Damien Rice

Then something unusual

Something strange

Comes from nothing at all

("Amie")

I know practically nothing about the life of Damien Rice, except that he was born on the outskirts of Dublin in the early Seventies, spent some time in a band called Juniper, and at a certain point, around the turn of the millennium, found himself with the ten acoustic songs that make up his debut album, "O". I know, because I've listened to them, that they're all love songs, and there isn't one that isn't heartrending; and that at the time he was involved with a singer a few years younger than him, Lisa Hannigan, whose angelic voice wraps around the album's harmonies like a caress. I don't know the backstory of these songs, but every time I listen to them it's a matter of "here" and "after", never of "before"; I don't listen for their story, but for what they can give me and leave with me. And they always leave something behind, whether it's a shiver, a sigh, or a touch of sadness.

It's said that what makes the difference in poetry is the ability to perceive things others can't hear, like the cough of a bee. The same isn't exactly true of music, and yet I'm convinced that behind the secret of a beautiful song lies the same capacity to pick up on, and generate, sensations that are inaudible to most people. There's something underlying the music of a Johnny Cash, a Bob Dylan, a Joni Mitchell, and it extends even to an outsider like Damien Rice, and it has to do with breath. You sense great songs through this, through the coming and going of air blowing between their chords, through the pulsing silences and the solemn new beginnings. Even before the melody or the words, you recognize them by the wind they carry and that gets into your bones. And Damien Rice's songs have that breath, the breath of Great Songs, the kind you feel on your face before you hear it in your ears, that echoes in your chest before it reaches your head. This is a different territory from the expressive urgency of certain indie songwriters – Sufjan Stevens, Elliott Smith. For them it's a matter of inspiration, of confession. Not for Damien: for him it's about electric sharing, about locked eyes. About whisky and warmth.

What I am to you is not real

What I am to you, you do not need

What I am to you is not what you mean to me

You give me miles and miles of mountains

And I’ll ask for the sea

(“Volcano”)

Despite knowing nothing about his life, I'm certain that whatever Damien was in that early 2000s, distant yet not too distant, is perfectly crystallized in the throes of these songs. After all, the clenched-teeth, emphasized sighs heard between the lines of "Delicate" or "Cheers Darlin'" deliver the vivid impression of an exhausted heart, seeking momentary respite from its own feverish beat. And it's in Damien's voice that the added expressiveness resides: androgynous and flexible in timbre, vibrant on the low notes and then full and cutting the moment it soars, it carries that unmistakable patina of suffering belonging to someone who couldn't fake it even if he tried.

By the time the record spins and the sweet guitar figure of "Delicate" kicks in, the scene is already there before your eyes: a downtown apartment set up for a night-time performance, soft lights, a few candles scattered across the floor and shelves; twenty people sitting on the ground, straining to listen, the fumes of wine already thickening the air. A guitar and a voice. An intimate setting, for a shared, personal experience. Because "O" is, first and foremost, this: atmosphere, before the words and music even step forward to take centre stage.

Eighteen years on from its release, Damien Rice's debut remains a work of dramatic, unresolved tension. That's precisely where its vital pulse comes from. There's the boundless tenderness of the verses in "Delicate", swept away by a scornful chorus ("Why you sing Hallelujah, if it means nothing to ya?"), there's "I Remember", which opens with a quiet acoustic arpeggio and ends in a troubled electric gust. And there's "Cannonball", at once the most disillusioned and the sweetest song ever written.

These are songs of stark emotional chiaroscuro, waypoints on a disordered inner journey searching for an impossible rational explanation, some tangible reason why the heart should now be reduced to a crumpled rag forgotten in a corner of the chest. And Damien, a drifter of feelings, doesn't even know who to blame, someone else ("Volcano") or himself ("Cheers Darlin'"); or who to turn to, the heavens ("Cold Water") or the memory of a loved one ("Eskimo").

