Experimental musician Neill Dougan met with Post-Burnout’s Aaron Kavanagh at The Music Café in Temple Bar (fittingly after work!) to discuss his band My Pilot, the history behind the act, their first release since 2015 Team Dangerous, what has changed in those seven years, balancing his music career with work and fatherhood, the conceit behind his music, learning to produce music and physical versus digital music.

So, I guess the first thing I’ll just ask is, could you tell us about the beginning of My Pilot, how it started off?

Eh, yeah. So, I suppose, it started up really with me getting some home recording software – like a lot of other people, I guess, it was just like a bedroom thing for a while. This is going back a few years now, to be fair. I was lucky actually, me sort of being interested in recording music kind of coincided with the sort of home recording boom, where you could get software and stuff for… – well, pirated software or cheap software of whatever [Interviewer laughs] – fairly easily. So, for a while, it was just me in my room, just recording stuff and experimenting and trying to learn how to do it. And then I did want to play live, although, I’ve always wanted to do the whole band thing, but I’m not really a natural performer, in a lot of ways, and I was almost sort of, really weirdly in hindsight, kind of vaguely embarrassed about having that ambition. I don’t know why. Maybe it was something to do with the way I was brought up or the place I grew up. I always kind of felt like…

Where was that, sorry?

Hmm?

Where was that?

That was…I’m from a little town called Ballyclare in County Antrim.

OK.

And I suppose the environment around there amongst, say, a lot of my peers… – [A waitress puts Neill’s coffee on the table and asks if he wants milk] No, it’s fine. Cheers. Thanks a lot. – …sort of almost like creative endeavours were sort of viewed as a bit suspect in some ways. Kind of a small-town attitude and it kind of took me a long time to get over that, but then I was living in Dublin, I was studying down here, and obviously it’s completely different here to a small town in County Antrim. Em, yeah, eventually I was able to get a few guys roped in, to make it like a live band. Managed to put out a couple of EPs – I can’t actually really remember what came first, the live band or the EPs. I know I recorded the whole EPs myself, quite badly [Interviewer laughs]. I can’t listen to those at all now, unfortunately, because I was kinda…I was kinda trying to run before I could walk, really, in terms of, like, being able to produce and record things properly. So, yeah, it just kind of went from there and, going back to like 2014, 2015, we weren’t playing all that regularly, but we played album launch gigs and EP launch gigs in various places around Dublin. And, yeah, it all kind of grinded to a halt then for various reasons, and we lost basically all the band members, apart from the drummer as well. So, yeah, I would have had this album out a lot sooner, but for various things that just kind of happened in my life and the lives of the other people in the band. That’s basically what took me so long to get it out.

Well, this is your first release since 2015’s Welcome to Ireland EP and you were saying there was a bit of a sabbatical. What do think has changed in that time for you, as a musician?

Well, I suppose the main thing is, I can actually properly produce now and Welcome to Ireland, I think, I was getting there. I actually randomly listened to it the other day for the first time in years and I was actually pleasantly surprised by how well I thought it stood up. Em, but, I suppose, I have worked a lot on how to produce my own stuff better since then. Having said that, I’m not a pro by any stretch of the imagination; like, I wouldn’t really regard myself as a producer, per se, but I can get by. The way I work is extremely idiosyncratic and erratic and I don’t know if I was ever to…I was thinking about, like, if anyone ever asked me to produce someone else’s music, could I even do it? And I don’t think I could, because my gear is really outdated; I’m still using Windows XP [Laughs] and a really old version of a digital audio workstation and recording software, but it’s just the way I’m doing…the way I’ve got used to doing things. I’m a bit stuck in…easily set in my ways, I suppose, but I’ve got something that works for me now and I can basically produce things to a much better standard. And I suppose I’m a better musician, as well, because that comes with the more you play, you know?

Yeah, of course. I was wondering, yeah, ‘cause the production is, like, a huge part of it and I noticed that there’s an incorporation of field recordings and soundscapes and stuff. I was wondering, how does that translate when performing live?

[Laughs] That’s a good question! That’s still to be decided. It’s funny, actually, generally when we’ve played live in the past, it’s been a bit more stripped-back. Like, when you’re recording, and especially when you’re on your own and you’re at home and you’re not up against the clock or on a budget, essentially, you can do as much or as little as you like to a song, but reproducing it live – especially when, with most of the My Pilot recordings, it’s just been me who’s played everything – it can be a bit of a challenge to translate that live. But it’s always worked OK. It’s just basically, you wouldn’t come to one of our concerts and expect to hear the songs reproduced, note-for-note.

Sure.

They are kind of different, they are kind of stripped-back and, looking into the future, there’s a couple of the songs on the new album that I have serious doubts if they ever could be played live.

Sure.

