Dublin-based singer/songwriter Tony Tyrrell is a longtime instrumentalist in Classical clarinet and Folk-Rock saxophone who has racked up a great deal of live play and studio experience, and for some years, he’s also worked on songwriting. He was a founding member of the band The Afternoons in the mid-90s and has supported the artist Donovan, however, it took the focusing experience of the global pandemic to encourage him to step forward as both a singer and a songwriter and shepherd his original songs into recordings for the first time. He worked with engineer/producer Tommy McLaughlin (Villagers, SOAK, and Pillow Queens) on the 11-song collection Conviction, which arrived on August 12th.
The album’s title is intended to convey the drive he had to find and the steps he had to take to bring his music to life, but it’s also true that one of his decisive steps was made a few years ago when after a period away from songwriting, he returned and found a renewed sense of purpose. Tony Tyrrell’s songs on Conviction often conjure up internal states, creating moods that stay with the audience, and leave room for personal reflection. I spoke with Tony about the psychological leap he made into the singer-songwriter role, how that developed in the studio, and about the ways in which his journey as a songwriter led to this new era for him.
Hannah Means-Shannon: From an outsider’s perspective, it seems like it would be much harder to go from being a singer to being an instrumentalist than to go from being an instrumentalist to a singer, as you have with this album. To what degree was that difficult for you? I’m sure there’s some psychological aspects to that as well.
Tony Tyrrell: It’s like your self-perception is just different. One of the things that was in my favor was that, as a wind player, I control my breath and do all of that stuff. Obviously, there’s another layer that comes in with the singing, but the breath part comes naturally to me. It’s more about seeing yourself as the front person as a whole other thing, and that was the big step, convincing myself that it was okay to do this.
The fact that we had that lockdown made me think, as it probably did for a lot of people, “Maybe it’s time to do this.” It also gave me some time to play around with the tunes and polish them. I decided to home record them at first, so I could get down what I could hear in my head, before walking in to a group of highly trained musicians. Then I was in the middle, even though I was the novice in that role, and I needed to be able to communicate effectively with them on a collaborative basis. You have to manage that role in the studio so that you’re assertive enough, but you’re also there to take on ideas collaboratively.
HMS: I’m sure that even being in the studio as much as you have done, nothing is the same as being in charge for the first time.
TT: No! But one of the other things that’s kind of interesting about the situation is that the better the musician, almost the more humble they are. They don’t really need to prove something if they are really good at what they do, and they are there, tuning into you. They give what they can with very little ego, and it’s astounding what they are doing. That was very pleasant, working with the group of people who the Producer assembled. That made it an awful lot easier for me to do it.
HMS: You were up in Donegal, right? How did you come to work with Tommy McLaughlin there?
TT: When I began to explore the idea of the album, through various contacts online, I asked, “How might I find a Producer in this lockdown situation?” I basically used a site that’s for engineers and Producers, which is almost like a dating site, but it includes really sought after people. I noticed the band name Villagers when I was looking through it, and Villagers is a band that I absolutely adore. This particular person, [Tommy McLaughlin] had been a member of Villagers and had Produced their first two albums.
He’d then gone full-time into recording and Producing and built this extraordinary studio next to his house up in Donegal. We began to exchange e-mails and tunes, and ideas of how we might be able to do something that was essentially, live. I didn’t want anything doctored up to any great extent, and he was excited about that.
The timeframe of doing it was subjected to the whole pandemic thing, but he sourced musicians for me, all from different places. He hand-picked them for what we wanted to do, building a vibe. Effectively, once there, we got everything down in three days from scratch. There were demos, but from the day we walked in to finishing what we were going to do there, it was three days. It was fantastic and energetic. We’d have conversations between playthroughs.
HMS: Can you see ways in which your previous experiences made this an easier development for you?
TT: At one point in time, we were restricted to going only two kilometers from home, and that’s how narrow life could be. I just looked at myself and said, “If you’re going to do this, what the hell are you waiting for?” The context reflected back at me and told me to do this thing. Once you start moving, your moving, and there isn’t as much fear left in it then, it’s momentum. You just have to take that step, and then it’s okay. People, generally speaking, are positive. Most people say, “Go for that! And here’s how we can help you.” But it is your responsibility, and there are a million and one steps, even beyond the actual recording of the thing, that I’m still taking.
HMS: Is there anything that kickstarted or informed your songwriting in the past, or more recently?
