Four in the Morning have released their new single ‘Keep It Together’. Irish singer-songwriter Kevin Dolan leads the band with Kiran Srinivasan, Dan Walwyn and Alex Lees completing the eclectic genre-defying line-up.
I caught up with Kevin, who is living in Australia, to chat about the new single, how the band craft their dreamy, musically dense tunes, and how he hasn’t been able to return to Ireland due to the pandemic.
‘Keep It Together’ is an atmospheric tune that ebbs and flows with brooding and evocative instrumentation. Kevin explained to me how the pandemic influenced the song.
“ I guess the first line of the song is – ” I haven’t been sleeping again. It’s been a while since that’s been a thing ” – and that was just a truism I guess. When lockdown hit, as for everyone and it’s pretty boring to hear me talk about it but it was a lot of stress, it was a lot of you didn’t know what was going on, we still don’t know what’s going on. We’re back in lockdown now so it’s just been uncertainty and I think everyone has been going through this weird joint psychological roller coaster and for me, that manifested itself. I’ve always been terrible at sleeping, and just before lockdown started I had bought this new record player, and these speaker setups, and they weren’t working. I had all this time stuck at home and I wasted a lot of it just trying to figure out how to make these bloody speakers work. So I realised that I was putting all of this stress, angst and worry into fixing these bloody speakers, and the song, kind of stemmed from that I guess – that and… I was listening to I think it was this New York Times radio podcast, where they were just playing moments from all over the States and all over the world of people dealing with COVID and lockdown. It was amazing to me to get all of these people’s brains just sort of fed into my head and that’s probably what was keeping me up. The song then came with a jumble of all of that, this idea of trying to keep yourself together and probably doing a very bad job of it.”
‘Keep It Together’ is the perfect example of each band members musical prowess as they intricately weave multiple layers and textures into the song to create a gripping listening experience that lingers in the listener’s mind for days.
“ I always joke that I’m a real lyric person and I’ll sit down at a piano and a guitar and write a song with lyrics and that’s how this song started, but the band I play with, these amazing musicians Dan [Walwyn] on bass, Kiran [Srinivasan] on guitar and piano and drums and Alex [Lees] on guitar, and I’m a real folk lyric nerd, but they’re like jazz nuts into prog. [ Progressive rock] and they’re a million times better than I am. We always joke that they take a song and just shift it and play with it until it breaks. I don’t have a big musical background so I just describe what’s in my head for a song and I think for this one it was the sound of a radio breaking and someone fluttering in and out of consciousness or whatever, and they ran with that and create this sound around the story. Interestingly for this one, because we sat with it so long over lockdown, it was made in a bunch of different directions. It started as a real driving kind of indie banger, just simple rock song, and that didn’t feel right. Then we took it away and we were just sending files back and forth to each other because we were in lockdown and Kiran created this drum loop and slowed the song down and that’s when we were like, this is the vibe for this one. Then finally, we got to record it in the studio, I’d say maybe six months, nine months after I’d started writing it, and we hadn’t played it live, at any point. So we went into the studio and we just kind of reinvented it again. It was really organic. The parts weren’t written on their own, we just played it in a room together which is the coolest way to play any music, and then just kept layering stuff on top of it until it felt right.”
The drum loop pulses through the song with a heartbeat-like effect, becoming the element within the track that exudes tension while an icy piano melody and synth embellishments create an ethereal expansive soundscape.
“Yeah, that drum loop was on the demo from way back and we again, couldn’t play in a room with drums and we couldn’t record in a room with drums in lockdown. We haven’t used samples or stuff before, but we had this drum loop that we loved, and that became almost the linchpin of the song. I always say there’s glass and there’s clay. Clay is the thing that you can mould and glass is the thing that you mess with, it breaks and for this one, it was the piano and it was the drums that were the glass of it. We actually tried to recreate that drum loop in the studio, and our producer Jono Steer was amazing, he is an amazing person. He was just like, ‘nah, just keep this’, and we ended up building more drums around it but keeping that. I think it goes through the whole song.“
The lyrics discuss putting on a good face and trying to convince those around you that you have it all together, which is a relatable theme even without the looming pandemic. Through his lyrics, Kevin perfectly captures a sense of loneliness while masking that hollow feeling through the metaphor of the broken record player. “I took it apart just to see what makes you sing. It was nothing but blue wires and the space between”.
“I wish I could say, I spent ages, meticulously crafting these words. But honestly, I actually don’t think I wrote them down. We were uploading them all to Spotify and all the things, and you have to put in the lyrics and I realised I hadn’t saved lyrics anywhere. Kiran our drummer, he’s a real organised brain, that I’m not. So I jotted down the lyrics, and he’s like ‘Kevin, these are not what you’re singing’, and he fixed them up. So it was a really weird one, I guess you get really lucky, sometimes with songs and there’s definitely songs that I sit down and I really write, but this one I don’t remember writing it and I couldn’t find notes where I had pieced together the lyrics, it kind of just all, fell out of me I guess”
‘Keep It Together’ feels like it lives in a dream state, or the in-between dreaming and awake. Kevin’s unconscious writing of the lyrics adds to the mystique of the track, while the cinematic instrumentation creates an awe-inspiring sense of elation.
“ I love when you mentioned cinematic, It’s such a compliment. I love images in songs and creating little postcards of images throughout songs and I’ve worked really hard at that, throughout writing lots of other songs. If the song hadn’t had those, I think I would have just thrown it away and forgotten about it, which I’ve done with 100 other songs that I wrote at the same time.”