Like, the likes of [the album’s lead single] “Nettle Soup,” with that big, kind-of weird ambient, kind-of middle bit. There’s lots of found sounds and field recordings and stuff in there. The whole song kind of jotters to a halt and then picks up again. I don’t know if we could reproduce it live at all. But that’s an open question, because, like – apart from James, our drummer – that’s me, that’s the band at the minute: me and the drummer. I’m actively looking for a new bassist and a new guitarist as well, but that’s going to have to wait until the start of next year, I think.

Your previous EP, Welcome to Ireland, had, I feel, a very kind of Ulysses­-esque thing, where it’s like you’re using Irish landmarks to tell personal stories. What was the concept behind this new album, then, Team Dangerous?

Yeah, that’s well-observed about the last one, anyway. The new one doesn’t really have a concept; certainly not to the same extent that Welcome to Ireland did. There are sort of vague themes of family running through it, but there’s no real unifying conceptual thread. I don’t think there’s anything like that, it’s just some songs and some of them, I suppose, do have themes of family. Like, family…my family situation is, over the last seven years, been kind of complicated, and that’s what sort of…I wasn’t going to talk about this, but then I decided…I spoke to my wife about this, and it was like, “I don’t really know if I should say much about this,” but she basically said, “It’s your job to say it.” So, basically, I have two kids and the youngest, who’s seven, is autistic and non-verbal and he’s got some…He’s a bit of a one-off and he’s quite challenging at times, and, you know, obviously I love him to bits, like anyone loves their kids, but if you speak to anyone who’s raising an autistic child, there’s quite a lot of heartache there as well and a lot of challenges and it’s also been quite difficult for me, on a personal level, to sort of reconcile myself to the fact that the family I expected and I hoped to have is not really the reality. So, that’s been my challenge or a challenge that I’ve been grappling with over the last…Well, it’s about five years since he was diagnosed and that’s kind of…That accounts, to a large extent, to the delay in getting the album out and I suppose in terms of the themes of family that vaguely pop up as, like, allusions or lines here and there in the album, that’s where that comes from. Like, in that middle bit of “Nettle Soup,” when I was recording that, there’s a little refrain, a little vocal refrain, about something like, “I will shoulder the burden | I will carry the load,” and that just kind of came to me as I was recording it. I wasn’t really thinking about much at the time, but, if you look at my life, that’s clearly what it’s a reference to. So, yeah, if there’s anything to the album, it’s kind of family and stuff like that, as well as my own challenges in my own personal life. There’s kind of vague references to other stuff that happened with my family over the years, but, I mean, I don’t really want to explain too much about it, because it’s better to let the listener ascribe their own meaning to it as well, I think.

Absolutely. And, you know, I don’t mean to keep making Joyce comparisons [Neill laughs], but it has a very free-flowing kind of narrative…not only, like, lyrically, but I feel musically, it just has this very…I don’t know, it’s like wind, almost; it’s like it flows…it just lands where it goes. I was just wondering, like, how would you, to the uninitiated, describe the music of My Pilot?

Yeah. That’s a good question, that. Someone else asked me that as well and I really struggle with that, because…Like, I used to do a bit of music writing myself, so I would…[Laughs] I would’ve like to think that I’m fairly adept at describing music, but when it comes to my music, I don’t know, I’m far too close to it and I don’t have any objectivity. But obviously there are certain parameters that I can put it within; it’s not mad electronic music or anything like that. So, it’s sort of…I suppose it’s kind of…you know, I hate describing my own music!  It’s kind of weird, sort-of noisy, folky, psych-y guitar pop, I suppose. That’s terrible, but that’s the best that I can come up with. And, you know, maybe that’s just because I don’t really like the idea of being pigeonholed into a particular genre.

Yeah.

You know, like? And some of the names that genres have, like, are so lame. Like, I suppose, in terms of, like, an established genre that people talk about, you would just say it’s like indie.

Yeah.

But that’s like so reductive, and it doesn’t tell you anything about what the music sounds like. And it’s also meaningless these days as well – like, what does it mean to say you’re an indie guitar act?

Exactly.

So, that’s where it sits, obviously, in “indie” or “alternative,” but I don’t particularly like those terms, but I don’t have anything really better to use either [Both laugh], you know? So, yeah, that’s it, I guess.

Was it a conscious effort to go against the grain and sort of go, “I’m not going to be pigeonholed into a genre” or was that just how your songwriting is?

