music. It’s not all the newest stuff in the world, but you’re finding yourself drawn to certain things.

“But, interestingly, for the first time since I was a teenager, when I was listening to music like that, I found myself wanting to belong to the club of things like Miracle Fortress and bands like that. I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I could get a synth, and I could be playing that kind of stuff.’

“And I remember, for about six months, I was like, ‘I’m going to make music like that.’ I was looking at loads of different music that had a kind of dreamy, synth-poppy thing mixed with a more live band thing, and I’m so glad that I didn’t embark on, ‘I’m going to sound like that,’ because that music was gone within [Laughs] a year! That whole genre that people liked was replaced by other genres. I think it’s in all of us, as well; sometimes you just want to belong to that club over there. It sounds like a fun place to be!”

Now more convinced of an individualistic route for the project, Billy began to set some realistic parameters for it. He explains, “When I was writing songs for the band, I would always limit myself to guitar, bass and drums, and there can’t be anything else, and there could only be two harmony lines for the other two guys in the band. So, I would actually write all those parts, and I wouldn’t put a keyboard part in there or something like that because we couldn’t play that live. So, it was good, that way.

“But, with this one, I made a list… – I didn’t want to be totally open; I wanted to be more open – …so, I made a list of all the instruments that I wanted to have on the album, and I stuck to that. It’s really interesting, there’s only an electric guitar on, I think, three of the songs, and that’s an accident! There shouldn’t have been an electric guitar. That doesn’t really fit the aesthetic of the album.

“But the rest of the thing; it’s all based around acoustic guitar, Rhodes piano, piano, and one synth, which I didn’t really know how to use, so it’s got one sound on it! [Laughs] So, if you want a sound on there…Like, on one of the songs, I really wanted a horn section on this, but you can’t have a horn section, so what will I do? So, I tried to figure out how to do the sound with a guitar and a synth and make it sound weird, and you end up in another area where it sounds way better than a horn section would have sounded.”

The actual collection of original material was not a long process, and within a couple of years, Billy had his new songbook written. “I think the whole album and all the songs that didn’t make the album were written in a period of about two years, and most of them were written, probably, in about six months, I would say,” he says. “That was all reflecting back on things because the period was between me moving in with my girlfriend and us getting engaged. I think that would’ve been me writing everything. [Laughs] Don’t read too much into that!”

Then came a period of procrastination. It was not until last year that Billy truly began to buckle down and get the album in motion. “There’s a really, really funny thing where I’ve been putting several things off for several years – personal stuff and the album and things – and, for some reason, I decided to do absolutely everything in one year, and I’m paying for it now!” he laughs. “Procrastination is a terrible thing when you actually get around to doing things!”

When he began working with others on establishing the project’s furbish, he noticed a pattern to the songs he wrote. “It was only when we were looking at the artwork and things like that that I started to see the themes emerge because I had to zoom out a little,” he says.

“When you’re working with a designer and you’re working with a photographer, you actually have to communicate what it’s all about in an artistic way, and I think that’s when I zoomed out and I was like, ‘That’s interesting! They’re all about breaking up with people!’ [Laughs] And I was talking to my wife about it, and she was like, ‘Yeah, yeah. That’s great. I’ve stopped being worried about that a while ago!’ [Laughs]

“I figured out that most of my songs start out with a little moment – like a feeling or something that really happened – and, then, I end up extrapolating out a story from there, and, sometimes, it’s a real story and, sometimes, it’s completely made up or it’s me putting myself in somebody else’s shoes or something, but it’s interesting that this whole album is a break-up album [Laughs] because I don’t sit down and go, ‘I’m going to sit down and write about this, or that, or the other thing.’

“I always find it very odd that artists, especially now, seem to know exactly what their song is about and it’s story about, and I always find that very, very weird because I’ve never been able to…I sometimes don’t know what my songs are about until a year after I write them. I’m listening to them, going, ‘Oh! It’s about that!’”

It was through this process that he found the perfect name to encapsulate these songs under a title. “I made one album before, with my band, and that was all so rushed that I never got a moment in the middle of it to kind of figure it all out, but this time…” Billy begins to say before starting over with, “In 2024, it was spaced out enough, but enough stuff was happening that the stuff was finished, and I had to give direction to a photographer, and myself and my designer were working on stuff, and I found that I had to get distance to see what things were about, but, in describing it to the photographer, there was a moment when I was describing it… – it was going to be called something else – …and I described it as a grand romantic gesture, and I went, ‘Oh, that’s the name of the album!’

“It was literally in writing the brief or writing an email. And what was cool about that was that I was doing that before doing the final mixes and the final recordings on ‘Gimme Love,’ and I went into recording ‘Gimme Love’ with loads of confidence because I suddenly knew the whole theme of the album and the visuals of the album – suddenly, the colour and all that sort of stuff was there – and the amount of confidence it gave me.

“In August and September, I was finishing all the mixes, and I was so confident about it, not because of the music but because the whole thing felt like a thing now, and I found that hilarious, that it was not the making of the songs, or the studio, or sitting at a piano or something, it was actually describing to somebody else what I wanted. It was very useful, and that taught me a lot.”

