Today (at the time of publication), the seasoned Irish musician Paddy Hanna released his fifth studio album, Oylegate, which is being marked as his triumphant return to music. However, if you look at his discography, there has only been a two-and-a-half-year gap between this and his previous record, Imagine I’m Hoping, which was released in October 2022; a seemingly standard interval between releases. But a lot has happened to Paddy in that time, which jeopardised his solo career’s future.

“If you line up the years, generally speaking, it’s, like, two years between records for me on average,” Paddy says when he spoke with us. “There’s a longer gap between my first record [Leafy Stiletto] and my second record [Frankly, I Mutate]; I think it’s a four-year gap. I had actually finished my second record in 2016, but it didn’t come out until 2018 because I spent over a year trying to get a distributor for it, you know?

“So, you’re right that on the surface, it seems a bit strange to call it a comeback, but you have to understand, Aaron, that I had properly given up, you know what I mean? My fourth record, it was one of those things where it felt like all of the stars had aligned, you know? I had a baby on the way, and I was getting married, and the album was recorded with great musicians. We were all having a wonderful time recording it at The Meadow, down in Greystones.

“The vibe was great, and I just had a feeling of, ‘This is destined to do good beeswax.’ Then – for reasons I don’t want to go into too much – it just fell apart upon its release. It didn’t so much enter the world as it did crawl, slug-like, into the world, and it just did no business at all. It was really annoying because when the year ended, it was on a lot of ‘Top Ten’ lists, for like ‘Album of the Year’ and shit like that, but no one heard it outside of a couple of journalists who thought very highly of it.

“So that combined with becoming a stay-at-home parent because it was the financially-wise move…Normally, if you’re married to a musician, [Laughs] the musician becomes the stay-at-home parent!  So, yeah, I’m raising a kid, and the album just does no business. And I’m very used to taking hits, you know? I consider myself to have one of the strongest jaws in the business, you know? I can take the hits but keep moving, you know? This one was like a punch to the liver. Like, this one knocked me down, and I could not get back up. I was very, very depressed and beaten down, and I felt like I let down my family.”

Outside a garage in Oylegate, Co. Wicklow (which would give him the title for his next album, as well as the title to one of its tracks and first single, “Oylegate Station”), Paddy sat in his car and considered the responsibilities he had as a parent and thought about what he felt was his stagnating career; a dread exacerbated by seeing his peers catapulting beyond him.

“I think a lot of musicians will tell you the same thing, that the pleasure of loving music is often lost because you’re so desperate to get your own shit out there, and, also, it’s hard to listen to music without being competitive,” Paddy admits. “Call it ego or whatever you want, but if you’re kind of struggling and somebody who you would’ve gigged with a few times blows up and is selling out arenas and shit, it’s hard to strap on a fake smile and pretend that doesn’t bother you, you know what I mean? […] That’s something that I’m very open about, now.”

For the first time, in that car, Paddy considered scrapping his solo career. “When you finish an artistic endeavour, like an album – something that you’ve put a lot of time into – you freak out a little bit,” he says. “You’re like, ‘Bollocks. Now what do I do?’ Certainly, in my case, I will enter into a period of manic creativity, where you’re just constantly producing new material, and it’s not necessarily great, but you’re doing it out of fear.

“I think around 2023, I formed about two or three bands [Laughs], and I wrote an entire album’s worth of traditional music. I was going to do a trad record, and I also formed a band…I wanted to do lo-fi music, as well. We recorded demos for both projects. I have the audio and one might argue that they’re actually OK, but I freaked out and both of those projects just faded.”

Through encouragement from his wife and financial backing from his father, Paddy decided to give another solo album a go. “Weirdly enough, when it came to making this record, I was all over the shop in terms of what I wanted to do,” he says. “I think once my dad said, ‘I want you to do this,’ I was just like, ‘OK, if you’re going to bankroll this, rather than spending a bunch of money on a fancy studio and hiring a bunch of lads to play drums or whatever, why don’t I just do it all myself?’

“So, I bought the gear – like, on a shoestring; I didn’t go mad or anything – but I bought a good preamp, you know? I bought a really good preamp and Pro Tools or whatever. Then I got talking to Daniel Fox, who was like, ‘I want to do this with you,’ and he kept pushing me, like, ‘If you want to do synths, Al Duggan – who’s my bandmate in Gilla Band – he has a collection of phenomenal synthesisers. He has an incredible Juno synthesiser from 1982 or whatever,’ and I was like, ‘That sounds cool!’ So, the idea just kind of evolved from that.”

Now that Paddy was committed to making an album, he struggled to think of what he wanted to write about. “I would run up and write for an hour when our kid was napping and stuff, and, over time, it all started to come together,” he says. “I cherrypicked a couple of tunes from the trad album I wrote, so that’s for you to figure out which songs were originally written as trad songs!

