Kieran and Emily on Delorentos, Republic of Loose and how Driven Snow started
An interview with the husband and wife about their time coming up in the mid-noughties Dublin music scene
Husband and wife Kieran and Emily aka Driven Snow released their debut album A Kind of Dreaming on February 9. You can buy it here. They were on TPOE 301 talking through all of the tracks on the album - that starts at about 24 minutes into the chat, preceded by talk about how Driven Snow started and going even further back to talking about Kieran and Emily’s former bands, Delorentos and Republic of Loose, respectively. You can read that part of the interview below - but listen to the podcast for the album track by track.
So I guess to start off with, we might go back 20 years or something like that, delighted to be chatting with two people who came up in that scene of the mid-noughties. Just tell me about Delorentos and Republic of Loose...
Kieran: Yeah it was a really nice time to be in a band. And it was really exciting because ahead of us were all these bands, like the Loose and Director and things like that, that we were watching, seeing do really well. We'd go to all those gigs and watch how they did things and all that kind of stuff so it was really cool for us. We supported the Loose a good few times when we were starting out. And then by the time it got to 2008 and we were playing gigs, we were trying to be as good on stage as Mick (Pyro) was. And the band were confident like that. So we were definitely influenced by the Loose and the other bands. There was a couple of bands - I remember there was a band called Humanzi, this is before that again, and they were like really confident on stage; we're not really like that. We weren't really like that as people so we were definitely going for that kind of thing. So that was kind of fun. The scene was great craic and it was great being young in Dublin and sleeping on floors, all that kind of stuff.
Emily: So it was 2006 when we met. I only joined the Loose in 2006 so I wasn't on the scene from 2004 at all. But no, I was in college at the time. I had gone back to do music and drama, and then just really serendipitously, I met a friend of mine one night out who was going out with Mick from Republic of Loose. We were just chatting in a pub and she was like, 'Oh, are you still singing?' because we had been in a choir together when we were kids. And I was like, 'Yeah, I am'. One of the girls had gone on her J1 for the summer who actually is now one of my best friends. So she was gone and they were looking for a few people to do some gigs. I obviously knew the band, I was really excited. And I didn't hear anything back for about two weeks. And then I emailed her again. She's like, 'Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely.' Because they were very chill. And so she said, 'D'you wanna come for a rehearsal in about two or three days?' So I was listening to the album on repeat, just Aaagh! because it had just been released. Then I did a rehearsal in Eamonn Doran's. I remember it so clearly, it's so funny.
In a good or a bad way?
Emily: Oh, in a really good way. But it was just so intimidating, walking into a room full of an established band, who were doing really well, obviously, at the time, and I was just so excited. And then they broke the news that the first gig we would do would be Oxegen in two weeks' time, so I was just like, 'holy crap!' We did a little practice gig in the Purdee Kitchen actually beforehand, which was lucky for me. It was brilliant. And then sure, that was the beginning of summer 2006 and then I did loads of gigs with them up and down the country that summer. We met Delorentos that summer and everything, but we weren't... I was otherwise engaged.
Kieran: I was trying to chat to her. She wasn't having any of it.
Emily: Ah we were all having a bit of craic.
How was Oxegen that summer?
Emily: It was amazing. We were main stage and it was just insane. They did a lot of videos for that actually, one of the lads filmed it, they brought it out as a little mini DVD thing afterwards. I must actually have a look and see if that's on YouTube. It was brilliant. Huge, big crowd. You could see people running towards the stage and the weather wasn't that bad that year, which was good.
Kieran: So we were both doing stuff - you finished in the Loose in 2013, was it?
Emily: I was there about five years. It was earlier than that, I'd say.
Kieran: So we were both playing gigs and doing stuff at different times for the next couple of years. Obviously, then, after that, our (Delorentos) kind of successful period happened, so Emily was really understanding of me going off touring the States or touring Spain or playing Mexico, that kind of stuff. She was really understanding of me, which is really important, because when we had our first child, then it was harder, obviously.
