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It's always the same story. A comet, every thousand years, makes its round and then disappears. However, after a few decades, someone remembers it and the spark, albeit briefly, repeats itself in the heavens.
With this image, I would like to recall the debut of this young Irishman, a sincere singer-songwriter, alas little known but musically intense and deep like the sea he writes and sings about ("Marrying the Sea"). Declan O'Rourke might be associated, given his not-so-original musical proposition, with any other storyteller of his age and quickly end up in the limbo of already heard/already seen. If it weren't for a factor that makes the difference: he's Irish.
Over years of listening, I have matured the conviction that there is a common denominator to all Irish "folk singers." It's their particular relationship with the voice. I think of Van Morrison, of course, but also Damien Dempsey, the same Sinead O'Connor, Christy Moore, Mary Black, and that early Bono (because today, let's face it, I'm more Irish than he is). I don't know if it's a genetic factor or what else, but the people I've mentioned, and to whom Declan is added, sing not to let the voice out. They sing to allow it to pass through them. In Declan's music, it's palpably felt how the body is not the origin of the sound, but rather a mere "corridor", a crevice with an entrance and an exit. Just as the wind swirls between houses and releases into a long whistle, so too does Ireland with its currents pass through the harmonics of the first street boy and makes him play. Declan only needs to jot down lyrics with strong lyrical impact and accompany the voice with fragile but confident guitar chords. There’s never a need to hold the sound inside, to contain it, to over-elaborate it. The flow must never be interrupted because it is ancestral, it is spiritual. It traces its origins in the Sean nos. That's why I particularly love this type of vocality: open, airy, embracing.
"Since Kyabram" (2006) is an album that, embracing you tenderly, first makes you fly among the stars ("Galileo"), then takes you down to the bottom of the sea ("We didn't mean to go to sea"), and finally tells you that it's right to stay where you are ("No place to hide") waiting for the voice to pass.
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