“And it just evolved. I was like, ‘OK, I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to write about, because, mentally, I’m spent.’ I was just like, ‘Look, your dad’s offering to help you here. Don’t let him down.’ So, I was very vigilant and studious more so than ever, really, in how I wrote, but I was like, ‘What the fuck am I going to write about?’ because, let’s be honest, whilst it’s lovely having children, songs about having kids are usually shit because what are you going to write about? It’s not like I’m riding my fuckin’ motorcycle around; I’m changing nappies and pinching their little plump cheeks! [Laughs]”

When stuck for inspiration, Paddy usually disengages and focuses on art and the world around him. “I tend to be inspired by random stuff,” he says. “I like to say that I’m a blonde goth. A ‘bloth.’” Some of his past muses have included Italian giallo flicks, cannibal-boom cinema, a children’s book adaption of David Lynch’s Dune, and photobooks of pre-World War II Europe.

When trying to find some juice for this album, he hooked up a projector and cast Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 Soviet non-linear sci-fi classic Solaris on his walls. “I projected that because I hadn’t seen it before, but I was very aware that it’s a visually sumptuous film,” he explains.

“So, basically, I just projected that on a loop while I wrote, and I would just look at the really expressive, aged faces of the actors. Not to be too pretentious, but it was almost like I was writing what they were thinking or whatever. And, the irony is, I’ve seen Solaris now about fifty times, and I’ve never actually seen it with the audio on! [Laughs] So, I’m concerned to watch it, for fear of, ‘Oh, this is a very different movie!’”

A recurring motif that established itself as Paddy wrote was insomnia. “I couldn’t not be tired,” he says. “We were first-time parents, trying to figure shit out and this would’ve been the peak of difficult bedtimes, and not sleeping, and shit like that. I do have trouble sleeping; like, my brain doesn’t switch off.

“As soon as your head hits that pillow, suddenly every conceivable thought enters your head at once, and you’re just like, ‘Well, I guess I’m not sleeping!’ A couple of nights ago, I wanted to sleep and went to bed at a very reasonable hour – like, ten o’clock or something like that – and I did not get to sleep until five A.M. My head was just catastrophising everything, and everything was bad.

“But the weird thing was, the following day, I was in a really good mood. I had about an hour’s sleep, and I had been up all night, catastrophising, but it was like some kind of bizarre exorcism. It’s like the negative thoughts were just playing out in my head, and, by the time I woke up, those negative thoughts were all spent, as if they had been cast out by Father Merrin. It’s a weird-ass thing.”

If you listen to Paddy’s music, you will notice a lot of range between each album, which results partly from him wanting to expand as an artist and partly from him accruing new instruments on the second-hand market. When asked about his versatility, Paddy admits that it came more so from self-doubts about his abilities as a musician, and he now wishes he had maintained a distinct identity.

“Insecurity has a large part to play in it, you know?” he says. “I’m a lot more comfortable in my skills these days – I know my abilities and these sorts of things – but even a couple of years ago, I’d be desperate to impress a lot of the times, and desperation has a smell, you know what I mean? People can smell it. You can’t be cool whilst trying to impress everyone in the room. It’s impossible.

“The idea of being either pigeonholed or losing your mojo has always haunted me. That freaks me the fuck out, especially when having kids. I’ve got three brothers, so I came out of the womb having my balls broken, you know what I mean? [Doing an old-timey ‘Noo Yoik’ voice] ‘Hey, Mister Has-Kids-Guy! You gonna do something real fuckin’ cheesy, ain’t ya?!’”  

Paddy began working with the aforementioned Daniel Fox, the bassist of Gilla Band and producer and engineer for acts like Silverbacks, Sprints, and Lambrini Girls. The two have been longtime collaborators and friends. “I’m extremely grateful to have someone like Daniel in my life,” Paddy says.

“He’s all about, ‘You go completely crazy, and I’m going to take the parts of the crazy that I think work best.’ So, he’s not just a producer, he’s an editor, as well, and a curator, you know? He curates the madness in many ways.”

The making of Oylegate (which Paddy says would have been a totally different album without Daniel) was made in a piecemeal manner over 2024, at the same time that Paddy and his wife were expecting their second child (although Paddy says the songs were locked in before that, and expecting his second child did not influence the album’s material).

On crafting the album with Daniel, Paddy says, “The way we work – and this is why we work so well together – when he’s judging a song, he likes it in its most pure form, alright? So, he doesn’t want a posh demo, he doesn’t give a shit about that. What he wants is me opening up GarageBand on my phone, and recording the song just quickly in, and then, maybe, overdubbing a couple of backing tracks. He doesn’t want click tracks, he doesn’t want any of this kind of stuff.