Four in the Morning maintain a dreamy, night-time chilled atmosphere throughout the song, even when the background synths and elements of distortion create a tense and heavy soundscape towards the crescendo. The vocals are hushed and sombre, adding a haunting or deep sadness to the song. It’s as if Kevin is quietly revealing the lyrics as if it’s too difficult to say aloud. This is the first time we hear Kevin display his voice in this melancholic and earnest manner. His vocals walk a fine line between nonchalance and despair throughout.
“Yeah, it’s a really good point. We play a lot of bars and loud rooms and I love it …and the trick was always could you have a few people at the bar stop talking, if they stopped talking and looked at you, you knew you were doing something right. I love Glen Hansard, and those people who can really belt out a song, but this one because it was written in lockdown and again not played live it had a little bit of a different vibe and again, our producer really wanted to honour that for want of the better term, in the studio. I remember he asked us and I was like ‘I don’t know how to do the chorus should I be giving the chorus more than I currently am’, and he’s like, ‘well do it how you sing it live’ and I was like, ‘we’ve never sung it live, you [Jono Steer] were the first person we sang it in front of’, he’s like, ‘oh cool, just do it, how you’ve been doing it’. So I think in a way that hopefully does fit the song”
The song was produced, recorded and mixed by Jono Steer (Angie McMahon, Ainslie Wills, Leif Vollebekk, Julia Wallace) at The Perch Recording Studio in Castlemaine in rural Australia. I wondered what it was like working with Jono.
“I think Jono is an amazing talent to be able to come into a room and listen to the stuff that the band is playing and [hear] what’s important. So the way we work with Jono was. He came to a rehearsal of ours and he just sat and we played all the songs to him, and it was literally the first time we’d ever played the songs to anyone. We were like, oh wow this is like a little gig, and he kind of took that away with him, and he didn’t really say much. Jono is a really quiet dude, but he didn’t really say much at that rehearsal. But when we got to the studio then, I think he’d really inhabited the songs and knew the most important bits of all the songs and he set us up in a way that we were just playing in a little sitting room, basically together. He knew that’s how we practice and how we played together. He just took the best bits of the song and just really dialled them up in ways that capture the song and sounds that I hadn’t been expecting for the songs or I hadn’t really imagined could go there, and it was great. It was so cool.”
‘Keep It Together,’ is part of a series of songs the band have written for an EP called ‘Stress Dreams’. Kevin explained what we can expect from the EP.
“So, the EP. It’s great that you talk about dreams and this space between awake and asleep because the EP is called ‘Stress Dreams’, and we played with a lot of names, but I realised after listening back to it, that there was all these references to dreams and sleeping and I guess even, we’re bloody well called Four in the Morning. I realised these songs were all ways of dealing with the world in a way that dreams do. A lot of stuff happens to you during the day, you go to sleep, your brain spits out a dream at you. I love dreams, they’re amazing, and I think songs are very similar. They’re your unconscious thinking about what’s going on in your life, and that’s what these songs feel like they are, and in a similar way musically, it’s hopefully quite atmospheric, it’s quite lyrical but in a little bit of an interesting twist. In terms of themes and stuff, it’s a lot about missing home, like not being able to get home at the moment and missing friends as well as just dealing with the minutiae of daily life and ruminating on that,”
Kevin has been living in Australia ( currently in lockdown ) and has found the pandemic particularly difficult because he couldn’t get home at all to see his family.
“ I haven’t been home in four years. Usually, I go home every two years, every second Christmas. I was scheduled to go home, Christmas of 2019, but I said, you know what I’m sick of going home in the middle of winter. I’m going to wait for a nice Irish summer I want long twilight evenings, walking on the beach in Lahinch. So I decided to go home July, 2020, being like, what’s the worst that can happen. It’s a cliche but you don’t really realise what you’re missing until you’re gone and I think that’s seeped itself into the songs in a huge way. I’m really looking forward to getting home and playing some of these songs to people at home.”
“It was really scary for me and my girlfriend. It was really scary for us because rightly or wrongly…we grew up as this generation of what’s a border, what’s a country, we’re global citizens all that kind of thing…It was a real stress and I guess it’s still kind of is. It’s tough, not getting home to my family…but yeah I’m really looking forward to going home. One of the songs on the EP, the opening track is called ‘Home Home’. It’s I guess about that joke, that idea in Ireland, you know, you’ve got your home, where you’re living, but you’ve got your home home, where your parents live or you go home to at the weekend or whatever.”
When Four in the Morning finally get to perform live in Ireland it will be a big deal for the band, and Kevin told me what he is looking forward to the most.
“The dream plan at the moment, is a realistic plan I guess, to head back around April next year. I don’t think we’ll get back for Christmas unfortunately but I think sort of April, March, May hopefully, we’ll start opening up again and yeah I’d love to get home and play these songs. It’s funny, I haven’t seen Fontaine’s DC live, I haven’t seen Pillow Queens live I haven’t seen all these great Irish bands that I love and I’ve been following from over here, whatever about me getting to play songs at home, I would love that and I really look forward to doing that. But yeah, just getting to some good Irish gigs will be exciting as well.”
Four in the Morning are a talented band. Their proficient musicianship crafts time stopping tunes laden in depth and meaning. ‘Keep It Together’ displays this superbly through beautiful melodies, eloquent songwriting and rich instrumentation. Looking forward to the EP.
Stream ‘Keep It Together’ below
Author: Danu
