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O’Rourke back on Irish soil

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BEST known for hits like No Brakes and Galileo, Declan O’Rourke is on his way to the Lime Tree Theatre in Limerick on Thursday, May 9.

 

He spoke to The Clare Champion last week from America, where he has been playing for the last few weeks.
“I’ve had a residency here in New York for eight nights with a string quartet. I had a couple of other gigs, one in Boston, one in Connecticut; I didn’t stray too far. I was really here for the shows in New York.”

Declan was in Boston right before the bombing. “I was playing on that street only a few days before. It was scary enough,” he says.

His most recent album, Mag Pai Zai, came out just over a year ago and he says he was happy with the response to it. “It’s been great so far. It went down very well. I was very happy with it myself and I enjoyed playing the songs off it, which is very important. It fits in well with the rest of my material. You need to keep putting coal on the fire to keep the train moving and it’s done the trick for me.”

2013 has already seen him playing abroad several times and there are more foreign trips to come.

“I think this is my third trip to America so far this year. I was in LA and in Texas in March. I’ll be opening a tour for the Mavericks at the end of May and going to Sweden this year too. It’s great, exactly what you want but it means less time to do other things.”

He says he has the songs for two albums written and plans to record both this year, although at least one of them won’t be released in 2013.

One of the records will be recorded with an orchestra, while the other will be a collection of songs about the Famine, which he has written over a period of about 12 years. He says it will have a traditional feel to it, quite different from his other albums.

“It took a lot of research and it’s been a nice challenge. I grew up listening to great trad music but in my own career I wasn’t really able to explore that because I’m a writer and most trad is reinterpreting songs.

“I kinda developed an interest in the Famine through learning some stuff about my own family history. It gave me an opportunity to write new stuff about it and explore that part of music, which I love.”

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