Mick Flannery
in conversation
with
Mary Nagle
What follows is the product of two phone interviews conducted by our Mary Nagle with singer-songwriter Mick Flannery, toward the end of 2020 and again in February 2021, combined with some thoughts on his work and it’s place in the contemporary culture.
The exchanges have been edited slightly for space.
Mary Nagle: Your early songs were about relationships but your 2016 album I Own You was mostly political. What changed? Do you think of the political songs as more important?
Mick Flannery: You just get older and you kind of fade away from being the centre of the universe. You’re just less self-involved and less anxious about your romantic life. I’m reluctant to call the other songs more important, because I don’t know what they do. Do they motivate people? I’m not sure about that; I’m not sure that I get motivated by…Art. [Laughs] It just reminds me of the “All art is useless” phrase. I’m probably gone too negative there.
N: But songs help people. Your relationship songs helped me; they gave me an idea of what to expect from people. Have songs done that for you? Helped you through things?
F: They do. There’s some film, or song where the protagonist starts to, like, get all the songs on the radio. [Laughing] They’re going through a break-up and they realize, “Oh my god, all these songs, they’re all about me now”.
I used to sing these Jim Croce songs when I was too young to know what they were about. I’d be singing the song in the back of the car, and my uncle would be going, “It’s kinda weird to hear this little six-year-old talking about hanging on a lover’s cross. Could you not learn some songs more appropriate to your age? Sing some song about choo choo trains”. When you hear Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits or even those Jim Croce songs later on, when you understand, they are very useful, because they make you feel that they’re about you and, you weren’t alone.
N: Why is loneliness something your songs keep coming back to?
F: Just, it’s one of the most empathetic things that runs across all different types of people. I was listening to I think it was Woody Guthrie giving an interview. He said he wasn’t always talking about lonesomeness for other people, he’d be talking about lonesomeness for a job, for a sense of purpose, for some meaning in life. He would use the word more broadly.
N: For a kind of absence.
F: Yeah…
Is that a song’s most basic function? To recognise your experience.
Flannery was twenty-four when he released White Lies, his first album after being signed with EMI. It cycles through the complications of young love: he’s not that into her; she doesn’t trust him; someone’s jealous; he has to go; she doesn’t like how it’s going.
His early albums were a hospital tent for my 19-year-old self, new to the minefield of romantic attachments. I learned that you can swear when you’re down—there are songs for that—but you’ll have to cry eventually. At such times there’s comfort in Flannery’s music, which is padded with a lyric-less kind of crooning. But any self-pity in the songs is tempered by a half-mocking self-awareness.
did you weep/ for the world outside
did you cry / for the child inside
Flannery’s songs have the intimacy of someone talking to themself, but there’s also distance to the narrative perspective. Even in love songs, the protagonists (Flannery voices various male characters) are never entirely at the mercy of their emotions. They are tracing the arc of what happened, looking for a lesson.
if you let down your guard / he’ll run right through your heart
if he cuts a piece away / you’ll have to share the blame
*
Flannery’s first first album, on the strength of which he was signed at twenty-one, was about two brothers, one rakish, one dutiful, who want the same girl.
N: In a piece for RTE you wrote “Perhaps I was trying to get the story to tell me which brother it would be preferable to emulate in real life”. Do songs give you answers?
F: [Laughs] I don’t know. To me, they kind of pose questions in as concise a way as possible. And in that way, they hopefully make you think, try to get to the deeper question. That sounds a bit arsy. [Laughs]
Once you’ve finished them, when you sing them for a few times afterwards, a funny kind of thing happens where you retrospectively apply different meanings, and kind of, like, congratulate yourself on [laughs] how broad the reach of the song is. It’s like the song is your kid, and they’re always a bit more intelligent in your eyes than they actually are.
I don’t think they really provide answers, no. They’re kind of a reaction to confusion or to upset.
Their use to the listener owes something to the fact that Flannery uses them to make difficult experiences intelligible to himself.
*
Flannery’s 2016 release I Own You opened a political tap and blood came out. It was a radical departure from the acoustic love songs of earlier albums. Flannery’s sound was bigger, grittier and less controlled, with lyrics that tapped political anger and disillusionment. It was released one month before Trump’s election.
