Somebody's Child chat long awaited debut album.
© Nicholas O'Donnel
Singer-songwriter Cian Godfrey has been recording since he became disillusioned with playing covers in Dublin pubs while a student at music college and decided to focus on his own material instead. He was initially wary of the hype that greeted the first EPs released under the Somebody’s Child name in 2020–21, which he likens to “constantly standing on this glass floor that could break at any point”. A couple of years on, with the safety net of a trusted team, a record deal with the cult American label Frenchkiss and – judging by advance sales on their forthcoming tour – a growing fanbase, Somebody’s Child prepare to release their self-titled debut album.
Somebody’s Child is a mix of pre-pandemic material and songs written in the past year. Although some artists thrived on the lack of distractions in lockdown, Godfrey found it killed his creativity for a while. “I’ve always thought to go out to a cabin in the woods and write as much as you can would be good. But I think it’s different when you don’t have the choice and it’s forced upon you. I couldn’t imagine John Lennon and Paul McCartney sitting down and writing some of the greatest songs at 9am on a Wednesday morning, stuck in a room with four walls and no window. I think in a couple of years we maybe had one song to show for it, and we were honestly working nine to five.”
The following six months were much more fruitful, producing half a dozen new songs that made it onto the album along with an equal number that didn’t make the final cut. Although the original intention was for the whole album to be written from scratch – “We wanted to let the narrative develop and find its own identity and unique space” – in the end, it seemed important to include some of their first releases as well. “They have been so big for us, and so influential in terms of what direction we wanted to go in, that it felt wrong not to put them on the record itself.” But Godfrey found that his relationship to the songs had changed over time, which made revisiting them difficult: “I have no idea how they’re going to do because at this point I’ve rinsed them – I don’t know what sounds good or fresh anymore. But I guess I subscribe to the view that they’re no longer mine – I just need to let go and allow other people to make their own judgement on them.”
“We wanted to let the narrative develop and find its own identity and unique space”
Somebody’s Child takes the sound of those early songs in a subtly new direction, their 2020s take on early 2000s indie guitars now overlaid with 1980s-style synths. “We have Vangelis as the reference throughout the whole album, and Blade Runner is a visual cue – we managed to get the synth sound that he used in the movie.” The album has benefitted from the production skills of Mikko Gordon, at whose Hackney Road Studios the album was recorded and mixed. “Mikko is great – he’s so professional, he clearly has a wealth of experience. What I took most from it was how he managed to deal with people, like waiting to do vocals until the evening, setting a mood, building things up as it goes. And just the language he would use to make you feel like whatever you’re doing is important, and nothing is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.”
Being in London was another advantage of working with Gordon: “We wanted something new and fresh, and it is the birthplace of a lot of the music that we’re inspired by.” Having lived in Paris for much of his childhood, Godfrey says that it took some time to have a sense of belonging anywhere. In spite of spending much of the last year in London, the feeling that Dublin is home was reinforced by Somebody’s Child’s most recent gig there, performing to an audience peppered with friends and family. “A lot of people I haven’t seen for years showed up. That’s a weird one, how music has gone far enough to reach back into my past almost, and open up relationships that haven’t been there, and wouldn’t be there if not for doing it.”
Image: Jim Fuller
Although Somebody’s Child draws on that strong connection with Dublin and Ireland, Godfrey hopes that the songs have a universal appeal that isn’t anchored to any particular time, place or circumstance. “The reason I do music is because it makes me feel a certain way – for whatever reason, the colours that come up in my head remind me of certain places or things. I do like to leave a good bit of ambiguity in terms of lyrics so that I can discover what they mean, what more I can understand about myself in the process of songwriting, and then hopefully leave that door open to interpretation for the listeners. That way they can take what they want.”
Conscious that Covid robbed them of two years of live experience, Somebody’s Child are looking forward to touring the new album around the UK and Europe, with a few US dates to round things off. Meanwhile, having made a start on the next album during a recent trip to Wales, Godfrey is keen to get back to composing. “You lose what you do, if you don’t write for too long. It’s important to keep that muscle active.” He’s excited to see what their next steps will be and is determined not to succumb to second-album syndrome. “You want to do different directions but the more you think about it then the more it hinders your creative process. As a songwriter it’s less the pressure of people expecting things of you; it’s more just trying to keep that muse alive.” And for Godfrey, songwriting is his therapy as well as his job: “My love is for writing music, it’s where I find myself in a state of flow, it’s where I find myself most at home.”
Somebody’s Child is out February 3rd 2023.
Author: Rachel Goodyear