One of Damien Rice's strengths is his ability to create that feeling of intimacy in a room utterly full of listeners. "All the time, I'm looking for the feeling that there's three people in the audience and I'm talking straight to them, as opposed to ‘HELLO EVERYBODY!' That works fine with certain acts, but what we're doing is so personal." He's apt to request that the stage lights be turned down or to borrow a beer mid-song from a fan. His performances are at once serious and informal and unpretentious. They often feel more like intense, musical conversations than concerts.
Rice himself has a hard time categorising the music. "I don't know if the songs are intense, and I don't want to know," he says, amiably but firmly. "I don't want to think about it, because then it distracts me from what I'm doing. I never really perform well if I'm thinking ‘What's the emotion in this song?' I just leave it be. They are what they are. A lot of the songs are about frustration," says Rice, following up with an observation that underlines the breadth of his material and the challenges it poses. "If I go from a funny song into doing something like ‘Eskimo', it takes a while to fall into it. You can't sit there in silence for five minutes. That's what I'm learning all the time; I don't feel like I'm there yet."
Born in Dublin, Rice first encountered his muse as a teenager. "I know I always sang. In school I was always in the choir, but I didn't have one of these classic upbringings, like Joni Mitchell records playing all the time and my parents being hippies. My dad plays, so there was always that, but it was never a musical household from the point of view of having loads of records in the house, or music playing all the time. My dad had one Dylan record and I listened to ‘Blowing In The Wind' on it. But that was the only song I connected with when I was a kid. I used to spend a lot of time outdoors. I had a dog and I used to fish a lot. Down by the river and taking the dog for a walk - I used to spend tons of time like that on my own. The time the music came into my life was when my elder sister had a boyfriend who played guitar. Then girls came into my life, and fishing kinda stopped. I picked up the guitar at that time, and once I had something to play while I was singing, it just never stopped. I used to find a lot of peace just writing something and playing it over and over to myself in my room. I was always getting into trouble for not doing my homework."
Rice became the lead singer of Juniper, a loud rock five-piece from Celbridge, just south of Dublin. The band signed with PolyGram, and although they delivered just two singles, Juniper played such significant venues as Dublin's Olympia and recorded at studios including Windmill Lane and Abbey Road. Juniper's music wasn't exactly his thing, so he left the band and spent eight months bussing around Europe, eventually returning to Ireland to start gigging in his own right.
During Juniper, Rice had been in touch with David Arnold. "When I left the band, he became more interested in what I was doing and wanted to help out. When he heard ‘The Blower's Daughter', he loved it and said, ‘You should definitely make a record of it.'" The song would later become the first single on the Irish version of the album.
Arnold offered the use of AIR Studios in London, but in his characteristic single-mindedness, Rice chose to record in his bedroom instead. "When I'd recorded a good load of songs, I went over and spent a week in AIR with him to mix." Rice still didn't feel finished with the album. "David had just spent ten grand on a week in AIR, and I had to turn around at the end and go, ‘I don't really like what we've done.' He was absolutely cool about it. He said, ‘Do what you want to do.' So I went back home and - I think it was another year and a half later - I eventually finished the record and had it mixed myself. We didn't think it was possible to mix the record with the little eight-track I had, but it turned out to be a good little machine." The results are exactly what one hears on O.
Rice is deliberate about his art, and it's increasingly rewarding. Still, he maintains a commitment to spontaneity, improvisation and living in the moment. Each show is different from the last, and he never plays a song the same way twice. "The crowds are coming and that's exciting," he says. "On the other hand, it creates a bigger expectation to deliver something, and a bigger challenge not to think about delivering anything."
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