In the title track, a man who has nothing breaks into a rich man’s house, strips him and tells him “I Own You”. The song looks at the angry man’s life:
No one come tuck me in at night
say, “I love you son
dearest to my heart, my darling one”
I’m a stray dog walking with his ribcage showing
With its rabid dog metaphors and limping rhythm the song sounds like a threat, or a warning.
“Cameo”, another song on that album, includes the lyrics:
Lately the world makes me unhappy
kids starin’ into TV screens
nobody wants to admit they’re lonely
maybe don’t know what lonely means
That song made me misquote Flannery to himself. I said he had written a line about loneliness being a pandemic.
Did I? Are you sure?
It’s disconcerting to be made question yourself. It’s something Flannery does through his songs. In “One of the Good Ones”, he takes the question of whether we have become too comfortable to care—about what goes in our cars, about modern slavery—and sets it to a club beat. (Dance, why don’t you, to your inability to escape being a cog in the capitalist machine.)
N: Do you see it as part of your job to trouble people’s consciousnesses?
F: Possibly, yeah. If art is to be useful then it should make people think.
N: What kind of art makes you think?
F: Certain Bob Dylan songs, Leonard Cohen songs. There’s a song I really like called “Gustavo” by Marc Kozelek. It’s more the song than the artist.…
N: You said you like The Ghost of Tom Joad. What is it about that album?
F: The storytelling. It’s a kind of a concept album. The songs are all to do with migration, but not the dust-bowl migration. He sets it on the Mexican-American border and he writes the songs from all the different points of view; from young boys coming across to sell drugs, to border patrol guards, people who came from Vietnam to settle in the Gulf of Mexico because they were given American citizenship after they fought on the American side of the Vietnam War. It’s interesting historically. All the stories are told through singular characters. I like that approach.
N: You often write from the point of view of the underdog.
A: When you’re trying to make art I suppose it’s hard to be drawn to the winners. There’s not a lot of empathy flying around for those stories. You can’t come out and say, “Hey look everyone. Jeff Bezos is not that bad a dude”. Nobody wants to hear a song about him. [Laughs]
N: So, it’s technically hard. Like writing a happy song.
F: Yeah. A happy song about Jeff Bezos. Which I now have to write.[laughs]
N: Your empathy seems to fall off a cliff when it comes to the big boss.
F: To a degree, it does, but, not fully. The big boss, whoever they are, they’re just another human, with no free will; no choice in who their parents were; no choice in their environment. I don’t know how much they suffer. I don’t know how much they think they’re doing good, when they might…not be.
N: The ones who chase obscene amounts of money to “feed a family”.
F: Oh yea…“I’m just looking after my family, who have…3 billion each”.
I Own You entered the Irish charts at no. 3 and was out of them by its sixth week. Flannery has talked about being disheartened by its reception It is perhaps surprising that such a politically charged album did not do better. I suggested to Flannery that songs with serious lyrics—lyrics that look at real people’s problems and consider their causes—were being marginalised.
F: I find that to be happening. It seems like breakup pain is allowed through the radio gates, but much of anything else isn’t. Subject matter in pop songs seems to be just Friday-night drinking, or drug use, or sex. It’s just perfectly aligned with advertising, because it’s consumerism. It’s like “You’ve saved up all your money, now here’s ways to spend it.” It’s not really surprising. It’s hard to know what forces are acting. Is it the fault of the radio, that more people just conform to thinking pop music is good music because it’s kind of shoved down their throats, or is the radio reacting to the fact that people don’t really want to hear about problems. They’d rather hear just a happy old beat in the background, to keep them chirpy during the day.
N: But when people had less comfortable lives they seem to have had more of an appetite for songs with meat in them.
F: That seems true, yeah. I hadn’t thought about it that way before. I listen to some American stations and they seem to play a lot more of the older music, sixties music, which often had a bit more meat to it. They weren’t always given to steering away from lines with a bit of edge in them. It seems a pity. Kendrick Lamar was a good one, for me, that he came to high popularity. He’s well able to write good lyrics about serious issues.
