Keep ‘hitting’ that piano Paddy!

His new album, ‘Love And Be Brave’ is pencilled for spring 2023 but in the meantime fans can enjoy his new singles ‘Heaven Not Far’ and the recently released ‘Are You Still My Girl’.

Reflecting on his latest single, the Limerick native 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.

“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.”

When he started writing the 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. By the time he had finished the last song that would go on the album, Paddy was lucky enough to get engaged and move back to Cork.

As a child, Paddy would rush to get a guitar or play the piano very loudly in the hopes that someone might hear it and request a song before they 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. It’s fair to say Paddy was not imbued with a keen sense of subtlety or restraint but he has been working on this over the years.

Paddy has always loved songwriting, largely due to his mentor who, at the end of a Thursday’s piano lesson would spend some extra time teaching Paddy 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.

Paddy’s musical influences have changed greatly over time. Boyzone do not retain the place they once held in his heart. He grew up listening to whatever his parents, sisters and brother would leave unguarded around the house. His first real sense of feeling a connection to music was listening to Mick Flannery perform ‘Evening Train’ on ‘The Late Late Show’. The very next day he walked into HMV with his Walkman and bought the album. He listened to it all the way home and for weeks afterwards again and again. The rest is history.

Paddy Dennehy plays Prim's Bookshop, Kinsale on 18 December. Tickets are available from Eventbrite.ie.