Interview with Oisin Leech – Part 2
by Killian Laher

On March 8th, Oisin Leech will release his Steve Gunn-produced debut LP Cold Sea on Outside Music & Tremone Records. Recorded in Co. Donegal, in an old sea-facing schoolhouse that Leech and Gunn transformed into a working studio, the album features contributions from M. Ward and Tony Garnier, a long-time member of Bob Dylan’s touring band, alongside Irish folk legend Dónal Lunny, and Róisín McGrory.

Photo Credit – Ellius Grace

NMW: You have plans to go touring, haven’t you?

OL: I start in Rough Trade West on St. Patrick’s Day, and then I come home to Ireland. We begin at the Sugar Club in Dublin on April 4th. Donal Lunny is going to be there with us, and Roisin McGrory.  Steve Gunn is flying from Brooklyn for the Dublin show, the Galway show on the 5th and also Donegal on the 6th.  After that, I continue touring solo with double bass.  I will have a little band on other shows.

Donal plays on the record.  He was super encouraging about the songs and he plays this beautiful bouzouki part on Trawbreaga Bay and Malin Gales.  On Daylight, that’s him and Steve Gunn jamming at the very end of the record.  Roisin McGrory does the strings.  She’s an Irish violinist from Culdaff and she adds strings to Malin Gales and Trawbreaga Bay and One Hill Further.  Her partner, Neil McGrory started McGrory’s in Culdaff.  He recorded Townes Van Zandt and he was instrumental in this record.  Neil came by and took all the photos and he made that October Sun video.  He came by on the last day and said, lads, we’ve got to video this before you pack everything away.  Neil’s a great producer, so Neil actually helped engineer the string sound on the record.  He’ll be on the road with us doing sound.  So it’ll be a family affair.

Also, I go over to London and play the Lexington and then Paris.  Belfast have booked me.  Another Love Story just asked me to play the main stage on the Saturday in August.  There’s talk of America in autumn.  So, yeah, it’s going great.  It was a huge honour working with Steve.

NMW: Tell me about the artwork.

The album cover is by a great Irish painter called Sinead Smyth.  She’s from Carndonagh and she paints landscapes all around where we recorded.  So I bought the painting from her and she sent it to Navan and then we got it made into vinyl, so she painted the front and the back.

NMW: The album is a bit of a love letter to Donegal, is it?

OL: It is.  I found myself over two years, travelling there with my wife and kids.  In the evening, I would take out my notebook.  I’m always asking my mum questions about our cousins and ancestors from up around there.  When I get up there, I feel really connected to the landscape.  I have a bit of a Star Wars moment, and I love it there for some reason. Going up there, swimming in the sea… it’s such a healthy place.  The songs that I wrote are super personal, so they’re from deep within.  I could have recorded these songs anywhere, but I chose Donegal as my canvas.

The themes of the songs – there’s exile, there’s love, there’s loss, there’s friendship, fatherhood.  Songs about departing and arriving, missing people, and kind of standing in a doorway, a threshold, knowing that there’s this weird past, but facing forward.  One Hill Further is about that.  Constantly moving but never arriving.  Malin Gales is a love song.  October Sun I wrote after seeing a news clip of a father sheltering his two children in a train station, and there was a war going on up above.  It’s kind of a song about everyday people being let down.  I haven’t told many people that because I’m always more interested in how other people connect with a song.  But that’s what inspired that song.  I wrote that song really quickly.  I spent a long time writing Colour Of The Rain.  It’s autobiographical.  Each verse is about a period of my life from Liverpool to Naples to Dublin, living along the maritime.  That’s my attempt at a Tangled Up In Blue (Bob Dylan).

We chose to put these instrumentals in because we thought that they let the songs breathe, like Cold Sea.  There’s this huge, expansive, stunning open bog land near Carndonagh.  Steve Gunn called it the end of the world because it was just bleak.  After travelling through there, we wrote that synth piece, the Cold Sea instrumental.

The record label for my album are great, they’re called Outside Music in Canada.  I have my own label in Ireland, called Tremone Records.  The album is 27 minutes long, just like Nick Drake’s Pink Moon and Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline. I didn’t realise it was that short until we were mastering it and the guy turned around and said, this is a short record.  My favourite records are short!  We have other songs that I’ll do in concert that we left off the record.  A Dublin double bass player called Graham Heaney is going to be doing some shows with me.

M. Ward from Portland plays guitar on October Sun.  He’s a really old friend and he loved that song.  I toured with Lisa O’Neill and M Ward just a few weeks ago in England and Europe. And then I head on the road with Gaz Coombes from Supergrass in two weeks, he has invited me on some shows. It’ll be really interesting bringing these songs into his audience.

“Cold Sea” is as much influenced by an album like “In a Silent Way’ by Miles Davis as it is by roots and folk music.  I wanted to leave as much space as I could in the songs and the sounds.  The songs come from somewhere deep within. Using the Atlantic Ocean as a kind of canvas I project these very personal songs onto the water – and that’s how I thought it was best to share them.  It’s up to the listener to decide what the songs are about. Hopefully, people connect with them in their own way.  I could only have made this album right now in my life.  Steve Gunn and I just captured a moment.

Another influence was a 1970s film called Scarecrow starring Gene Hackman.  It’s a film made at a time when studios weren’t afraid to have a gritty yearning feeling in the production.  At the time of writing the songs, I was reading the classic novel Songlines by Bruce Chatwin, Sheffield author.  It’s a book about travelling across Australia and meeting native aboriginal people who have an ancient culture of mapping their land in song. They use songs as a geographical tool to map their country.  One Hill Further and Trawbreaga Bay were influenced by this book: my album is a reflection of the North Atlantic and the Inishowen landscape presented in song.

A lot of work went into the writing of the songs ahead of the session and Steve Gunn and I had really prepared ourselves for the session with how we might approach the sound . Steve was a wonderful producer because he approached the recording like a painter – he was very sparing with his brush strokes.

NMW: What about the Lost Brothers, then? Will you pick that back up again maybe next year or something like that?

Yeah, we will.  We were gigging right up until Christmas.  I don’t see us writing another record for another few months…. or a year.  After seven albums, it actually feels really good.  15 years.  The pandemic broke our cycle of album, tour, album, tour.  But actually, it’s quite nice to step back and come back to it fresh again.  I’d never planned on making this solo record. It kind of flowed and now it has happened, so I just went with it, and I’m really taken aback by the reaction. I really love singing these songs, so I can’t wait to sing these tunes to people.  I feel really thankful that I got to work with people like Steve Gunn and Tony Garnier from Dylan’s band.  His bass is amazing on the record.  We’ll come back to Lost Brothers.  I took my time making my debut record, but it feels right.

NMW: Do you think the Irish music scene is in a good place?

OL: Oh, yeah. I mean, it’s unbelievable, isn’t it?  It’s blossoming. I feel that Ireland is kind of leading the way.  All the exciting bands and artists seem to be coming from Ireland at the minute.

NMW: Do you have much going on outside of music?

I have two kids, young kids, busy, so football, swimming, karate. But music has always been my life.  I spent my whole life wondering what I’m going to do.  But I’ve always been doing music.  It’s always been there as a lifeline.  The more I get through life, music has taken over.  Wake up in the morning and there’s music in every room. It’s my life.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.  Oisin plays the Sugar Club on 4th April and Cold Sea is out on March 8th.