The Clare Champion Clare news, sport, entertainment and local notes
TULLYGLASS based singer and songwriter David Hope is releasing a new single Lovers’ Leap, which is something of a love letter to his native county.
“It was inspired by a trip down to Loop Head. I’d spent a fair bit of time down there as a young lad, fishing and all that sort of stuff.
“I got a bit captivated by the sea stack, which is right at the end fo the peninsula. It’s called Lovers’ Leap and there’s a whole mythology about that, Cú Chulainn being chased and jumping away from a randy witch as she was chasing him around the country!
“She fell down to her death and became this wave that was sinking ships and things like that. As a songwriter you start latching onto these ideas, and, you know, we’re lucky to be from a beautiful place, so that’s where the song came from,” he says.
David plans to bring out a second single later this year, while his next album And The Sea, will follow in early 2022.
Prior to Covid, David was on the road most of the time, so lockdown has been a big adjustment.
“It has been a bit of a culture shock alright. Up until that I was probably playing around 200 shows a year since I was in my early twenties, all across Ireland as well as all across Europe. I played quite a bit in Switzerland and Germany and obviously that has been curtailed, so hopefully we’ll get back to it a bit sooner rather than later.
“It has been good in another way, I’ve been doing plenty of writing, doing a bit of practising for a change, doing stuff like that. You have to make the hay that you can make I suppose.”
He has had the chance to do a few different things, musically and otherwise over the last year.
“There’s been too much gardening and DIY. I hung a door, which is a big achievement for me, as anyone who knows me would know! That was one big change. A lot of it was working on stuff I had been putting on the long finger, songwise. It was nice to sit down and do a bit of practice. I was learning some trad tunes here and there, despite being from Clare, it was very different to what I played, but I’ve been picking away at the mandolin and things like that. They’ve been strange times, but I hope I made a bit of use of it.”
The new album will be the first one for a few years, and he has the same Cork based producer on the new offering. “My last album was released in 2017 called Tough Love. That was recorded with Christian Best, who is a producer, we did that in 2017 and the new album was mostly recorded in the summer of 2019 but the last session was February 2020.
“It was due to be released, but lockdown happened and all that. The work we did in 2017 was very good, Christian is a very good producer and a great man to have in the studio for coaxing out performances.
“What we started with Tough Love we’ve taken a bit deeper, there’d be a lot more atmospheric stuff on this new album in terms of sounds, before that it’d have been a bit more acoustic.Now there’s a lot of acoustic stuff on this album too, but this song Lover’s Leap has a lot of tones that would be throughout the album. We tried to create an album rather than a collection of songs, if you know what I mean.
“There’s a good thread going through the whole album, it’s going to be called And The Sea, and there’s a bit of a maritime, nautical theme, it’s quite a dark album, as a studio recording it’s probably the best work that I’ve done as a whole, I’m really, really proud of it.”
He adds, “We recorded a lot of it live, which isn’t done too much these days. In the original recording session there were four of us, I had a girl from Switzerland called Stefanie Hess, who is a fantastic double bass player and a great young guitar player from Cork called Kealan Kenny, with Christian playing drums.
“As I said we recorded the kernel of the whole album live, which gives it a very nice natural feel, there wasn’t too much done after that, it was just a case of taking what we had and really making it shine.”
Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan has been a journalist with the Clare Champion since 2007, having previously worked for a number of other regional titles in Limerick, Galway and Cork.