TT: There was a time when I lived in the States for a while, in Washington D.C., and attended a couple of workshops with Dar Williams. During that time, I wrote a couple of songs, including “Tuning Into You”, which appears on the album. That was around 2016 when I wrote it. That song is actually about songwriting, and was maybe the start of all of this, in some ways. I had neglected songwriting a bit. I don’t want to sound big-headed in any way, but I think I have a gift for songwriting. I can’t run a hundred meters, but I can write songs.
If you have a gift, you have to nurture it, and keep minding it, and practicing with it. For a time I had held off doing it. When I went to this songwriting retreat, I wrote that song as a lovesong to songwriting, to reconnecting and saying, “This is actually where I’m happiest.” That has to be the best thing in the world, to realize that where there was nothing, now there is something, a song. That’s a miracle, an amazing thing. So that caused a sharpening of focus as I moved towards this album. I started to say, not just to myself, but to others, “I’m a songwriter.” I needed to move into that space and own that space fully.
HMS: What does the singer/songwriter category mean to you? It’s a core thing right now, it seems, in the music world.
TT: On the Irish side, there’s a huge respect for singer/songwriters here. It’s enormous and always has been. When you think about people like John Martin, Ron Sexsmith, and David Gray, they have a huge following here. It’s a very strong tradition. So the jump for me was the “singer” part of singer/songwriter, rather than to songwriter. It’s just not unusual where I come from.
HMS: It may well be that the North American perception of singer/songwriter has been very shaped by Irish ideas. One of the songs from the album that’s been released is “Another Day” and one of the things I liked about the song is that it’s a narrative but it’s not super detailed to the point where the audience knows all the outcomes. Did you intend that?
TT: To some extent, yes, but in other ways, no. Compared to other songs that I write, it’s a bit different because it’s such a direct narrative. The impetus for that song was that I was parked at a traffic light, and a girl pulled up beside me, and she was crying. She had a little, hanging giraffe on her rear-view mirror. Those two things stuck with me and kept going around in my head. I almost set a task for myself because of those images.
In a songwriting workshop once in the past, I was told that my lines were too airy and needed to be grounded more in some real imagery, but most of my songs aren’t that literal. In this case, with the images stuck in my mind, I tried to make it more literal, and connect with the journey of a person in a car, and the emotional aspect of that. I felt delighted that I did that and delivered it in that way. On the other hand, I have an absolutely belief that words escape meaning once I put them on a page or record them. I don’t own them anymore and they can become whatever they become.
People have said to me, “What happens? Did she go back with her boyfriend?” But, to me, it was actually her mother and father, and it was about leaving home, because she was a very young person. But I was glad that the song gives some space. There has to be space for people to decide what to think and something that gives them room in the song.
HMS: I’m happy to hear that there are more relationship possibilities there, since it really works for a number of scenarios. I do see on a number of the songs on the album a form of storytelling that is more internalized, reflecting internal states. Does any of that fit the song “Shining”? I found that one fascinating.
TT: It could be one of my favorite songs that I ever wrote. People respond to it in all sorts of ways. Sometimes when I play it, people ask, “Who wrote that song?” It has characteristics that make people feel like they may have heard it before. For that song, what you hear is literally what I wrote when I sat down one evening, and I didn’t know why I was writing it. It just came out like that. I was just messing around with the walk-down, descending bass progression which I really love in many songs, like “Dear Prudence”.
I was playing around with it and the lyrics just started to happen. For a long time I had no idea what the song was. It wasn’t explicit to me. But later, I thought of it as being actually a conversation with myself, so all the pronouns, whether you or me, are myself. It’s about inaction, or about not doing things when you should. And that could be about not making an album, or it could be political, or it could be about other things in your life. It’s about taking action, ownership, and responsibility for something. When we were recording it, and got to the instrumental bit, I said, “I need a lot more here. It’s chaos. This song is about chaos.” The guitarist said, “This much chaos?” He added to it, and I loved it.
HMS: I loved that warped, dissonant part, with lots of instruments going. One of the things that I latched onto early on in the song was the image of the parade, that made me feel like life is like something that’s unreeling in front of an observer. The observer is not involving themselves, and there’s this temptation to not act, to simply observe.
TT: That’s true. Also, I say “May Day Parade,” which has certain political resonances. And that may be true with what’s going on in any country right now.
HMS: The image of “the shining” is interesting because it could be interpreted as the idea that something better is coming along naturally, so you don’t have to do anything about the current situation. There’s a kind of golden age, wish-fulfillment, and melancholy to the mood at the same time.
TT: I really like that. It’s like having my cake and eating it.
