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Posted on 13. Sep, 2003 by admin in Damien News, Interviews.

 

An Irish bard of jerkdom and nothingness

By JOAN ANDERMAN
THE BOSTON GLOBE

“I’m not great,” says Damien Rice on the phone from an L.A. hotel room.

The 28-year-old singer-songwriter, who named his first solo effort after nothingness, deflects praise with the clarity of a Zen master. “These songs are here because I was a jerk to somebody.”

The album, “O,” Rice says, “is a journey through those constant, continuous contradictions that come up all the time in relationships, over and over and over. There’s another reason for the title. Going around in circles.”

Rice is as thoughtful and intense in conversation as the songs would suggest. But his restrained recorded tracks don’t begin to hint at what happens to Rice, and to the music, onstage, where the scruffy troubadour curses and crumples, spits out improvised X-rated verses, and funnels terrible noise from cracks in his soul through a distortion pedal with the same efficiency you or I would vacuum the den.

At a meeting to discuss the promotional schedule for “O,” Rice announced that he would agree to one print interview, one TV show, and one radio spot a week. He’s already being called difficult.

“I’m not promoting my record,” he said. “I’m protecting it.”

Years ago, Rice had a quite different outlook. The young musician from County Kildare in Ireland dreamed of joining a band, getting a fat record deal, playing huge concerts, and becoming extremely famous. He almost pulled it off as the flamboyant frontman (who went by the pseudonym Dodi Ma) for Juniper – a loud rock band with an elaborate light show. Juniper signed to Polygram and was on the verge of jetting off to the south of France to record its debut album in early 1999 when Rice just walked away.

“We got a taste of the rock star thing, and I realized it just wasn’t what it seemed,” he explains. “I was frustrated. We’d gotten promises from the label about freedom, and then everything turned functional. It was all about order and straight lines and sales and genres. They wanted to box me in. And I wanted to run away.”

Rice did run away, to Tuscany, for a year of gazing at olive groves, planting vegetables, and busking. When he returned to Dublin, rejuvenated and reinvented as a solo artist, Rice borrowed money from his father to make a demo of new songs. Rice sent the tape to his dad’s cousin, the British film composer and producer David Arnold. Arnold became Rice’s benefactor, supplying him with mobile recording equipment that Rice set up in various bedrooms, kitchens, and friends’ apartments to capture the ideas that would eventually blossom into “O.”

“Everybody thought I was a bum. I had no plan, was just living and trusting in whatever happened,” he says. “Over a period of a year of random nights playing bits of music, it just sort of fell out. I finally played some songs back, turned up the speakers, and thought, ‘This is gorgeous. This is a record.’”

Rice has already written his next two albums. The follow-up to “O,” he says, is heavy and aggressive, the darker side of the same life stories that inspired his debut.

Rice says he’s certain that he was put here to sing songs, but the heartless business of selling records is another matter. He returns again and again to the idea of being free – to make whatever music he chooses, to not make another album, to walk away.

“I have no fear of having nothing,” Rice says. “Having nothing has brought me the most joyous moments of my life. When we deliver the next album, they can say no thank you. If it’s not all here next week, I’m back to being the happiest person in the world who has nothing.”

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