Pic: Kevin Byrne Photography
INTIMATIONS that his new album ‘Creation’ could be his last are true. According to Limerick son Johnny Duhan, he will not make another album himself: “Basically the sale of CDS has gone through the floor but it’s not true that I will stop writing”.
He is someone who has crafted mindscapes and moods to his sound tracks. ‘The Voyage’ and ‘Into the Light’ were song cycles of exploration, a probing of the mystery of belief in the divine, and hymn to married love, or generational challenges.
This lyricism and delicate but hardy self carries into the latest record, ‘Creation’, which has 16 songs within 45 minutes. “It can be read as a 1st an 2nd half, the songs read individually, or be intermixed. All the melodies feed off each other”.
Take your clue from his album-cover doodle for this traceline in ballads through to his own mortality. “It began with a fallen tree I came across in Barna Woods [Galway, where he lives] the night before, this centuries’ old oak. It brought me face to face with my own mortality. I jotted down a few lines… it made me feel inspired in a way I have not felt since ‘Just Another Town’.
‘Just Another Town’ was the song that precipitated Duhan to national prominence and a move to London to make capital of his confessed “search for gain and glory”.
His songwriting is as fine as ever. Duhan stirs himself and others to the importance of having an ear, an eye for the power and depth of poetry: “One thing I say to new songwriters is, study poetry as much as you can if you want to come up with the goods”. His own influentials are many, Eliot, Hopkins and Frost, one of the Americans “who brought back a great simplicity to poetry that it needed at the time”. Bach was writing music on his deathbed, I’m reminded.
‘Creation’ songs such as ‘Resurrection’, his last, graze like a tender shoot back to his first, ‘The Fallen Tree’ and his own connection to being narrator, musician, co-creator – of family, grandchildren, albums and songs, to having a value as creative entity.
“As with the tree,” he grins, “still sprouting unless someone comes by with an axe and chops it down”.
