A showman digging deeper

Kieran Goss is known for his affable on-stage persona and rapport with his audience, but this has not stopped him mining a darker seam in his latest album, writes SIOBHÁN LONG

SONGS OF MEMORIES turning from sepia to full colour; of separation and loss; and maybe, just maybe, of the triumph of hope over experience. Kieran Goss’s eighth album isn’t quite as shiny and happy as his early writing, or indeed as his affable on-stage persona.

Recent personal traumas have left their mark. Having lost both his mother and sister-in-law to cancer, as well as supporting his wife through her own recovery from breast cancer, Goss has taken a pummelling in his private life. Still, there are artistic riches to be found in adversity, and Goss isn’t the first songwriter to discover that.

The truth is that great art is often the product of personal crisis. John Martyn's classic album, Solid Air, mightn't have seen the light of day were it not for the personal grief he experienced (Martyn composed the title track in response to the suicide of fellow musician Nick Drake). And what of the marital strife that informed Dylan's Blood on the Tracks? You can almost touch the enmity on Loudon Wainwright's cynically titled More Love Songs, a post-separation anxiety record of gargantuan proportions. The human heart seems to find its best expression during tough times.

Goss recorded his latest collection, I'll Be Seeing You in Nashville, with Gabe Rhodes, son of country singer Kimmie Rhodes, co-producing alongside him. It's a stripped-down, spare collection, shot through with Goss's undeniable lyrical tenderness. The depth of the songwriting demands repeated listening, and return visits are amply rewarded, with layers revealing themselves slowly over time.

Goss is more than comfortable with such patient appreciation. He’s not in hot pursuit of the lightning hit or the instantly hummable three-minute wonder. Maybe that’s what comes from maintaining a career for two decades and making eight albums.

“See what Johnny Cash achieved in his 70s,” Goss muses. “For someone to dig that deep is like a light at the end of a tunnel. I’ve been on the edges of commercial success and I’ve seen the fickleness of it and how transient it is. Of course, we all love our little bits of fame and recognition, but you also have to recognise that what it’s about is the work, and the quality of the work.

“I genuinely do believe that part of that package is that the tide goes in and the tide goes out. It’s part of the deal, and if you don’t accept that, you’re going to have some difficult days when the sun’s not shining on you.”

Goss’s trump card, ever since he first stepped on to a stage in the late 1980s, has been his rapport with his audience. He’s an artist who thrives on the challenge of the heckler, whose store of impromptu on-stage witticisms would be the envy of many a professional comedian. But the fact is, he’s not a comedian; he’s a singer/songwriter, and sometimes he has to remind himself of that when he’s on stage.

“I think there’s a balancing act that you have to strike,” he says. “I would like to think that really good performing is about being yourself, but you also have to know that it’s an amplified version of yourself. You’re turning up the colour on things that are genuine, because you are entertaining people who’ve come out and paid good money to see you.

“What loses me, though, is when I go to see an international artist and it’s like a West End show. They’ve turned it up to within an inch of its life. I don’t like that. I feel like I’ve been short-changed in some way. When I go to a show, I need to feel that I’ve really got some genuine communication with that person. That’s a balancing act, and as you get older, you get to do it better. So I think I’ve learned to talk less during my shows, because it can distract from the songs.”

PEOPLE WHO AREN’T on intimate listening terms with songwriters such as Leonard Cohen have a tendency to consign his work to a dustbin labelled “depression city”. Contrary to such cliched thinking, though, songs of death, loss and life’s rougher edges are often the most life-affirming snapshots. How many of us have had our eyes opened by a lyric that spoke to us directly? Or been rattled by an emotion expressed in a song that we presumed was ours alone?

Goss seems to know a thing or two about the universality of human experience, but he’s not in the business of using his songs to expunge guilt, exorcise grief or slough off the pain that life brings with it.

“I think that you have to allow your personal experience to feed in emotionally to your songs,” he says. “But it’s not therapy, it’s a song. That can be a fatal mistake. That seemed to be a trend for a while: singer/songwriters seemed to represent a moan-fest and, to me, that’s a very juvenile way to see songwriting. It’s based on the songwriter being the centre of the world, whereas what I want to do is to apply the craft of songwriting to details in my life to make them universal in some way. There’s a good chance that what touches a nerve in my life will be going on for other people too.”

Goss’s particular talent is in allowing songs such as I’ll Be Seeing You to breathe a life all their own. He doesn’t spell out his personal experience, line by bleeding line. Instead, he suggests, invokes, conjures, summons. Feelings and sensations are the stuff of his songs, not interminable verses cataloguing personal trauma. It’s finding the universal in the particular, and Goss has managed to make use of that all-too-rare gift with enormous subtlety and understatement.

Maybe his decision to take time out, to allow time for gestation, is part of the explanation for his insights? “For me, I keep writing until I know, in some instinctive way, that I have nothing to write about today,” he says candidly. “It’s a scary place, because we all fear that we never will have again. But what I know now, that I didn’t know 20 years ago, is that you go off and you live your life, and writing becomes a part of it again. At some point, I think every artist fears that they’ve done what they’re going to do, and that there’s nothing more. But you know, we all need time out.

“You don’t stop being a writer. You just give it time. If you don’t allow that in your life, then you’re allowing your ego, your sense of what the world expects of you, to dictate the terms for you as an artist.

“That’s just an ego trip, and for me, more than anything, this journey has been a journey in control of ego.”