No. Well, I suppose one thing that I’ve always been conscious of is because it’s me, recording this stuff on my own, I’m not really that keen on sort of a lot of modern-day singer-songwritery stuff and was quite keen to avoid being pigeonholed as a singer-songwriter. It’s just not my thing. I mean, I like a lot of older singer-songwriters, like massive Dylan fan and stuff like that and, I suppose, stuff like Bill Callahan and Will Oldham, I love those guys. But I don’t know, I was just reluctant to be pigeonholed as a quote/unquote “singer-songwriter,” and I was much more interested in the type of thing that Mark Linkous was doing in Sparklehorse. Like, he’s basically one of my heroes, one of my musical heroes, and one of my main inspirations, and he was essentially responsible for recording nearly all of the Sparklehorse stuff, as I understand it, but yet he didn’t go under his own name, he went under the name “Sparklehorse,” and when he played live, it wasn’t him up there with an acoustic guitar – well, I suppose he did some gigs like that – but it was with a band, with Sparklehorse. So, that’s really what I was into in terms of what I was aiming for, was kind of a Sparklehorse-type thing, because I just love the guy. But, beyond that, it’s not that I was reluctant to be pigeonholed; I suppose it’s just that – like a lot of people, these days – I listen to a lot of different types of music, and it seems kind of absurd to say, “I make this type of music and I’m never going to make any other type of music.” So, I suppose, when you listen to a lot of different types of music, it just comes naturally to…Well, I think it just comes naturally to see that reflected in your own musical output. I suppose it’s kind of, it can be seen as hamstringing yourself, as well. I remember there was a review of our first album, For Winter, where that was sort of put forward as a negative; it’s like, “It’s stylistically all over the place.”

Yeah.

And I suppose, from the point of view of a consistent listen, maybe that’s a fair point, but it’s not something I think about, really.

Well, I think that kind of eclecticism is sort of…like you were saying, I think it’s easier now for people to get as much music as they can, where, maybe 20, 30 years ago, you had to just kind of buy stuff that you knew you’d like, which then informed your next purchase. So, I think that kind of thing is dying now.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Do you see, like, if you’re trying to book shows, do you see, like…do you feel that you have to be in-line with the other musicians who are playing or do you feel it’s gotten to a point now where kind of anybody can get up on stage and just play?

Well, I’m all for diversity of acts on the same bill. I don’t know. I don’t really have any strong feelings on that. I mean, I can see the appeal, from an audience point of view, of going to see acts that are kind of broadly similar. But, at the same time, it is quite…it can be good fun and it can be interesting to see wildly divergent stuff, as well, on the same bill. I suppose if I had a preference, I would aim towards the latter, but it can be a bit jarring, I suppose, for an audience as well and, I suppose, if you look at huge acts or big, established acts that are touring the world and stuff, I suppose the support acts are always sort of in the same ballpark, musically. I don’t know. It’s a strange one.

I guess one last thing I’ll ask is, you know, you have your own life, you have your family and you have work. How do you balance that with the music and just having a personal life in general?

Hum. It’s tricky. It’s very hard. I’m sure anyone else in my position would say the same, and when you have kids and a family, it doesn’t make that any easier. A lot of people I knew who were making music when I started aren’t doing it any longer because you only have so much psychic space and something has to give, you know?

Absolutely.

I was just – I don’t know if I’m pig-headed or whatever – but I was just determined to stick at it. But it isn’t easy and especially in my position, when you have a child with additional needs, it’s a bitter harder as well, again. I suppose, I mean I would’ve preferred to get this album out years ago, but what you find is when you have a full-time job and you come home and you’ve got kids to deal with, I always have in the back of my mind, “I’ll get a bit of time this evening” or “Later on, I’ll do a bit. A bit of work on this album,” but half the time I just fall asleep on the settee, you know? I suppose I probably did it in a really stupid way, which was I had no plan, I didn’t set aside any time to say, “This is when I’m going to work on the album;” I was just plugging away, if and when, as and when time allowed, you know? And, in the end, that’s why it took [Laughs] the guts of seven years to get an album out, which is just a shocker, really. But, I mean, at least it’s out, you know?

And I was just wondering actually one thing, did the pandemic…hinder or did it benefit your production of the album?

Eh, that’s a good question. Em, yeah. I never thought about that. I think it actually hindered it and, in theory, it should have helped because I was at home more and I suppose, in theory, I might have had a bit more time and opportunity to work on it, but, for a lot of that time, the kids were at home as well, so [Laughs] I was just, like, all hands on the pump, trying to keep them occupied. And, plus, I suppose as well, that that was such a weird time. I have a lot of admiration for, you know, you see a lot of artists who, during the pandemic, they really redoubled their efforts and, because they couldn’t play live or whatever, you saw a lot of pandemic albums coming out. But I didn’t really have that experience; I was just…it was such a weird time, I basically just spent most of the time worrying and sad [Laughs], sad at home. Having said that, when the pandemic hit – this is kind of a boring recording anecdote – but, when the lockdown happened, the drums for the album still weren’t done, and I was hoping to get James the drummer to do the drums but, because of the lockdown, it couldn’t happen. So, I ended up, once the lockdowns eased a little bit and we were sort of allowed to go out to a certain extent, I went back to the rehearsal studio where the band rehearses and we weren’t able to rehearse as a full band then, but they were allowed solo acts in, so I basically taught myself to play drums [Laughs] during the pandemic, which I suppose is quite productive, now that you’ve mentio…now that I think about it! So, sorry, I taught myself the drum parts to the album and also recorded them in the studio – like, the drums were the only part that weren’t recorded at home – so, yeah, I was able to do that during the pandemic. Em, yeah.