And so it is

Just like you said it would be

Life goes easy on me

Most of the time

(“The Blower’s Daughter”)

Yet there's that ability to speak to everyone's soul. "The Blower's Daughter", from whatever angle you look at it, is one of the great love songs of the millennium. It has everything, and then some: tenderness, anger, pain, sadness, redemption, and a melody that has by now become common property. It thrives on a devastating emotional crescendo, a criss-crossing of voices, battered guitars and string melodies that each time crash into those lines that every one of us, thinking of someone, carries tattooed in our veins. Those "eyes" that can't seem to look "off you", eyes that then lose their sight and dry up, become "mind", and all that's left is the memory. 'Til I find somebody new…

Over plucked notes come stories of everyday life, like "Older Chests". "Mama tried to wash their faces/ but these kids they lost their graces/ and Daddy lost at the races too many times". In other words, when things change and can never go back to how they were. "She broke down the other day, I know/ some things in life may change". A necessary pause. "And some things, they stay the same…/ like time".

Time, there's always time. In its relentless passing, it's another constant running through the album. In "Cheers Darlin'", a tipsy waltz, it's the thing that takes opportunities away and leaves only regret behind ("I die when he comes around to take you home/ I'm too shy, I should have kissed you/ when we were alone"), until all one becomes is "a whisper in the ear" of someone no longer around. In "Amie", instead, time is an empty window onto the future, waiting to be filled with hope; she reads him a story and he, at the top of his lungs, urges her on: "Tell it like you still believe/ the end of the century/ brings a change for you and me". And all around, the strings swirl in a gale of romantic airs.

But in "Cannonball", and in every other song, time is the thing that, the more it stretches out, the more it widens the distance, without ever managing to dilute the intensity of the pain. "There's still a little bit of your song in my ears/ still a little bit of your words I long to hear", Damien sings over a soft, measured arpeggio. It's time passing, wearing away and wearing away until it forms a callus. Until falling becomes a fear already lived through.

So it's not hard to fall

When you float like a cannonball

("Cannonball")

There's a superhuman, desperate force in these songs, as if they were straining to burst out of the throat, still warm, like a necessary regurgitation straight from the depths of the soul. Yet there's an infinite grace in their melodies and arrangements, in the cello notes that float and sink gently, in the brushed drums and the plucks of bass, in the voices of Rice and Lisa Hannigan duetting with disarming spontaneity. "Volcano", with its jazzy stride, is a perfect summary of all this, but it's "I Remember" that truly takes your breath away, so pure and lovestruck in its first act (with a touching performance from Hannigan), before exploding into that raw, furious finale.

And there's no shortage of added ambition either, whether it's a Gregorian choir rising like dense vapour from the icy "Cold Water", which caresses the temples and wipes everything else away; or even the majestic intervention of a soprano in the middle of the closing "Eskimo", a touch that's vaguely grotesque but distinctive, and iconic today. And finally we return to acoustic calm, once more paying tribute to that eskimo friend who's always there, ready to lend us a hand, whoever he may be.

A pause follows, after which Damien resumes singing. Then another pause, leading to the farewell of a "Silent Night" sung by Lisa in the most enveloping silence. The end. But "O", in a circularity suggested by its very title, could already start over from the beginning, again with the aching "Delicate", still without answers, still burning with the same intensity.

We might make love

In some sacred place

Oh, and look on your face

It's delicate

("Delicate")

I confess I lied. I happened to read a few interviews about Damien Rice and this album, and there's certainly no shortage of anecdotes worth mentioning, starting with his past as a street musician up to the fact that these songs were partly inspired by a stay in Italy – and let's not pretend we're not proud of that, come on. But I chose not to include any of it, because this work tells its own story, on its own terms, without clinging to the tales that surround it. These are ten songs that are simply unique, each one more wonderful than the last, and I couldn't be more honest than I am in writing this. They mean so much to so many people that it's almost hard to believe.

The unrepeatable enchantment running through the grooves of "O" belongs to a record that, without shifting the course of music in the slightest, has genuinely changed the life of everyone who's heard it. It holds the story of a singer-songwriter who learned to fly from stones, to lie from love, and to die from life. Come to think of it, it's a million stories all at once, in the same room. With the lights dimmed low.

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26/04/2020