FOLK singer-songwriter Paddy Dennehy is originally from Limerick and now based in Cork.
Paddy has a new album ‘Love and Be Brave’, to be released in Spring 2023. His new track is ‘Are You Still My Girl’ and a live date in Dolans happens this week.
Speaking of the song, Paddy says:
“The protagonist in this song spends his last hours on earth thinking about the love of his life. While writing the song, I felt like it was a tragic death so I’ve tried to intimate that his demise is through misadventure rather than old age – “I took one I took three, it’s a goddamn disease…”. The dying man spends most of the song wondering if that person still loves him and I hope there is a bittersweet ending when, in an out-of-body experience, he sees her comforting his remains.”
Described as a, “rare talent”, by Rolling Stone, Paddy Dennehy has always loved songwriting and was blessed with a wonderful piano teacher that would stay late to hear what he had written that week. He studied classical piano but it was the extra bit at the end of the lesson that he lived for every Thursday for almost fifteen years. He got to learn about music theory, the shape of songs, how a melody worked and didn’t work, why you had to learn your scales.
It may come as little surprise then that Paddy followed his mentor into teaching. It sometimes calls for late nights rehearsing, writing or driving back from a gig after putting down a day’s work – but it has been worth every minute of sleep lost. There is nothing like a five year old child telling you, not asking you, to tie his shoes to keep you in line. Neither is there anything like feeling that you have connected with an audience.
As a child, Paddy Dennehy would rush to get a guitar or play the piano very loudly in the hopes that you might hear it and request a song before you left. It was often requested of him to play more quietly or to stop ‘hitting’ the piano.
Another frequent suggestion was that screaming the notes that he found difficult to sing did not make them sound any better. He was not imbued with a keen sense of subtlety or restraint but he has been working on this over the years.
Paddy’s first album ‘Little Light’ was released in June of 2020 to both critical acclaim and a well-documented pandemic. He received glowing reviews from Hot Press Magazine in Ireland, Folk Radio UK and Rolling Stone France.
When he started writing this album, Paddy lived alone on his father’s small farm in County Limerick. It was a long way from anywhere and afforded him plenty of time to think, write and play with everything on full volume. It was both cathartic and challenging.
Speaking of his recently released single ‘Heaven Not Far’, Paddy says:
“This is my little humanist prayer. I’m not shying away from any of the problems that I think we all face – accepting death, the search for hope, the search for love, social media – but I wanted the main theme of the song to be the incredible potential to make something wonderful, wherever you happen to be, right now.”
Paddy Dennehy performs in Dolans this Saturday December 17.