Emily: And they were really busy.
Kieran: We were crazy busy. We were signed in Spain and 2015, we were over in Spain, especially for the middle of the year, we were over every second weekend for two or three gigs and our manager or our agent over there would fill the weekend with stuff because we were flying over. So we'd land and we'd be doing radio, we'd be doing TV, we'd be doing gigs and acoustic sets and everything like, because he was really on it. It was just a crazy busy time. Our success at the time, or whatever - thank God that we had understanding partners and parents and stuff because it wouldn't have been able to happen (otherwise). So yeah, it's funny how just being a musician in Dublin or whatever, kind of helped; that period really helped us do stuff in the future.
Emily: I remember earlier, maybe around 2010, Republic of Loose did four gigs in the Academy, we did a residency. It was so good! It was just such a lovely (time).
Kieran: We were at all of them. Loads of other Irish musicians were at them.
Emily: Ham Sandwich, everybody was there. We were all hanging out together all the time and there was always DJs on downstairs then afterwards, Every Friday night, it was our night out. It was like, we did a gig and then everybody would just go to the DJ set afterwards.
Kieran: And the guests were amazing.
Emily: Shane MacGowan, Sinead O'Connor, I think U2 were supposed to be there one night, Damien Dempsey.
Kieran: Bono and the Edge were there one night.
Emily: Yeah they didn't play with us but they came to the gig.
I haven't talked to anybody who's been in Republic of Loose, but they do still get held up as this band who were completely different sounding to everything else around at the time. Is that something that you were thinking about in the band, like, 'Oh, we don't want to sound like anything else'?
Emily: I don't think it was a conscious thing. I didn't have a massive - I didn't have any part in the songwriting or anything, but watching the lads the whole time, the influences that they [had]. they all grew up, just listening to blues and listening to r&b and hip hop, and all of their influences, they kind of came together as a group because of the fact that they had that interest especially in blues. So it was wasn't that it was a conscious decision for them to be different to everybody but it was that influence that made them stand out from everybody else at the time. And even today, if they were still playing music [it would be the same thing].
So you finished up with them around 2013?
Emily: Around 2012. Yeah, it was a really difficult decision to make, but I had a full-time job then at that point, so I wasn't able to - they had always been really flexible in terms of the BVs (backing vocalists); there was three of us, myself, Eve and Orla. At one point I remember myself and Orla were so happy doing what we were doing that we actually took a pay cut because we just wanted to go and do gigs together. They said, 'Look, we can't have everybody coming on every gig'. Myself and Orla were like, 'OK we'll take half the money and we'll just do it together, is that OK?' Like fucking eejits!
You wouldn't be doing that now.
Emily: I know! No, we wouldn't. But like, we loved it so much. And we just wanted to get out there and play.
So that's about 10 years ago. Did you have itchy fingers over the years since, like, 'oh, I want to be making music'?
Emily: I did. Absolutely. Stars on Fire was after that wasn't it? So early days after the Loose, I was working full time, and then myself and one of Kieran's friends, Kevin Lynch, who's made a lot of our videos, actually, he plays bass, and himself and myself and a friend of his Eoin Dalton, decided to try out a band. We were writing songs and stuff. We were just like, literally, in a garage down the back of a house in Leinster Road trying to write music. I have a good ear and all the rest of it but I wouldn't be a great musician in terms of keyboards or whatever. I can play the basics. So we did that for a while. But we wrote some great tunes.
Kieran: Jim Carroll's pick for...
Emily: One to watch or something at one point. We played a few gigs...
Kieran: But then the band broke up.
Emily: We broke up three weeks later.
Kieran: Like instantly broke up.
Emily: I know! It was just because everybody had jobs, and we were all working.
Kieran: But for a three-month period, you were busy. And you were getting really good. And then it was just fell apart really suddenly.
Emily: But I would have then sung backing vocals with a couple of members of the Loose (they set up covers bands and stuff like that), I would have done a lot of singing with them throughout the year. So I've been singing kind of consistently, all the way up. And then I actually ended up doing backup vocals for Delorentos. And Orla, who was in the Loose with me. We did Electric Picnic with the lads and stuff.