Now, with the album fully realised, Billy had to kick one final temporising tendency to get it over the finish line. “I’m a designer in my day job, and I learnt a lot from a guy I worked with a few years ago, [that] procrastination is just a fact,” he says. “I know there’s a lot of stuff, especially in my Instagram feed, that ‘Procrastination is a sign of blah.’ ‘It’s a sign of not being masculine enough,’ and all this sort of stuff! Social media is wonderful, isn’t it?”

“So, I don’t know the actual facts about procrastination, but I know I made my peace with it a few years ago, going, ‘Oh, it’s actually everybody – especially in creative kind of things – that suffers with this or ends up procrastinating so much that you just have to work with it.’ 

“And he did this wonderful thing – he would be writing blog posts or something like that, and he could never get them done until the last possible second – so what he did was just arrange a thing every week where he would have to do a talk on the subject that he wanted to write the blog post about.

“So, he’d arrange it for one o’clock on Friday, and no matter what would happen, there would be a few people around to attend this talk, and at one o’clock on Friday – he might have finished it thirty seconds before – but he would have all of his thoughts arranged in order, and then he would record the talk, and that was, basically, the blog post. [Laughs] And that was something I learnt about: If you set these immovable deadlines, things get fucking done!”

Billy brought that fixed cut-off concept into his project. “That was actually how I ended up getting my album finished after ten years of working sporadically on it,” he explains. “It hit me; I was out for a walk with the dog during the summer, and, for some reason, I wanted to release the album in October, and I was like, ‘Well, in order to get that done…’, and I figured out in that dog walk that that would be impossible, but it also hit me that, ‘Oh, if I had an immovable deadline, like, say if I booked in the mastering, in-person, in a very expensive and hard-to-get-to place, I know whatever happens – if it kills me, the week before – it’s going to get done.’”

Billy booked time at the prestigious and historic Abbey Road Studios in London to work on the mastering with Christian Wright, whose past clientele include LCD Soundsystem, Coldplay, Mumford and Sons, Ed Sheeran, and Blur. “I mixed everything, as well, so I was handing it over to the mastering engineer, and you don’t know what the mastering engineer is doing, and a lot of people have a lot of opinions on mastering, and I find it’s great!” Billy says of the experience.

“It’s great, especially when you’ve done all the work, to have somebody else who knows what they’re doing to come on. What’s weird, though, is that mastering is relatively quick. You always think it’s going to take a few days, but any album you’ve ever heard is an afternoon’s work, usually, for somebody. ‘What’s it like to master Odelay by Beck?’ ‘I just can’t remember because I did three albums that day!

“So, it was an interesting thing, going over, because I remember talking to the mastering engineer, and he was like, ‘You don’t really need to come in, if you don’t want to. Like, I can just do the work and send it to you,’ and I was like, ‘Well, I am coming over [Laughs] to do this…’, and I explained to him about the deadline, and he was like, ‘No problem! I’ll give you the V.I.P. treatment. Come along, and we’ll sit down and work on it. You’ll be in Abbey Road, and you’ll have the whole experience.’ It was great! But I was going in there at eleven and leaving at two! [Laughs]”

Now, with his album crystalised and his solo project established, Billy plans to play some soon-to-be-announced shows around the record’s release and is already looking forward to its follow up. “I’m excited about what’s next because, to be honest, I didn’t set out to have a solo career; I actually set out to make an album,” he says.

“Because, as good as my first album was and a lot of people like it, it wasn’t what I wanted it to be, in a lot of ways. I think it’s really, really good, but it’s a collection of songs, and I’m an album person; I love it when albums hang together.

“This is a collection of songs, as well, but I feel I achieved what I set out to achieve. It’s very different from what I thought it would be, but it is the thing that I want to create. What’s interesting, now, is the only way people will listen to this is if I’m out there playing and trying to get new pairs of ears. [Laughs]

“Our live show, there’s a bunch of songs in there that aren’t on the album, and I’ve counted it up and I’m like, ‘I’ve got the next album written, basically!’ Like, accidentally, I’ve got the next thing together, and that’s interesting.

“But I don’t want to rush into recording that, but I know there’s going to be a second one, and that might just be something that’s just slipped out onto Spotify at some point, or it might be the same arduous [Laughs] climb up the mountain kind of thing!

“But I feel – going back to that confidence thing that I have – I feel a huge sense of confidence in completing this, and it’s given me a feeling that I can’t really control if people like it and I can’t control if people hear it, beyond working hard on it, but I’m interested to see what the next one is like, and I can control whether I do that or not, and with the skills I’ve learnt in making this one, I’m interested to see where I end up with the next one.”

Mr Billy Fitzgerald’s debut album, A Grand Romantic Gesture, is on all streaming platforms from today, and you can purchase the album on vinyl via his Bandcamp. You can keep up with his live dates, music, and social media accounts through his Linktree.

Tune into POSTBURNOUT.COM Interviews… tonight at 21:00 (IST) to hear our interview in full. Available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Music Podcasts.

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.