The highs and lows of love central theme of Ultan’s second album

The Groove Tube with Jimi McDonnell – tribunegroove@live.ie

Galway’s Ultan Conlon celebrates the release of Songs Of Love So Cruel with a show in Róisín Dubh on Friday, October 4. Ultan’s second album is a set of ten songs that explores the highs and lows that love brings.

“With my first album, Bless Your Heart, I was writing for years,” he says. “I started making my first album when I was 28, so I had a big back catalogue. So I found it hard to piece things together, to make a cohesive album. I had songs from different eras.”

“When I finished up that album, I decided the next thing I wanted was to have a real theme to an album, and have the songs all belong in the one place.”

Conlon’s latest opens with the In The Mad; appropriately enough, it was the first song he wrote for the record.

“It’s about an older man looking back on his life, married with kids and he’d turned into a bitter old man,” Ultan says. “He doesn’t connect with his wife and kids any more, but he’s trying to. There’s a line in the middle eight where he says he’ll ‘quote poetry and sing songs of love so cruel.’ When I wrote that long, it kind of jumped at me.”

“The rest of the songs followed, I stayed to that theme,” he adds. “A lot of it was personal as well, looking at relationships and people who have lasted the test of time. Everything was on the same page, and the title came early, so I wrote the rest of the album with that in mind.”

Did Ultan find it tricky sticking to the theme?

“It was almost like a project, I wanted to get to the end of that. A lot of the time I found myself drifting down another road, writing a song that didn’t suit the album. At times I was going ‘feck it, why did I commit myself to this?’ But by the end I was happy I did stick to it.”

Ultan started off recording his Songs Of Love So Cruel in Grouse Lodge, Westmeath, did some more work in Galway, took it to London and then came back to Galway again.

“You can imagine at that point, I couldn’t see the wood from the trees,” he says.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.