Damien Rice - The singer-songwriter who defied success

Looked at from the outside, Damien Rice's story seems like the cliché of an artist from centuries past: in his twenties, a future reasonably well launched in the music world with a record label backing him, a sense of burnout brought on by the commercial logic he had to submit to, and so the choice to walk away from it all, leading a nomadic life between Iceland, Spain and the countryside of central Italy, occasionally releasing albums that win over both audiences and critics, yet doling out his output and live performances in the smallest possible doses — reduced, one might almost say, to the bare minimum needed to survive. As so often happens in life, though, when looked at more closely and with less superficiality, Damien Rice's personal and artistic story turns out to be far more complex than that.

“Damien Rice walked so Justin Vernon could run”, read a social media post some time ago. And that might be a good way to introduce Damien Rice — even though the former can be filed away far more easily than the latter within the folk-singer-songwriter scene, alongside names like Sufjan Stevens, Beirut, Josè Gonzalez, Hollow Coves, Kevin Morby, and a reborn, less cathartic Jeff Buckley (as VH1 described him in the early 2000s), while the Canadian belongs to a hazier, more cerebral, experimental, at times ineffable dimension. And yet, just like the spirit of Bon Iver, Damien Rice has also been defined throughout his career by a rejection of record-industry logic, and that rejection was precisely his good fortune and one of the drivers of his success — even if, unlike Vernon, he reached his peak with his very first record, and never managed to win over the entire indie audience of the time, still steeped in late-90s prejudices and not particularly open to new developments in the field.

Musically, Damien Rice carries within him the vocation for telling bare, sincere stories of private experience, which clearly recalls Elliott Smith; the ability to elevate the personal to the universal through mythological archetypes, which recalls Bob Dylan; and the tacit ambition to tell stories that speak less of men than of humanity itself, which winks at Bruce Springsteen.

Damien Rice was born about twenty kilometres from Dublin in 1973, and took his first steps in the music world in the mid-90s with Juniper, the band with which he achieved modest success, above all thanks to the single “Weatherman”. Juniper were undeniably a band of their time, children of 90s Britpop, with a sound somewhere between Blur and Green Day, and with Rice's voice already extremely recognisable from the earliest demos.

PolyGram, the record label now absorbed into Universal, noticed them and offered a six-album deal, from which Damien Rice would flee, weighed down by record-industry logic and the artistic control labels so often exert over their talent. At the time, Damien Rice was young and inexperienced, and while his artistic pars construens was still taking shape, the pars destruens was already clear: Juniper was not his path, any more than the categorical imperatives of the record industry were.

After his departure, Juniper became Bell X1, still active today with nine albums released, ranging across folk rock, lo-fi and synth-pop all the way to new wave and electronica, drawing inspiration from Talking Heads and the Radiohead of “In Rainbows”, and showing, in their more recent work, clear traces of Coldplay.

In the years after leaving the band, Damien Rice lived in Italy, where he worked as a farmhand in the Tuscan countryside. He took time to travel around Europe and began recording his first solo tracks, sending them out to producers in search of funding: the one who believed in him was David Arnold (composer, among other things, of several James Bond film scores, and a distant cousin of Rice's), who helped him put together a bare-bones home studio where he could record his new songs and shape their sound.

In 2002 came the release of Damien Rice's debut solo album, still to this day his biggest commercial success, O. Ten tracks, and no major label behind them. The record is a tribute to his friend, singer Mic Christopher, who had died the previous year, and, as the title suggests — and as explicitly recounted in “Amie” — it also draws inspiration from the famous novel “Histoire d'O”.

Although in the story told so far Damien Rice tends to come across as a solitary figure, the imperfect acoustic perfection of O is the result of several collaborations: above all, with Lisa Hannigan, second voice and Damien's girlfriend at the time, who would remain a fixed part of the project until 2007, in constant dialogue with him on vocals and beyond. O also features ten other musicians, with cellist Vyvienne Long and guitarist/co-producer Mark Kelly given particular prominence.

O is a raw, stripped-down album, almost entirely free of production flourishes and effects. Most of the tracks are acoustic, with the guitar sketching out the melodic line and the mood always suspended — austere at first, then, as the record unfolds, increasingly warm and reassuring. It's an album that is, all things considered, accessible and simple, yet never comes across as predictable or commercial — and that was precisely the record's good fortune, turning it into a landmark of pop culture, from concert halls to cinema screens (several tracks were chosen as soundtracks for films or TV series) all the way to the UK X Factor, where in 2011 it found a new lease of life.

