The Kerryman James O’Donnell has been a music fan for his entire life. As a kid, he listened to Dave Fanning on the radio before building an eclectic record collection that featured the likes of The Smiths, David Bowie, Nirvana, and Sonic Youth, whilst learning what was current from publications like NME and Q.

As an adult, James performed with acts like the Cork-based shoegaze-inspired dreampop band Hush War Cry and the Dublin-based jangly-guitar-driven alternative project Dear Desert. Both bands enjoyed success in their respective scenes and garnered some meaty press coverage.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. With both of his bands now disbanded, James, now a primary school teacher based in Cork City, returned to his childhood home in Kerry and began crafting music in his old attic.

“I never really stopped writing since the band previous, Dear Desert,” James tells Post-Burnout. “When that band finished up, I kind of started buying instruments and recording stuff in the hope that I’d come back to it again someday. So, I was on Adverts, picking up different microphones, and bass guitars, and all this kind of stuff.

“I didn’t know if I would write again, but just [over] the years, I had different voice notes, different acoustic ideas, and when I started listening back to those, I was like, ‘There might be something there.’ These very rough ideas, and I didn’t really know for sure if anything would come from them.

“Then, when I had so much time, I just started writing, pretty much daily. I treated that as a second job, almost, doing four or five hours a day; just kind of seeing what came of it, really. But Ways as Seeing only really started as a project at that point.”

With this new project, Ways of Seeing, James wanted to retain complete control over its destiny. “I had been in two bands that had broken up, and it was kind of a [protective] thing, where, like, ‘I want to be in control of whether this breaks up or not!’,” James admits.  

“I kind of wanted to keep going, because…not that it’s progress lost, but when you start a new project, you’re very much starting from scratch; like, trying to get new fans, new followers. I kind of wanted to keep a bit of momentum, regardless. People like Villagers and Tame Impala, that template was there, and I kind of wanted to keep it to that.

“I’m kind of open to, ‘Oh, that might evolve. It might change and become more of a looser thing.’ That kind of thing where different people come in and write different parts. I’m kind of easy, really. It’s all about the music with me!”

As James was crafting these songs during lockdown, he decided to listen to as many radio programmes as he could, in the hope of finding new inspiration. He also listened to Paul McDermott’s podcast, To Here Knows When: Great Irish Albums Revisited, which introduced him to ‘70s and ‘80s Irish punk, new wave, and post-punk acts like Microdisney, Whipping Boy, and The Radiators from Space, and the ‘90s indie band Rollerskate Skinny, which he cites as influences on the project.

“Linking them to, I suppose, where we are in today’s Irish music scene, I saw a lot of connections,” James says of these older Irish acts. “And even, I suppose, the political zeitgeist and how it links to today’s. I just started relistening to all of those albums as I was writing, and I was linking it up to the more modern stuff that I was listening to, as well, and was like, ‘This is where I want the album to go.’”

The songs that James was working on became Way of Seeing’s debut record, End Comes To Light. Crafted over two years, the album was released in October 2022. “It was definitely long and arduous [Laughs], in that I’d never finished a song on my own, previous to that,” James says of making the record.

“Like, I mean, a complete song with drums, bass, electric guitar, whatever a standard song needs to have. Actually, I remember the first time I finished a song, and I was like, ‘That’s actually a song’; it was like a moment where the doors opened. It was definitely a seminal, really important moment, where the other songs started to come really quickly after that. But, up to that point, it was really tough! [Laughs] I was like, ‘Can I actually finish a song?!’

“So, yeah, there was a lot of self-doubt. So much of music is about having the balls, having the confidence to kind of say, ‘Yeah, I wrote that. It mightn’t be the standard way of writing it, but that’s my interpretation of how this song should go.’ [Laughs] Whereas before that, ‘Oh, a song has to be a certain way. These chords have to be a certain way.’ But when I let go of that idea and treated them a bit looser, the songs started to come a bit easier then.”

After finishing the songbook, James enlisted the famed drummer and producer Christian Best (best known for his collaborations with the singer-songwriter Mick Flannery and the alt-rock band The Frank and the Walters) to help complete the record.

“I met him because of this project,” James says of working with Christian. “I guess, being in Cork, I was looking up the best Cork producers. So, I was doing a good bit of research about it and, immediately, I made contact with Christian. I was giving out some influences, and he was digging them, and he knew what I was going for.