Kieran: So as we went on, as the Delorentos albums got more kind of complicated - not complicated, but musically more complex - we didn't really want to play with backing tracks. We had to figure out how we're going to play them live. We kind of went through flirtations with extra musicians, extra players and loads of backing vocals, and then also doing backing tracks. And there was one show we played in Spain, because obviously you try and keep it as cheap as possible when you're touring, and we were playing with loads of backing tracks, and they all failed. It was horrible. I hate playing with backing tracks and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, we went back to musicians then. And that was when Emily actually was on tour with us then. We had another piano player on tour with us. That was really fun actually, it was great. We've been lucky enough to have lots of different musical experiences and musical phases and busyness and everything like that. It's funny, when it got to 2018, 2019, Delorentos had released six albums and recorded seven - it was so busy! I don't know, we needed time to get our heads together. And it got to 2020. And, we had listened to sort of the start of the next album Delorentos went over in January 2019. There was a New York dude who was going to release our stuff and he wanted us to be bit more like Beck and 'Could we write some songs in the way that Beck writes songs?', like real radio songs.
Is that the conversation that happen? 'Can you write songs like Beck?'
Kieran: Basically. He was very good. He really analyzed our music, he really liked us. He thought Delorentos was really, really good but he said it's not puppy enough for pop radio and it's not alternative enough for alternative radio in the way that it is. So he said, why don't you do some of the puppy stuff you've done, like, lean into it, but keep your alternative stuff. And he said, 'Like Beck does'. Beck writes really poppy stuff, but it's still Beck. So we were writing all these kinds of songs, and some of them are still there. And one or two of them are great. But they were on the poppier end - or the more radio-friendly end of what we do. And then the funny thing is, in the process of trying to write poppy songs, we ended up just writing, I think, more normal Delorentos songs, like songs that we'd normally write because our instincts didn't take us to that much, we just couldn't go that pop! But anyway we had all these songs. We listened to them in January 2020 on Ross's bed, up in his room. And then we decided to take a break so we could do some... We were about to have a baby. And Ro wanted to record and release his solo album. So we said we'd take a bit of time off and then Covid happened and then everything slowed down.
That's great though that once you do get back together with Delorentos, you've got half the work done.
Kieran: Well, I think there's been a little bit of cannibalisation going on
Emily: Ah no! There was two songs that were there from years ago but they weren't gonna go on a new album. They would have maybe been possibles for two or three albums previous. They were rejected! (laughs)
Kieran: That happens a lot. There's a lot of songs that were written around the time of Delorentos albums tha didn't really suit Delorentos. Whether that they were just the wrong style, or there wasn't someone that's in the band that was feeling it or whatever.
Emily: And I think Ro probably has a few of those as well. (Ro Yourell from Delorentos releases his debut solo album Commencer on May 24)
Kieran: But I just wonder how many of those would have been on the next Delorentos album. Like, if Covid didn't happen, would there just have been two more Delorentos albums? So then that break meant that we were on our own, we were together, we were still writing, we were doing stuff. A lot of our musical (starts to laugh)...
Emily: Outlet over the last nine years...
Kieran: Has been singing to the kids.
Lullabies or?
Emily: We were singing random stuff.
Kieran: That's the thing, a load of those lullabies are so stupid and babyish.
Emily: Some of them are a little bit strange as well. No, I would sing Irish songs actually, not necessarily in the Irish language, but just old little lullabies, like that 'Garten Mother's Lullaby'. I would have gotten my voice trained when I was younger, and I had a really nice teacher who used to always bring these amazing, old fashioned kind of songbook songs. ... We [just used to find and sing songs to the kids that] weren't wrecking our heads.
Kieran: A lot of the stuff for kids is nice for the kids, but it is absolutely awful for the parents. So we thought we'd do something really interesting. we'd write really interesting lullabies.