But let's take things in order. The album opens with “Delicate”, which begins with an acoustic guitar arpeggio and, after about thirty seconds, brings in Rice's voice singing “We might kiss when we are alone/ nobody's watching”. Used as a soundtrack on “Lost”, “House” and “Dawson's Creek” — to name just a few — “Delicate” is a half-whispered song that explicitly recalls Jeff Buckley in the obsessive repetition of the hook “Why do you sing hallelujah/ if it means nothing to you”, and brings him to mind too in its use of whispered vocals broken up by full-voiced phrasing, serving as a kind of mission statement for the whole record.

What follows is a triptych fired off in quick succession: first “Volcano”, a bedroom song for guitar, cello and percussion sung as a dialogue with Lisa Hannigan; then “The Blower's Daughter”, the lead single and probably the Irish artist's best-known song, partly thanks to its inclusion in the soundtrack of “Closer”. The track lends itself to two readings: The Blower's Daughter as the daughter of the singer's flute teacher, with whom he fell hopelessly in love, or as the daughter of the “blower”, slang for the phone box, whom the singer saw only once, lurking outside her home and hiding behind a bush out of embarrassment. “The Blower's Daughter” is just like the film it soundtracks: slow yet always elegant and perfectly paced, desperately romantic, deeply minimalist, caught between eternal love and visceral hatred (of himself and of others). The third feat is “Cannonball”, which again opens with an instantly recognisable acoustic guitar arpeggio, and which Little Mix performed on the UK X Factor in 2011, taking their version to number one in both the UK and Ireland. The song is built on oxymorons and contradictions (“Stones taught me to fly/ love taught me to lie/ life taught me to die”) and unfolds in a vocal crescendo that keeps shifting between minor and major within the verses, culminating in the closing “Come on courage/ teach me to be shy”.

The album continues with “Older Chest”, “Amie” — which contains an explicit reference to the “Histoire d'O” that gives the whole record its title — and “Cheers Darlin'”, a ballad about unrequited love built on exotic, ancestral percussion, before arriving at “Cold Water” (part of the soundtrack to “ER”), where Long's cello and Hannigan's voice take absolute centre stage on a spiritual track that almost seems to foreshadow “Illinoise”, the masterpiece Sufjan Stevens would release three years later, where the vocal effects and the almost ritual quality of certain songs would clearly recall the vocal — but above all production — ascent of this track's chorus.

The album closes with no fewer than three ghost tracks: “Prague”, which starts off at an extremely slow pace on guitar and builds, carried by percussion, into a distorted electric interlude, with a distant, shouted vocal (echoed almost identically by Mitski in the outro of “Drunk Walk Home”, a track from 2014's “Bury Me At Make Out Creek”); then “Come All Ye Lost” and “Silent Night”, a variation on the original theme written and sung by Lisa Hannigan.

O is a record that never won a Grammy, wasn't even nominated for one, and although it found its way into soundtracks and became a landmark of pop culture, it never achieved unanimous, worldwide success: it remains, however, an anachronistic reminder of music-making untouched by commercial logic, built on subtraction rather than addition (of tracks to the tracklist; of production, effects and computerised scaffolding layered over the natural sound of the instruments; of strings thrown in without justification and grafted onto the melodic line; of orchestration for its own sake; of crowd-pleasing guest spots; and so on).

After the release of O, Rice set off on a European tour, appeared on TV shows like the David Letterman Show, embarked on a tour alongside Fiona Apple, released a B-Sides EP, and finally arrived at the dreaded, much-hyped "sophomore album", 9, released in 2006.

That a radical transformation between records isn't strictly necessary is made clear by Rice himself. At least sonically, on 9 the Irish musician comes across as largely minimalist, reassuring, low-to-midtempo, much as we'd left him on O — bar a few exceptions, and bar a generally more pronounced experimental streak on this album. Vyvienne Long and Lisa Hannigan are still on board, but Mark Kelly is gone, replaced for the most part by Joel Shearer, who had been opening Rice's shows since 2003 and who joined the band and the production/arrangement team on 9.

The opening track is "9 Crimes", which starts with a piano arpeggio rather than the guitar we'd grown used to on O. The song, elevated by Lisa Hannigan's ethereal voice and set within an almost woodland atmosphere reminiscent of certain Enya productions, tells of nine crimes committed, which Rice alludes to and hints at, but always vaguely, approximately, at times calling himself "a cheat, a liar" — without ever offering grounds or truth. "The Animals Were Gone" is the second track, a slow ballad in which Rice sings "I love your depression/ and I love your double chin", an evident wink — albeit with roles reversed — at the unforgettable "You told me again you preferred handsome men/ but for me you would make an exception" from Leonard Cohen's Leonard Cohen's "Chelsea Hotel #2" (also clearly referenced in the song's sound and arrangement) — and, in the same way, "The Animals Were Gone" comes across as penetrating, sincere and steeped in a generous dose of romantic tenderness.