“I know a lot of his stuff is folk-rock, but he was excited to try something different, and I think it, maybe, brought him back to his youth. He would’ve been into the rockier stuff when he was younger. So, he was just really into trying new things in the studio with the equipment that he had bought with the idea of using. He got to use [them] in this project.

“He’s just such an easy-going guy; like, really nice to hang out with. I just loved heading out towards Midleton and hanging out with him for a few days. We kind of did it in chunks. The whole album was, like, doing it three or four days at a time, and kind of working around my work and stuff. That kind of suited. That kind of left time for us to digest what we’ve done.”

While End Comes To Light mainly consisted of James working with session musicians and Christian on drums to finish the project, Ways of Seeing has since expanded into a larger project, which now consists of James with David McDermott on drums, Calvin Brannigan on bass, and Eoin Lenihan on guitar.

This new line-up has shifted Ways of Seeing’s sound away from the more minimalist, indie-focused sound heard on End Comes To Light into a more full-on alternative rock sound, which still includes that glisten, as demonstrated on the album’s follow-up singles “Gold Hand,” “Idolise,” and “USA 94.”

“I did have some reservations,” James says of this sonic change. “But then, when the songs kept coming, I was like, ‘No, it’s meant to be. I can’t ignore this kind of shift in my own head and what I’m enjoying doing.’ So, I kind of had to commit to it, and, yeah, I know that critics and stuff like to see connections between albums and stuff, but I think it’s been done in the past, where there have been big shifts in bands’ careers.”

While “Gold Hand” was a standalone single to follow up their first album, “Idolise” and “USA 94” are the first looks at what’s to come from the band’s second album, The Inheritance of Fear.

“I think after I wrote about three or four songs, I started seeing some kind of theme, and then that influenced the finishing of the lyrics and all the songs, and the next eight songs, writing them,” James says of the album.

“The title of the album is The Inheritance of Fear, and, at the time, I was listening to a lot of psychologists [on] what makes our flaws, what makes our fears – whether it’s generational, or something in childhood, or something way, way back.

“There was a poem I read by Doireann Ní Ghríofa. I think it’s called ‘An Experiment to Induce the Inheritance of Fear.’ [Editor’s Note – The poem is titled ‘An Experiment to Engineer an Inheritance of Fear’] So, the title actually comes from that poem. But, it’s this experiment where…It’s this poem about a smell kind of inducing a fear, going back to the times of the Famine.

“So, I was really interested in where our makeups come from. I think all of us have some bit of trauma, whether it’s big or small, and I just wanted to explore that, whether it was personal, or thematic and general.”

The tracks for The Inheritance of Fear were mixed by Gilla Band’s bassist Daniel Fox. In addition to his own band, Daniel has also contributed his engineering skills to acts as wide as Lambrini Girls, Skinner, Paddy Hanna, Melts, Cian Nugent, and Silverbacks.

James was interested in working with Daniel after being impressed by his skills on Sprints’ debut album, Letter to Self, which Daniel produced. However, as an in-demand engineer who is very selective about who he works with, we had to ask James about how he got Daniel on board.

“There was a lot of chance involved in it,” James responds. “In another world, I wouldn’t have got to work with him, but there was a lot of stuff that happened that opened a door. I probably sent him a message a good few months before I heard back, and I kind of had other stuff lined up.

“A lot of live stuff happened, I had problems with my voice that delayed recording, and then one of my friends passed away, and then I had tinnitus from that time. So, a lot of different health things delayed recording, and if those things hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be working with [Daniel].

“So, basically, I pushed back recording a lot, and then, in that window, he got back to me. And he was my number one guy. I made a list of potential mixers, and he was number one. […] I had the rough mixes, or rough tracks, put down, and I kind of visualised what they could become under the same lengths as the Sprints album.”

While at the time of publication, the release date for The Inheritance of Fear is yet to be announced, James does mention that the band will be doing a nationwide tour next year to support the album.

So, look forward to the first quarter of 2026 to see the final results. Until then, the band will be performing sporadically and have more singles to come before the album is out.

You can keep up with Ways of Seeing and see their future music, live dates, and social media accounts through their website.

Tune into POSTBURNOUT.COM Interviews…, tonight at 21:00 (IST) to hear this 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.