Yeah. I find your new album has…Actually, I just wanted to ask one thing, the name “My Pilot” and “Team Dangerous,” I was just wondering what they were?

[Laughs] Oh, yeah,

I was just wondering what the [conceit] was to that?

Em, well, the name “My Pilot” is… – I’ve never really been that happy with it but I sort of figure that I’m stuck with it now and, if I picked something else, I’d probably be equally as unhappy with that – but basically it’s from a poem by Lord Alfred Tennyson, called “Crossing the Bar,” and there’s a reference to “My Pilot” in that; he says, “I hope to see my Pilot when I’ve crost the bar [Sic].” It’s basically a reference to God [Laughs], so we’re named after God! Which isn’t, probably, that modest! And, Team Dangerous…it’s funny, I’ve a friend – Ali McKee, who did the photography for the album, on the back and the inside – he and his dad and his brother are really into, or used to anyway, be really into rallying. When they went off rallying, they called themselves…the three of them called themselves, “Team Triple Dangerous,” [Both laugh] so I just basically stole it off them. The reason why it’s Team Dangerous…Another reason why it’s Team Dangerous and linked into the whole “Triple Team Dangerous,” is that I actually recorded enough stuff for about three albums, and I was going to release them all at once and my brothers convinced me not to because they were like, “That’s a terrible idea! No one’s going to listen to a triple album!” But I do have three albums recorded, and the idea is to release Team Dangerous, Team Double Dangerous and Team Triple Dangerous. But it’s taken me so long to get this one out, God knows when they’ll see the light of day.

As someone who self-releases, how do you feel about sort-of the comeback of physical albums, particularly through vinyl, which I know is very hefty for a lot of artists?

Yeah, well I’m a huge fan of physical music. I never really – even going back to the days of iTunes and stuff – I was never really that enamoured with .mp3s, because there’s something so unromantic about owning a computer file.

Yeah, it’s quite ephemeral.

Yeah, yeah. Whereas vinyl is, like, on completely the other end of the scale; it’s so tactile and it looks so cool as well, with the big 12’’ artwork as well. So, yeah, I much prefer…I buy as much vinyl as I can, finances permitting. But also, I know people… – obviously, Spotify gets a bad rep and I’m absolutely aghast myself at how little they pay artists and stuff – but I do listen…- I do have a Spotify subscription – and I listen to loads of music on Spotify, as well. I mean, one thing I’ll say about it is, about streaming, streaming is a bit of a weird one obviously, in terms of the impact it’s had on the ability of artists, a lot of artists, to make money off their music, but it’s no worse than – to my mind – it’s no worse than pirating a load of stuff from, you know, Pirate Bay or wherever you got your illegal downloads, back in the day. If you can combine a Spotify habit with actually supporting the artist by buying their merch, going to their gigs, buying their records, well then, I don’t really see that much of a problem. Although, it’s obviously a…actually, it is a big problem that they pay so little, but, yeah, physical product is where it’s at if you want to support the artist, I guess.

And, I guess the last thing: what does the future hold and do you have anything else you want to add before we wrap up?

Eh, well I suppose I kind of hoped to have the live band back up and running, to coincide with the release of the album, and that didn’t happen for a number of reasons – again, going back to, like, other stuff I have to deal with in my life – I just didn’t have the space to try and…because it’s quite a lot of hassle to get band members; you sort of have to essentially put people through a trial run and stuff and it’s always a bit grim [Laughs] and kind of stil…It can be very stilted and awkward to get someone through all the different…

And then you have to work through their schedules, too.

Exactly, yeah, yeah. Plus, you know – especially when you get to this stage that I am, in my life – people have a lot of other stuff going on; jobs and families and so on. So, with one thing or another, I didn’t manage to do that in time for the release of the album, but that’s my main aim for 2023, to try and get the live band back together and play some shows and, if I can do that and maybe make a bit of progress in the second instalment of this, well then, I’ll be well happy.

Perfect. Thanks very much.

Thank you. Thanks very much, Aaron.

My Pilot’s latest album Team Dangerous is available to stream or purchase here. You can follow My Pilot on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.