In "Elephant", Rice draws a contrast between "I am lately lonely/ I am lately horny", offering a spiritual key to reading the album, as if the crimes he alludes to were carnal sins, to be atoned for through a Passion recalling that of Jesus Christ. Reading it this way, it's easy to see "Me, My Yoke And I" as the physical fulfilment of that passion; it's an experimental, painful, pounding track, built on electric guitar arpeggios, drums, bass as the lead instrument, distorted sounds and a hook repeated to the point of exhaustion, almost like a serial industrial production, recalling — in the vocal and the guitar pedal — certain Spin Doctors tracks — and it is, by far, the most experimental song on the record.

Beyond this sacred reading of the album (whose clues are, in any case, numerous), what remains are the cathartic "Rootless Tree", a ballad that opens deceptively sweet and syrupy only to explode into the liberating, repeated "fuck you" of its chorus, recalling the theatricality of Jeff Buckley tracks like "The Sky Is A Landfill", and the sublime, whispered "Accidental Babies", built around a single piano scale, with Rice's voice breaking into tears as he pleads “I know I make you cry/ I know sometimes you wanna die/ But do you really feel alive without me?/ If so be free/ If not leave him for me/ Before one of us has accidental babies”.

9 comes to an end, and with it ends the artistic collaboration — but also the life partnership (though the term "life partnership", meaning love affair, does feel dreadful) — with Lisa Hannigan, who in 2007 decided to leave the songwriter to pursue a solo career (and, more broadly, a solo life).

Eight years of shifting circumstances pass between 9 and My Favorite Faded Fantasy, during which Damien Rice takes a road trip to Spain to see Radiohead, writing a song every day for all ten days of the journey, goes on a spiritual retreat in Iceland, but also spends a great deal of time in silence. Until, in 2014, his third studio album finally arrives — the first without Hannigan.

The narrative power of My Favorite Faded Fantasy feels stronger than in his previous work, and Rice brings in an orchestra to accompany several tracks, lending them a solemnity and a sense of fatality unprecedented in his output.

The title track, which also opens the album, is a soft song that could have come straight off "Sketches For My Sweetheart, The Drunk", the posthumous album by Jeff Buckley (a track like "You & I" immediately comes to mind), in its whispered use of the voice like a silken thread held up by a handful of electric guitar notes — until the majestic entrance of the band (bass, drums, electric keyboards) and the orchestra, which fade in behind Rice's sung notes as the hook "I've never loved" repeats.

The second track, "It Takes A Lot To Love A Man", runs a full nine minutes, opens on piano and is almost immediately joined by a cello that echoes "Volcano", before closing out with a full orchestration. Here Rice draws on a compositional device he's used several times on previous records, lyrical juxtaposition for dramatic effect ("It takes a lot to know a man/ it takes a lot to know a woman"), bringing to completion a song that sounds like the soundtrack to a fantasy drama.

The album unfolds as a series of letters addressed to a former love, arriving alongside statements made by the artist about his regret over the separation from Lisa Hannigan.

In "Colour Me In" we find the stripped-back, private Damien Rice of O, as he sings over a few bare arpeggios "Almost drove myself crazy and these words led to you"; in "The Box" he throws out a provocation that could easily be aimed at the record industry, whispering "Don't give me love with a whole bunch of rules/ 'cause that kind of love is just for fools"; and finally, the closing "Long Long Way" is a suspended track, a musical closing credit, with horns entering over a bed of strings as the edges blur and the notes grow ever more rarefied.

My Favorite Faded Fantasy is a cohesive work, built on a series of recurring devices — lyrics that shift by the end of a track over the same musical theme, the majestic entrance of strings and orchestra at the point of maximum tension, a whispered, semi-falsetto voice rarely used on previous records — that breaks an eight-year silence, but which, in all likelihood, marks the end of Damien Rice's recording career, the same year he also appeared on Italian TV screens as an international guest at the Sanremo Festival.

Nine years on from his last album, there is indeed no trace of a fourth: in the meantime, a few concerts, the occasional live EP, and a cover of Sia's "Chandelier" that brings out the drama of the lyrics, which tell of alcoholism and depression, and which holds its own against the synths and electric keyboards of the original.

In today's musical landscape, Damien Rice represents an endangered species: an artist untouched by overproduction, far removed from any commercial or industry logic, whose creative process is driven by deeply personal needs rather than the rhythms of success. Damien Rice writes, sings, releases music when he feels the time is right, but accepts no interference along the way — not out of austerity or unapproachability, but to protect the truth.

The price to pay – a rather steep one – is that every album could indeed be the last. And the more time goes by, the more one becomes convinced that it is.

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