Into the Dark

Somewhere between the kitchen table at his home near Milltown and the opposite edge of the world, Paul McCann made a record about what happens when everything changes.

There are of course a number of ways to make a music record.

There is the manufactured approach where musician sits down with a plan of sorts, sets out a mood board, a list of references and even perhaps gets a person in a very expensive room to tell them what it is that the world needs next.

Or you can collect things.

A guitar shape here, or even melody hummed into your phone at four in the morning, bleary eyed, long after the stars have put the street lights to sleep. It could be a meandering chord progression that refuses to leave- that all elusive ear worm. Or a strange sound that could come in useful six or more months from now, among dozens of half-finished ideas, bits and bobbins, filed away with hundreds of others, waiting for their turn to reach the mic.

McCann is one such collector.

“I have hundreds and hundreds of voice notes,” he admits. Guitar bits, little chord changes, vocal melodies. Things he can always return to.

It’s an appropriately analogue way of describing the making of ‘It Does Not Exist’, his third album. Eleven songs assembled from years of instinct, curiosity and accumulated musical debris.

There are new things too. Strings - and lots of them. Orchestral arrangements litter the traces of power pop that have run through McCann’s work since the beginning.

Yet the first thing you hear is not necessarily what you expect.

‘Watch It Burn’, the album’s first single, arrived last Friday, September 18.

Inspiration

The song grew from something haunting McCann found in the chords. He decided not to fight it.

The result is an eerie, atmospheric song about losing someone - or watching someone destroy themselves - and being left behind with the aftermath: senses of frustration, grief, memory.

The lyrics venture into the supernatural, drawing on the Japanese folklore of the Hyakki Parade, the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons, in which supernatural creatures and animated household objects move through the darkness.

Then there is the eBow.

Alain Johannes, the Chilean-American musician whose CV wanders from time spent with Queens of the Stone Age, Them Crooked Vultures, PJ Harvey, Chris Cornell and Mark Lanegan, contributes eerie, sustained guitar textures that seem to hover.

“He’s like the ultimate secret weapon,” McCann tells the Celt.

There is no shortage of musicians on ‘It Does Not Exist’ who might qualify that description.

For someone who has spent almost three decades playing, recording and collaborating, McCann has accumulated an address book that makes a casual studio session sound faintly ridiculous.

The new album features Matt Johnson and Mick Grondahl, the drummer and bassist from Jeff Buckley’s ‘Grace’. Johnson has also worked with the likes of Rufus Wainwright and St. Vincent.

For McCann, having them play on his record is not merely a nice piece of muso trivia.

“Grace is one of my favourite albums,” he says. “To have them as my backing band is pretty incredible.”

Grondahl came over from Copenhagen especially and stayed in Cavan while the songs on ‘It Does Not Exist’ were recorded. That detail feels especially important. Because despite the headline names on the sleeve, this isn’t a record made in some anonymous international artistic bubble.

Star power

There is something pleasingly incongruous that geography of this project remains stubbornly Cavan.

Alan D’Arcy, another local musician, contributes a baritone saxophone solo to ‘Watch It Burn’.

McCann’s influences stretch from The Beatles and Paul McCartney through San Fran’s Jellyfish and the intricate end of power pop, with Jason Falkner among the more contemporary touchstones.

His earlier records were often brighter.

“There’s definitely less pop,” says McCann of ‘It Does Not Exist’. “I just wanted to take things in a different direction.”

The change is immediately audible. Around eight of the album’s 11 songs feature strings. But McCann insists orchestration was never part of the master plan.

He explains to the Celt that his process often involves writing the song first. Then he listens, before asking what might make it better.

“It’s very much about, as the recording process is progressing, figuring out what sounds are going to elevate it and improve it.”

To use the kitchen anology.

Needs more salt.

Add chilli.

More strings. MORE STRINGS!

McCann laughs. “A hundred per cent.”

In the groove

McCann has been buying records since he was five. One of the earliest he remembers arriving into the family home was Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’. Decades later, he is about to hold his own music in the same physical format.

There is a certain romanticism to that, one which ditgital streaming desperately fails to reproduce.

He recalls the members of Gomez talking with excitement about holding their music in record format when they signed their label deal. The economics were far less romantic, but the object itself remained sacred. McCann understands that.

His album is due for physical release through East London Recordings on CD and vinyl in the UK and Europe, with Coolcats Music handling the US release.

There are also discussions around bringing his first two albums - Here Comes the Rapture and Alter Ego - to vinyl. Both were critically well received, with the hallowed Shindig! Magazine describing McCann as the ‘most celebrated power pop artist you’ve barely heard of’.

But beneath all the names, guitars, records and impressive studio stories, ‘It Does Not Exist’ is ultimately an album about a world that feels increasingly difficult to make sense of.

McCann’s previous album, Alter Ego, was more personal. His father had died, and grief ran through much of the writing. This time, the lens has widened.

There is climate anxiety. Global uncertainty. Civil unrest and considerations of genocide.

“Things aren’t looking great,” McCann opines.

But he isn’t making a record simply to document the darkness. There is a desire to find something positive out there.

“Because we have a chance to change things, as a society to be better, do things better. We have to find a way out of the darkness.”