Interview: CNN
Posted on 20. Nov, 2003 by admin in Damien News, Interviews.
Damien Rice taking success in stride
Thursday, November 20, 2003 Posted: 4:48 PM EST (2148 GMT)
Irish singer/songwriter Damien Rice has stopped making plans. It keeps life interesting for him.
“Everything just comes up,” he said. “Hey, this pops up here, ‘Let’s go for a little while.’ Something pops up over there and we say, ‘Hey, let’s go over here.’”
Nice things have been popping up for Rice lately.
His full-length debut “O” was released this year to glowing reviews. The album, featuring impassioned folk songs with simple guitar and lush string arrangements, picked up the prestigious Shortlist Music Prize in October.
Rice is scheduled to start a U.S. tour Friday in San Diego, California. He sat down with TMR recently to chat about the album.
TMR: Start off by giving me the short version of the history of how you got into music and how you came to where you are now.
RICE: I always sang as a kid, like in school in choirs or whatever, and I think I was around 8 and I asked Santa for a set of drums. And I got this drum kit that didn’t make any noise; it was for the house. And you’d hit it and it was just puh-puh-puh.
I was quite disappointed with that, and I think a year later I got a proper set of drums. But I had gotten so frustrated trying to play the other things that I never even bothered with the full kit. And then I think I took up the guitar when I was 13. So that’s where it really started.
TMR: Tell me about your album, and why the title, “O”?
RICE: I have no idea why I chose it. I think I was on a bicycle at the time. I was doing something kind of random, either walking or cycling along, and it was one of those moments where it just kind of came to my head. And I just liked it. It was just so short and simple and it kind of expressed for me — even though I don’t know what it expresses — it expressed for me what the album was all about. And I’ve made up lots of things in the meantime, but they’re all rubbish. They’re not true. About going round in circles and the cyclical nature of life and that the sounds are all about that, but it just came to my mind one day and that was it, you know?
TMR: Any main themes that are running through the album that you’d like to tell us about?
RICE: Obsession. [Laughs] Definitely obsession running through the album. The main thing that this album was for me was these kind of melancholic, frustrating moments that I had in my life. Something would happen and I would end up going inside and feeling irritated, frustrated, sad, whatever. And then I’d write and that would all get released, and get released into the songs.
And then after a while I just started noticing that when I was looking at a song I wrote a couple of years ago and then one I wrote a year later, I was just noticing these patterns. And I was noticing that I was making the same mistake over and over. And there’s just this person as well who just kept reappearing in my life and wrecking my head.
TMR: You seem to favor this type of raw music. Do you think there’s too much overproduced music out there today?
RICE: I think in general there’s definitely a vibe of fast, plastic, quick, disposable, whoosh [makes noise] things in general. Like the buildings they’re throwing up these days — they’re functional — a lot of the cars as well are functional and not particularly pretty. When an old car drives by, we all go, “Wow, look at that.” The time and effort and design and everything. … Everything [now] is just about efficiency and stuff. And I think you can miss a lot in that. That’s why I love being able to do what we do, you know?
Article found here.
