“I’m sick of this game if I’m being honest,” Pa Sheehy sings on Maybe It Was All for This, his debut solo album. If his folk/pop tunes weren’t so consistently excellent, you might wonder if the former member of the Co Kerry band Walking on Cars was in fact a pitiful character written out of the final draft of Angela’s Ashes: the songs labour under titles such as Towards the Water, Loser, Ghost Down the Lane, The Night the School Burnt Down, and Song to Silence (Last Ferry to Doonbeg).
In fairness, the past five years have been particularly tough for Sheehy, who at the tail end of 2019 was fronting a band that achieved significant international success. As 2020 arrived, with their song Monster used as the opening theme for the Harlan Coben series The Stranger, on Netflix, the future looked bright for the quartet of friends. Within six months, however, Walking on Cars had split, the group’s other members shell-shocked by their singer’s decision to leave.
Songwriting was then for some time a solitary experience for Sheehy, and although this self-contained approach invests the album with a noticeably insulated mood, the songs are lessons in how to share stories rooted in home, hearth and honesty. Sheehy has admitted that gigging, albeit briefly, with Bruce Springsteen in the summer of 2023 influenced his creative direction – “real stories without rushing on too quickly,” he said recently – so the songs pivot on memories of childhood, teenage years, yearning to leave small-town life and realising, after no small evaluation, that he was destined to return.
“Excuse me while I question my existence ... I go for a drive when I need some time,” he sings on Loser. The song’s title is a red herring: Maybe It Was All for This is a deserving winner.