GARETH Dunlop's new album Animal was delayed by two years due to Covid. It was finally released back in April, but the Belfast singer/songwriter/producer is only now starting to play his own shows to promote it.
Dunlop (35) was busy serving as bassist and backing singer for his friend Foy Vance over the past few months during the Co Down musician's American and European tours, on which he also served as the opening act.
With those touring commitments now complete, east Belfast-based Dunlop is glad to finally be fully focused on his own music, which will be celebrated at his upcoming show at The Empire in Belfast on November 11.
"I absolutely loved it, but some of those nights were long old nights," he says of pulling double-duty on the road with Vance, whose recent album Signs of Life he also produced.
"You're up there playing your own set, and then you're throwing on a bass and you're playing for another hour-and-40 with Foy. It can definitely take its toll on the voice. So yeah, it's great to be back and just kind of concentrating on this record."
Dunlop is looking forward to returning to the more familiar surrounds of The Empire Music Hall to mark the release of his second album, having made his debut appearance at the SSE Arena while opening for Vance last month.
"I've played The Empire quite a few times," he says. "In fact, I used to have a residency there playing everybody else's music in the Basement Bar.
"If I look back even further than that, I think I did my final music tech performance at The Empire. And I've seen so many great performers there as well. I remember seeing Foy there, so it's somewhere I love playing and somewhere I love going. I just think it's a great venue."
He adds: "I mean, the SSE show was incredible. Just walking out onto that stage, in front of that many people was... I've never experienced that before. I got a real buzz off it. But there is something special in those smaller, more intimate venues. There's an immediacy that I certainly get off on."
Having first picked up his guitar at age 14, Dunlop quickly traded dreams of rock and roll stardom for Bob Dylan-inspired songcraft after finding a copy of Blood on The Tracks among a discarded record collection in a neighbour's driveway. Going on to study music at Bangor Tech, he quickly made a name for himself as an accomplished performer of covers and his own original material.
After winning Young Songwriter of The Year at the 2011 Belfast Nashville Songwriters Festival, Dunlop signed up with a US-based music publisher for whom he spent almost a decade making music 'to order', creating songs for TV shows, films, ads and other artists.
Of course, he's also managed to fit his own musical projects in over the years. The upcoming Belfast gig will find Dunlop performing with a backing band to better show off the rich and soulful multi-instrumental sound of the songs from Animal alongside favourites from 2017's Americana-informed debut album No 79 (both recorded at his home-based Sycamore Studios) and the series of increasingly adventurous EPs he's released in-between, including 2020's Born Uncool.
When he spoke to The Irish News, Dunlop was busy rehearsing with his band, having performed with them at London's St Pancras Old Church last weekend. As he explains, the Empire gig is effectively a belated album launch show.
"I've been living with this record for the best part of a year and this is my first home headline show for a really long time," he says, "so I'm really looking forward to it.
"The London gig was only around 45 to 50 minutes, but this one's gonna be a full show. We've still got a few of the older tracks to kind of blow the dust off and try to work out again.
"And even with the new songs, for the US tour [with Foy] I was just playing them on my own. Working them up with a band isn't something I've had much of an opportunity to be doing until now.
"The way this record came together was kind of back-to-front, you know? Normally, you get out and play a lot of new songs in front of folks. You stretch them and pull them apart, and then you go into the studio and you put them together. But Animal was done the other way around.
"Even though I thought I had it finished right before the lockdowns and all that stuff kind of happened, there are actually a few songs on the record which made their way onto it pretty late in the day."
Incredibly, it seems that a key moment on the record, the anthemic single Look Back Smiling, was one such late addition. It was inspired by his family's experiences during lockdown, Dunlop tells me.
"When things started opening up again, my son Wilson [who also stars in the excellent video, alongside his elder sister, Joanie], went back to school. I think he was a bit shell-shocked by the whole experience, you know? He missed out on most of P1, and I think it was a bit of a shock to be suddenly going back to that after it being just the four of us in the house for so long," explains Dunlop.
"So he went into his shell a little bit. I felt I wanted to write about how I wanted him to grab life by the horns again and be as much of a kid as possible, to just be able to enjoy that young sense of wonder and childlike fearlessness.
"When it was finished, I just had to find space on the record for it."
The onset of the pandemic also coincided with the end of a major chapter in Dunlop's musical career: having worked for a Nashville-based music publisher for many years, by 2020 the Belfast musician was keen to draw a line under this arrangement and concentrate on his own music, which was starting to move further and further away from the rootsy sound of his debut LP.
2020's Born Uncool EP was a watershed release which found Dunlop experimenting with electronic sounds. It helped pave the way for highlights of the new album such as the soulful electropop of recent single Right About Ready and its moody, pulsing title track.
"When I made No. 79, I was still heavily involved with the Nashville side of things and doing a lot of Americana and country music, so that was still very much a part of what I was listening to and what I was interested in," Dunlop explains.
"By the time of Born Uncool, I'd had a couple of mad ideas where I was starting to tinker around with synths. I was just getting ready to get out of the Nashville publishing deal, but they wouldn't release me until I put out one last project.
"Part of me knew that they just wouldn't get Born Uncool, they wouldn't understand it. And, if I'm being honest, that was maybe a little bit of a driving force for that EP. It was kind of my parting gift to them: 'Here you go – I can't wait for you to absolutely hate it'."
Spoken like a true animal.
:: Gareth Dunlop, November 11, The Empire, Belfast. Tickets via thebelfastempire.com. Animal is out now, buy online via garethdunlop.com
