David Corley’s Irish Odyssey: From a Moving Past to a New Album

If David Corley was a landscape, he would be an ancient forest. The time-worn oak in his voice bends with the seasons. His words shade raw memory from a dry sky. His recent debut album, Available Light, is a collection of songs spanning decades of life’s encounters. His consequent European tour brought him to Ireland, where I was able to spend some time with the bard.

Corley is good, but you didn’t see Seamus that night in the pub. Seamus is a veteran of the Irish music sessions in Cleere’s in Kilkenny, Ireland. He was standing at the front of the pub singing to the hushed room. His unaccompanied voice had the fragility of all the decades he’s been singing these songs, and the whimsical warm strength of a man who will never stop singing them. And that’s what he does. In his smart blazer he comes into Cleere’s between 11.23 pm and 11.25 pm. He orders his Guinness, sings two songs, and then returns to the bar to finish his pint.

Corley was drinking in every word from Seamus, and he’d just been bought a whiskey. It had been that sort of weekend. This night was gig-free. It was the end of the Irish leg of his European tour. He’d already been called up to play. He bounced up enthusiastically, if a little surprised. Not that he had a choice; it had been made clear to us on several occasions that someone was playing or singing or reciting at the other end of the pub, and we were to afford them the attention they deserved. Of course it guaranteed Corley a rapt audience, but more than that, it was indicative of the reverence in which the performer there is held. Corley was in a good space.

He was in Ireland with his band for a five-gig stint of the island as part of his European tour. When we met up for a chat in Waterford before his Shortt’s gig, he had that big, gentle grin on, as he talked about his band — his “laid back veterans of the road.” They are six guys of a certain age, he said, “on the road and acting like we’re 25. I’m second oldest and that counts in my favour as you have to listen to your elders. It’s caustic, sarcastic, and we’re having a blast.”

Corley laughed as he explained the intricacies of the messing about they do while they’re touring. Like the one where everyone in the van plays whatever song they want, all at the same time, and they have to stay on the same song. “You choose really fucked-up songs too,” he told me as he started to play air guitar and sing “Sundown You Better Take Care.” The air guitar serenaded us as he talked. “We’ll sing maybe some Irish ballad, or BJ will sing in Dutch …” When I said that the audience would get a bit of craic out of that, he promised to have the band do it on stage that night. But without wanting to burst anyone’s bubble, I hate to inform you, the band didn’t do it. We might have had John Murry singing “Southern Sky” with Corley on piano. We might have had two, maybe three tracks from the new record. We might have had “Easy Mistake” and “Unspoken Thing” from Available Light.  But we didn’t have everyone on stage playing a different song each, all at the same time.

Despite this disappointing turn of events, however, the band was stellar. There was a Dutch contingent with him: Sjoerd van Bommel on drums, Mike Roelofs on keys, and BJ Baartmans on guitar – otherwise known as BJ’s Wild Verband.

“They’ll be talking in Dutch”, Corley said, “and then you’ll suddenly hear your name dropped in the middle of it and then they’ll start laughing.  Then Chris will say, ‘you know they just called you an asshole, right?'”

Chris is multi-instrumentalist Chris Brown, the close friend of Corley’s who produced Available Light, and who was playing keys on the tour. Corley described him as one of the main ingredients in the album.

When I first arrived at the pub for the interview, I wandered about the bar looking for Corley (who was outside having a smoke). Brown spotted me and brought me over to their table, to introduce me to the band.

When Corley joined us, I asked him the difference between playing in Europe and in the U.S. “I love playing in the States,” he said. “Sometimes, though, there’s a wall of conversation in the room. If you play loud they just talk louder. People over here seem to say, ‘Hey, right now it’s listening time.’ This means a lot. You’re not playing to the void.”

I suggested that this isn’t always the case in Ireland, but he’d already moved on to another difference he sees between Europe and the States. “The US is like the whale,” he said. “It’s nearly impossible unless you have the machine behind you, to get started and get promoted. We’re doing all this just grass-roots. Part of the beauty of the modern age is that you can do it from the ground up. You can do it with boots on the ground.”

For example, organising everything to come that extra mile over to Ireland; I was delighted with their tenacity, but is it enough to cover costs? “We’re not here to make money,” Corley said. “I just don’t want to lose my house. Tonight, when we play, I just want you to enjoy the music. I want to get the music out there. I want to sell enough records so I can make another album. So I can do this for the rest of my life.”

Corley spent years moving. He doesn’t consider that being “on the road,” but he hasn’t settled in any one place. “You move somewhere,” he explained, “and it takes about three months before you can integrate yourself, until you get to know what’s going on, and you meet a few people. It’s fun. You wake in the morning, look out a different window, and you write different because the picture is different, the people are different, and the sounds, and how you’re talked to as well. Just ordering food in a restaurant is different. I like changing.

“When I’m writing,” he added, “I like to get different perspectives. I would look out the window of an apartment and I would think I’m gonna go … here.” He stretched out the word “go” as he moved his finger in the air before pointing it down hard onto the table beside his beer.

