Karl Whitney (Author) – A Year in Music – 2025
by Killian Laher

How has your year been?

Busy enough – plenty of travel and a house move, which included a memorable van journey with friends from London to Liverpool. It was also interesting to have a chapter of my first book, Hidden City, included in the One Dublin One Book anthology, Dublin Written In Our Hearts, and to do a couple of events connected with it, including a walking tour of the Liberties. All catching up with me in December, unfortunately. Worn out! A good time to listen to records and review the year, then.

What albums have you enjoyed most this year?

I tend to listen out for whatever Jeff Tweedy, Gruff Rhys and William Tyler do. This year, there was material from all three. I’m currently listening to Tyler’s collaboration with Kieran Hebden, 41 Longfield Street, Late 80’s, which is a beautiful evocation of a certain kind of eighties country from Nashville and includes an expansive cover of Lyle Lovett’s ‘If I Had A Boat’.

Jeff Tweedy’s triple album Twilight Override is one that’s provoked some conversations with a friend of mine. Is it too long to get a handle on? Would it work better as a single album? I personally like having a huge amount of new Tweedy songs to pore over. As ever with the Wilco frontman’s solo work, it’s got some really beautiful, intimate songs on it.

Finally, Gruff Rhys’s Dim Probs is a Welsh-language pop banger that recalls both his band Super Furry Animals’ Mwng and the pastoral pop of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynki.

What’s the most promising new act you’ve heard this year?

To continue the Welsh theme, Pys Melyn, a band from the Llŷn peninsula, whose work I hadn’t been aware of before seeing them live over the summer. They have melodic, lush songs, and live, they have a hilarious stage presence. When I saw them, they had been drinking for several days and had just played at the Eisteddfod festival. They chatted in Welsh to people in the crowd before locking into the songs and playing a warm and wonderful set. Start with ‘Bolmynydd’ from the 2024 album of the same name.

Any gig highlights?

Lyle Lovett at the National Concert Hall. Gruff Rhys reprising his American Interior PowerPoint presentation on the Seine at Le Petit Bain, Paris. Gang of Four at the Button Factory. The legendary Ian Svenonius, formerly of Nation of Ulysses and The Make-Up, arrived on the Boyne with his minimal rock and roll two-piece Escape-ism, supported by Beat-Up Face at the back room (more a theatre!) of McHugh’s in Drogheda. Svenonius and his bass player/backing singer Sandi Denton prowled the venue in what resembled mariachi outfits before taking the stage.

The aforementioned Pys Melyn played a Gruff Rhys-curated festival at Future Yard in Birkenhead that also included a band called Gintis: brass section, gentle melancholy, feelgood atmosphere. Ryley Walker at Bellobar was memorable – a goofy raconteur with an amazing back catalogue. The pedal steel guitar player David Murphy’s Cuimhne Ghlinn: Explorations in Irish Music for Pedal Steel Guitar was a highlight of last year, so it was wonderful to see him live, also at Bellobar.

I realise I’m just listing everything I’ve seen now, but the jazz saxophonist Emma Rawicz was terrific at the Sugar Club, and James Brandon Lewis and the Messthetics at Grand Social were excellent. More recently, a stormy November night in Dublin seemed to keep much of the audience away, but Norman Blake, Bernard Butler and James Grant (performing, Crosby, Stills and Nash-style as Butler, Blake and Grant) at the Ambassador put on a wonderful show, covering Neil Young and The Monkees while drawing from their back catalogues.

It sent me in search of a compilation of the work of James Grant’s band, Love and Money. Over the summer, Butler had played in Whelan’s and spoken quite movingly of his Irish heritage. It was the thirtieth anniversary of his and David McAlmont’s ‘Yes’, so he played a version of that now-classic single. Finally, it’s hard to talk about live music this year without discussing My Bloody Valentine’s gig at the 3Arena, which felt fresh, vital, even revelatory. So much music is wrapped in nostalgia now, whether it’s older bands trotting out their greatest hits to ageing audiences or younger bands drawing inspiration from nineties acts they’ve heard on Spotify. MBV are a tonic: it still feels like music from the future.

The ‘happening’ at The Complex, Cage→ Fluxus→ Kirkos→?, was a fascinatingly staged multimedia immersive event that was a serious argument in favour of maintaining and cherishing art spaces in Dublin. That the Complex received an eviction notice soon afterwards was a sad reflection of the current state of play in Dublin. We shouldn’t keep relegating the physical places in which art happens to the so-called ‘meanwhile spaces’ — empty shop units or warehouses whose landlords await commercial tenants or planning permission for apartments — of the contemporary city.

Can you recommend an album that doesn’t get the recognition it deserves

Since it’s the time of year for it, I’m going to say Emmylou Harris’s Christmas album Light of the Stable. Great selection of songs — some familiar, some less familiar — and backing vocals from Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, Willie Nelson and Neil Young. Incredibly atmospheric and memorable.

What inspires you these days?

As a writer, you get to the point where you read everything quite critically, so that you start to see other people’s books as a series of decisions made that you might have done differently, or might never have thought of at all. That kind of reading then feeds back into your own work. So I would say: close attention to other people’s work inspires me. There’s another side to the process, which is that when you go back and read something that you yourself wrote a decade ago, say, you think of the things you might have done differently if you were writing it now. It’s inspiring to keep reading and engaging with writing and art even when one isn’t necessarily producing it.

Anything interesting in the works yourself?

Over the last year, I did a few events and published here and there. I imagine next year will be similar. If anyone wants to keep in touch with this side of things, I have a newsletter that you can subscribe to at karlwhitney.ie/newsletter/ — basically just send an email, and you’ll be added to the list.