Cult musician Paddy Hanna is taking listeners on a journey through the euphoric highs and crushing lows of parenthood in his newest album Oylegate.
His fifth record - produced by Gilla Band’s Daniel Fox - follows Paddy’s 2022 album, Imagine I'm Hoping, one that arrived to critical acclaim but not the mainstream success needed for him to continue as a full-time musician, leaving him to lose faith in what he was doing.
“(Oylegate) started at loads of different points”, Paddy told the Irish Mirror. “I was coming off. Imagine, I'm hoping, and that album just didn't take off at all, and I really took that on the chin.
“Normally, I can brush off getting nice write ups, but not kind of getting a lot of attention, because it's happened a bit or whatever. But this one just was, it just was the killer blow kind of thing. It really knocked me on my ass.
“I did lose all faith in what I was doing. Like, completely done. It's not that I didn't care anymore. I just had no faith anymore in music and it was awful.
He added: “I was just heartbroken, and I felt as a father as well that I’d let my kids down. So much so that I was gonna remove any evidence that I'd ever been involved in music.
“That was the other part. I just was utterly rudderless, had no thought or hopes or vision for the future. Also because I was a stay at home dad, and I still sort of am, but that was my job. I was the stay at home dad for like two years.
“So it's hard watching your kid grow and your dreams die at the same time, because there's this horrible kind of intersection of watching them start to develop a sense of hope, whilst the hope goes out of your eyes.
“It really f***ed me up, you know, and, the worst part is, this is a story that's also common to too many people…. I had a dream once the dream almost became a reality, and then, boom, it's gone.”
Thanks to support from the Arts Council and the encouragement of his family, Paddy returned to songwriting. Paddy said: “It took a few months and a bit of family support, basically, to be like, ‘Listen, you got to give it another go’.
“It was kind of like the training montage in the movie. I had to rebuild my music muscles, start writing again, and stuff like that.”
“I think it was my wife who really just laid it out for me,” he added. “She was just like, ‘look, you are who you are, you're not suddenly gonna change who you are.
“‘You've always been this weird dude, you know you can't put that away in a box. You'll never live a happy life if you try to hide who you are’, and that's essentially what I was doing.”
Paddy has released two music videos from the new nine track, for Oylegate Station and Harry Dean, both of which feature the artist who plays a character called The Spaceman.
“I'm not very social anyways,” Paddy shared. “I didn't gig for about a year, I think, and in that time, I was a stay at home parent, and so for about a year and a half, I think I really, I didn't really talk to anyone, aside from my wife, for a long time.
He added: “When it came to doing the music videos… it seemed pretty logical to take on this kind of role of like some kind of interstellar traveler type person who is reintroduced to Earth, but the earth is kind of gone and or not, as he remembered it.”
Paddy will perform in Whelan’s next Thursday, in a gig poised to be his “most daring show yet”. The artist says a “one of a kind lighting fixture” has been designed for the performance.
“We have custom built our own lighting rig, which we have collaborated with a really cool lighting person by the name of Cian Finley,” Paddy revealed.
“It's a one of a kind lighting fixture that we've built and within that, we're going to be sort of adding performance elements. And I just can't fucking wait, dude, because it's been a minute.”
- Paddy Hanna’s fifth album Oylegate is out now via Strange Brew.
- Hanna kicks off his Irish tour in Whelans, Dublin on April 17, followed by dates in Dolan’s in Limerick, Wexford Arts Centre, The Sunflower in Belfast and Levi’s Corner House in Ballydehob, Cork.
- This summer Paddy will play festivals When Next We Meet on June 8 and Beyond The Pale on June 14.
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