I suggested that he likes to see the best in people, which turned into another question – is he in the right business for that? His answer was straight: “Music isn’t a business to me.”

And that is the pivotal element to understanding the David Corley story. It’s part of the reason why he never toured or played out a lot, why he wasn’t in a band until he was in his 40s, why this giant talent was 53 years old before he released his debut album.

Throughout school, Corley performed solo on stage, so he had grown up with that. “But rock and roll is different,” he explained. “Stepping up with your own songs in front of people … that was part of my hold up. I never had stage fright but I was definitely afraid of exposing myself. I’ve been more nervous today about this interview than about the gig tonight. I’m looking forward to the gig.”

Corley’s partner Kari Auerbach had come over to Ireland for part of the tour. She was able to join our conversation and cast more light on Corley and his music. “I was 23 when I first met David,” she told me. “He was just figuring out music, just learning the guitar. He was already very accomplished on piano, and at composing, but it was always alone. He always played by himself.

“So I gave him the handle ‘Outsider Artist,’” she added. “He was creating through compulsion and always alone in a little corner or a dark room. The isolation wasn’t by choice; it was just how David created. He didn’t collaborate with people, he didn’t play out. Outsider Artists are people like the writer and artist Henry Darger. Nobody knew about the whole fantasy world he created until he died. Luckily that’s not happening with David, but we had to wait until he was ready to collaborate, ready to be on stage again.

“He matches that term Outsider Artist right down to the point that [artists like him] need somebody to bring them out. So that was me.” She turned to Corley, and he nodded.

The grin had appeared again, and then it waned. “I’d had a couple of shots in studios earlier in my life when I was 25 or 30 years old,” he said. “But they kept asking ‘What style do you write? What genre?’ Fucking genre. I was every genre! So I would always lose, because I would always walk away. They would want me to sound like, say, Bruce Springsteen. I love Bruce Springsteen, but I don’t want to sound like him.” Kari was laughing in the background. “I wouldn’t want Bjork to sound like Bruce Springsteen,” she said, and they gave me a synchronized shrug in agreement.

So how does all this work with his songwriting? “I’m not a songwriter,” he said. “Let me say that. I’m a maker-upper of things, I’m an inventor. I don’t write the music down, I scribble words. I cobble things together. I like it fucked-up and just sorta weird. I don’t want to know too much about music. I know musical structures and I’ve studied a little, but I like that it’s still kind of magical at my age. I never practice; I’d get sick of music if I practiced. I’d just get sick of myself. I’d get sick of my songs.

“As soon as I finish a song I doubt I’ll ever write another one,” he continues. “There’s no method to the madness but I just like wearing ’em for a while – then you don’t make the mistake of thinking, ‘ah this is a great song.’” His eyes light up and his cigarette hand rises as he says this. “And then a week later you’re thinking ‘shit, that’s kind of bad.’ I’ve written plenty of turkeys, man. I’ve just thrown them out the window.”

But Corley knows not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. He knows to keep some of those turkeys, to pick the bones for other songs. Indeed he’s done that with songs up to 10 years old.

“It’s hard to tell what some of my songs are about,” he says, “because some of them are written over a period of years. Not that I was working on them for 10 years, just that they were different places in my life … I steal from myself all the time. 

“I’ve got 5 or 6 pieces running around my ahead all the time. I’ll sit down at the piano and start hammering at one of those, and sometimes lightning strikes.”  

“Lean” from Available Light was one of those. That one took him half an hour.

Will he be using any of his older material on the next album? “I’m writing right now, with everything that’s happening, and I want to make a record that’s all current, this is how I feel now.” There’s the grin again, he seems happy with how things are now. … I’ve raised the bar on myself.”

He started looking into the distance, thinking about his words. “I want my songs to be better. I have a lot of them. Chris and I are sifting through them. I want to make a harder hitting record. Available Light was a pretty mellow record. It wasn’t the one I wanted to make when we first started, but Chris has so much experience, and such a veteran ear. I know when someone is smarter than I am. I let him direct the ship.”

What does he mean by harder hitting?

“I want it to be more epic, maybe? I have some really heavy hitting songs that I’d like to try. It’s going to be a lot more piano laden. I’m going to play a lot. They are songs that I have personally invested a lot in.”

At that, Joey Wright arrived, and it was time for them to get ready. Corley started to introduce him and I explained that he had been introduced to me earlier, as an asshole. Joey’s face remained unmoved as he agreed. Corley started to tell me about Joey’s beautiful songwriting. Joey’s “Family Guy” voice piped up an insincere “thanks, David.” Kari cracked up. We all did, but Corley managed to tell him to “fuckin fuck off” between yowls. Seems they were back in the van.

This note from Corley’s label appeared on Facebook last night: 

As you may have heard David Corley was brought to hospital after he collapsed on stage at the end of his set at the Take Root festival. We thank everybody for the support and queries about his health. David is stable and it will take time, but the doctors expect a full recovery. We will keep you all posted on progress.

Photo credits: Kari Auerbach, Mook and Alex Vignes
Video credits: Kilkenny Gig Guide