“So, what I’ll do is record a bunch of stuff randomly. I won’t worry too much about the lyrics. That will come. I don’t want to rewrite any of that. You can do that. If you can nail him with the hooks and the feel of a tune, then he’s like, ‘OK, let’s do this.’

“So, I’ll send him about twenty or so of these things, where I’m just going [Vocalises a melody]. So, he’ll pick his favourites, and I will often be surprised by his choices. The funny thing about Foxxy is that he loves pop music, and it’s just one of those things that you wouldn’t know from listening to Gilla Band, although I think, as a band, they have incredible earworms. You can’t make music like that without having an understanding of melody, do you know what I mean? Because the amount of motherfuckers that have tried to rip them off and just make noise. I’m like, ‘You, my friends, have missed the point!’ [Laughs]

“So, in order to make that kind of vicious noise, you have to understand melody. I think so, anyway. So, he picked the poppiest tunes. For this record, there’s a song on it that’s going to be the third single, that I did not want on the album, but he pushed for it. I have registered my protest, but sometimes you have to just take it on the chin and be like, ‘Maybe he’s on to something.’”

Now that Paddy has decided to stick around for another album, we ask how he feels about his decision. “We haven’t gigged yet, and I’m slightly nervous about stepping out again,” he responds. “Luckily, I’m a drama queen, so once I’m back up on a stage, the muscle memory will kick back in and I’ll be grand, but, right now, I’m very nervous about it. It’s been a minute, you know?

“The whole album, in many ways, takes place in that car in the gas station, you know what I mean? It’s almost like every song is a thought; whether it’s like, ‘Will I disappoint my kids?’, ‘Will I get the hell out of here?’, ‘Why can’t I be inspired anymore?’

“Because one of the tunes is all about losing inspiration and the fear of that, you know? The song ‘Martha.’ It’s a reference to the song ‘Martha’ by Tom Waits, so it’s not actually to a person called Martha; it’s singing to the song. Why can’t I get the inspiration from you that I got when I was seventeen? And you got the exclusive on that one! I’ve never actually told anyone that! [Laughs]

“And then there are other tunes that I shall be a bit more tight-lipped about, but it ends, ultimately, with a song called ‘I Won’t Be Afraid,’ which I guess is the rallying cry of ‘You’re going to make it, son!’ So, you know that the narrator decided to stick around for his family at the end of the record, which I did! Then we had another child! Holy fuck!”

Tomorrow, to celebrate Record Store Day, Paddy will do an intimate in-store performance at The R.A.G.E. record shop in Temple Bar and, next Thursday, will do his first headlining show since 2023 at the Main Venue in Whelan’s. “We’ve put the work in to create the live show,” Paddy says of his return to gigging.

“So, I can tell you that we’ve built a one-of-a-kind lighting rig specifically for these shows. It sounds very expensive, but it pays to know creative people who do pro bono work, let’s put it that way. But we have a really cool lighting set-up that’s going to be super awesome.

“We’re still kind of fine-tuning the live show. It’s kind of hard to pick what songs to play a lot of the time because we’ve got a new record, and I’ve got four previous albums. [Laughs] And, you know, people will say, ‘Oh, I like this song’ or ‘I like that song,’ and then some other person will tell me they like completely different tunes.

“So, in terms of curating the songs, still figuring that out, but we have a heck of a live show. I’ll be a veritable hot mess that day, so it will doubtless be a dramatic performance with a lot of flailing or whatnot.”

Now that Paddy has regained confidence in his project and himself, he’s looking to the future. This spring, he will commence a nationwide tour and has plans for a UK and European tour at a later point. “I like the idea of evolving, and I like that I’m sort of setting into my curmudgeonliness,” he says.

“I was never meant to be a teenager. I was never meant to be a twenty-something trying to make their way in this crazy world. My heroes, growing up, always had beards and were gruff and irritable. There’s nothing I miss about the past. The future is an exciting thing to me. And I love breaking balls, too!”

Paddy Hanna’s latest album, Oylegate, is out today. You can purchase a physical copy here or stream it. Paddy will perform at The R.A.G.E. in Temple Bar tomorrow (sorry, I couldn’t find the times for his appearance; just stick around all day!) You can keep up with Paddy here.

You can see Paddy live on his Oylegate Tour at:
April 17^th – Dublin – Whelan’s
April 19^th – Limerick – Kasbah
April 26^th – Ballydehob – Levis Corner House
May 3^rd – Wexford – Arts Centre
May 10^th – Belfast – The Sunflower Public House

Tune into POSTBURNOUT.COM Interviews… at 21:00 (IST) tonight 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.