Once more with feeling

Paul Brady's new album is all about spontaneity, trusting your instincts, and taking risks, he tells Arminta Wallace.

'Nashville", says Paul Brady, leaning back in a comfortable chair in the purpose-built recording studio which nestles in a leafy corner of his garden, "is a funny town." Funny how? Well, being small, suburban and leafy but within easy commuting reach of both east and west-coast America, it's chock-full of musicians of every shape and hue.

It is, Brady insists, a music town rather than a country music town. The very word "Nashville" is, nevertheless, instantly and totally redolent of country music; and Brady has just recorded his new album there. So does this signify a deliberate change of direction for the 60-year-old songster? A country tinge, and all that? He looks horrified. "No way," he says. "And in a sense the reason I was reluctant to record there, over the years, was because that was exactly what I didn't want to do."

But when he arrived in Music City, Tennessee in October 2003 to collect an award for his chart-topping song, The Long Goodbye, his American publisher Garry West suggested laying down a couple of tracks - just to see how it would go. It went well, and the result is a collection of new songs called Say What You Feel, on which, Brady says, he did exactly that. Or rather, he sang it. "I see myself as a singer and a musician first, rather than a songwriter," he says. "And this album is about enjoying singing, and enjoying taking real risks with the type of song I'm singing. The way we put it together was very spontaneous.

"I suppose I was reacting to the way I've worked in the past, when - like everybody else in this country - I got seduced by new technology. I've been shying away from that recently. I'm an instinctive person. I like to do something, and let it go - I don't like to sit and stew over it for months, tweaking here and tweaking there, because I end up losing perspective on it completely. Then I end up coming out depressed by the recording process instead of being enriched by it. So this time I just said, 'Right - I don't care what this comes out like, I'm going to record it now."

Brady's open, unguarded singing style gives the album an easygoing, laid-back feel. Behind the apparent artlessness of Say What You Feel, however, lie the skills of a studio band whose combined musical talents are off the end of the scale. The bass player on the first four tracks is ex-Pentangle stalwart Danny Thompson.

"He's from east London, and I've always liked his style of playing," says Brady. "It's a fairly aggressive style of rhythmic bass playing. He happened to be in Nashville at the time - in fact, his presence there was actually what made me decide to try this out. I figured, well, he's not from Nashville either, so he's not going to put up with this country gunk. We'll do it our way - you know?"

Also in town at the crucial moment was the redoubtably-named John R. Burr. "He's one of these piano players who has ingested all of Americana, from jazz to the classical things through to - what would you call it? - Bruce Hornsby and people like that. He knew the sound I was trying to aim for, and I love his playing."

Burr's distinctive style contributes hugely to the mood of Say What You Feel, and it's no accident that Brady singles out the vital roles played by guitarist and pianist, for he himself began his performing career playing guitar and piano as a teenager - though it was a long way from Nashville, Tennessee.

"My mother was originally from Irvinestown in Fermanagh, and my father was a Sligo man," he explains. "They met in Bundoran, and honeymooned there in the 1940s, so that was where we all went every summer - my extended family. My mother had nine in her family, so I had about 50 first cousins, and we'd all go to Bundoran every year."

Brady senior was a talented amateur dramatist and singer; and before long, Brady junior was installed as a regular part of the backing band at the Holyrood Hotel.

"This was long before the kind of organised entertainment for tourists where you have a trad band in the corner - this was all spontaneous stuff," he says.

"So-and-so would nudge someone else and say, 'Go up and ask Jimmy to sing a song'. So an announcement would come: 'And we believe we have a talented man here from Co Derry called Jimmy Jones - would he come up and give us a song?' And Jimmy Jones would get up and sing. It could be anything from Danny Boy to Gilbert and Sullivan to Perry Como.

"The whole point was that, as a musician, you had to follow these people. They'd just start singing - they didn't know what key they were singing in. So first of all you had to find the key. And then when they got halfway through the first verse, and realised it was too high, they'd change key downwards - and you would have to go wherever they were changing to. It was an incredible education in the piano keyboard and the guitar keyboard and in trying to find out where people were, by ear."

It was also an extended lesson in how to hook an audience by means of a good song. Brady's songs have, famously, been recorded over the years by a veritable horde of singers in a variety of musical styles, from Tina Turner through Art Garfunkel to Johnny Hallyday. He has also formed songwriting partnerships with a range of people from Carole King to Ronan Keating to, on Say What You Feel, the RTÉ presenter John Kelly.

How do these partnerships work? Has he developed a systematic way of creating a song, regardless of who he's working with?

"Well, actually, no," he says. "There's no set way to do it. It's very fluid. It's like trying to catch mercury on the table. You're grabbing a structure out of the air with one hand, and you're changing it with the other - and throwing it back out again so that the other person can get it. And then something happens, and both parties know it immediately. And then it moves off again.

"To be honest, it's a very exciting process. I'm sort of addicted to it now. I used to spend all the time writing songs on my own - and apart from the fact that it was an extremely solitary existence, it was very hard to keep dragging stuff out of myself all the time. I mean, I'm very proud of what I did on my own - but I feel such a sense of fun and relief now, when I'm writing with other people."

And now that he is a composer of a certain age, are there things he no longer writes songs about? "Well - yeah," he says, with a chuckle. "Young people write about what young people care about, you know? In my younger days I wrote . . . kind of angrier things, I suppose. The older I get, the more I tend to look at personal things, because I think that most of what goes on in the world originates from how two people relate to each other in the first place."

What was he angry about? "Well, the whole British-Irish thing annoyed me for a while. The whole imbalance of power between those two races and how one felt superior to the other and all of that. That bothered me. But I'm not really angry any more about anything. No, wait - there's one angry song on the album. Doing it in the Dark is about how stupid can we be, making the same mistakes over and over. That's what that song's saying."

He throws back his head and laughs. "And don't look at me for an answer . . ."

Say What You Feel is on the Compass label. Paul Brady plays the Point Theatre in Dublin on April 22nd