Emily: Well not write them - well, we thought about it.
Kieran: Interpret.
Emily: Or record pop songs in a lullaby style... We did 'Sweet Child O' Mine'...
Kieran: We did a demo of our version of lullabies, of like modern sort of lullabies. And we played it to a friend of ours and he was like, 'These are really good. What are you doing? Why don't you make your own music? You can't be wasting your time doing this, do something together!' And it was so funny, because we'd been talking about doing it for ages. But we drove back in the car. And we were like, 'Yeah, let's do it. Let's do our own stuff.' And it was just so funny, because we always wanted to, but we just needed a kick to do it.
Emily: It is about getting a bit of confidence as well, for somebody to say that, I suppose it did give us a bit of a kick in the bum and say like, 'OK, it's actually not too bad. You can do it.'
Kieran: So that's when the first Driven Snow songs appeared... We (Kieran and Emily) played together in 2012, played a little acoustic show.
Just the two of you?
Emily: Yeah, just like just singing a few songs.
Kieran: We were thinking we would do stuff then. And it just never happened. Because like I said before, Delorentos was a thing that needed all my songs and to have an album every two years or whatever; there's a lot of stuff that has to be written to get there.
Emily: But also you were so busy, it was just gonna be weird if we were like, 'OK, we're gonna go over here and do some music'. It just would have gotten in the way, it wasn't the right time.
Kieran: And also, Delorentos was on Universal and they wanted stuff and Universal in Spain as well. And there's a manager and there's a tour crew and you have to feed all those things to keep everyone employed as well. So you do feel like you have a responsibility to put your best into your job, which was at the time Delorentos. So it just didn't end up that we did stuff. And then we started making stuff and it was at nighttime and the kids were asleep. It instantly had a slightly different personality, because the personality of me and Emily doing stuff is naturally different to Delorentos. And as I said earlier, Delorentos has a... you'd be on stage, and you'd be putting out confidence and you'd be, you know, a bit of a showman, there's a bit of performance in there, an attitude that you're going for. And I used to turn myself inside out with songs that I would, 'OK here's a song, how do I make it better? How do I mess it up? How do I muck around with it?' On True Surrender, I think that's some of our best songwriting as a band, because we were deconstructing the songs as we were writing them. I think the songs like 'Stormy Weather' and 'Deep in the Heart' and stuff like that were really musically interesting and challenging and worked through, but real like thought and craft and skill and everything we'd brought up to that point. But with us (Kieran and Emily)...
Emily (laughs): We just threw it down! We didn't work on it at all!
Kieran: No, but it had to feel natural. And it had to feel like the song - what is the thing that happens next? Where does this naturally bring us? And what are we trying to say? It had to feel more - and it was interesting to get to there - honest and more melody and story driven. And so it couldn't be, it just didn't feel like it would make sense for it to be musically overly complex.
Emily: We just didn't have the resources for it, though, either, because we just didn't know what it was going to become. And so every song was written in the most basic way, in the sense that it was all about vocals, all about melody line, and very minimal accompaniment. Then obviously, if we had the freedom, or we had the people around us (it was 2020, 2021, we were completely limited) and the minute we got up to Tommy's (McLaughlin's Attica Audio studio), we got so excited, because Tommy would just do something so simple, maybe with a bass guitar, or like, some sort of little track in terms of drums. It was like getting a present because all of a sudden, you could just make it so much more interesting and do much more with it. But it was still very simple. ...
Kieran: You were mining stuff. Especially with the last couple of albums, you were really pushing yourself to come up with really interesting ways of writing whatever. And it was kind of freeing to say 'No, I'm not going to do that.' Like 'Trying' (on the Driven Snow album] is basically two chords almost all the way through, and then a little break. It's cool because it means that the melody has to do all the work, which is nice. And that's something that we're good at, I think - melodies and harmonies. Especially Emily's very good at arrangements and stuff. So it was kind of freeing to do that. And also not feel that you had to prove yourself: I don't need to show people how many chords I know!