N: What is it about him?
F: He just strikes me as an honest person. He’s able to get around the industry. What he seems to be aware is a pop hit. That’s his hook to get his other messages across, which are more societal and racial.
N: Do you have to be mercenary then?
F: As in play the game a bit?
N: Yeah.
F: It seems so. I don’t know. The game…A lot of people were able to play the game like that. There’s a certain talent to it, it seems. Morrissey was able to do it—smuggle awful depressing lyrics into poppy songs. Adele is able to do it, even though she fits into the break-up bracket, more…There is definitely a mercenary thing. It’s like going into a football stadium and trying to get people to cross the road to…do some synchronised swimming. You’re trying to pull people who aren’t necessarily interested in serious issues when they’re listening to music, you’re trying to reach out to them. You can view it that way, or you can view it as succumbing to the pressure of a record company.
N: Your song ‘Tomorrow’s Paper’ [from White Lies, Flannery’s first album after signing with EMI] was a kind of “Fuck you” to the industry.
F: Yeah, but, I don’t know if the industry listens to the lyrics. They just hear the beat and go “Yeah. There’s the single. We don’t care if it’s ragging on us”. [Laughs]
N: Are you out of that world now?
F: I am, yeah. The deal I signed was pretty bad. I was twenty-one and I didn’t know what I was doing. I signed a five-album deal with EMI. I didn’t know at the time that it was going to be too restrictive. And unfortunately EMI then were bought by Universal two albums into that deal, and, you know, Universal wouldn’t really have had my back in the same way, because they didn’t sign me. I was just someone who got transferred over in the buyout.
N: ESCQ, who you did two co-writes with on the 2019 album, seem to be part of that commercial world. Whereas the people you’re co-writing with now, Anne Egge and Susan O’Neill (SON) [with whom Flannery has a forthcoming duet album], seem far-removed from that.
F: It’s strange but the people involved are rather similar. If I were to listen to the ESCQ songs and not know who they were, I would kind of assume they were straight-laced fellas, looking to make some cash. [laughs] I did meet some people like that. I met one guy, in a co-write situation, and one of the first things he said was that his dream was to get a song into a car commercial. I was like “Fuck me, I’m in the wrong house this day!” But the ESCQ guys are not like that at all. I hope they don’t mind but, they’re kind of hippyish fellas. They were very open minded. I think they were set a challenge when it came to me. I think Sheena Keane [Flannery’s manager] might have said to them “Can you take this guy out of his comfort zone?”
*
With more choruses and up-beat co-writes, Flannery’s last studio release, the 2019 Mick Flannery album is the most commercial-sounding album he has produced to date. But the song that has become his most played on Spotify, “I’ll Be out Here”, is no hit track.
The world is rigged and cold and no one hardly wants to know that
God damn / it feels so lonely / driftin away from you / it feels so lonely I don’t know but / If you want me I’ll be out here / dancin
F: It has a little air of some positivity in it. I don’t know if everyone can hear it, but, it’s supposed to be there.
N: Does it surprise you that that’s the song that’s the most played.
F: Yeah it does because I kind of had made an effort to make some of the other ones “accessible”. Big enough choruses in them and stuff like that. But it’s a different kind of consumer world these days. That song has been put on a few big playlists and I think that’s why it has more plays.
Another of the album’s tracks, “Star to Star”, is the closest thing to a pop anthem Flannery has written.
I don’t know where we are
but I love you with all my heart
with all my heart
N: It sounds like something you could just sing along to in a club. The verse seems like an optional extra.
F: That was kind of the point. I kind of wanted to have people not listen to the verse lyrics at first. [laughs] So I put them low down and mumbly. Well, not really, but, people don’t, generally, pay too much attention. If they know a chorus is coming they’re just kind of waiting for it.
In the past Flannery has spoken about being hyper-conscious of not “selling out”, so I was surprised by how he related to “Star to Star”.
F: I like the fact that I managed a chorus
N: But a chorus doesn’t seem like the hardest thing to write.
F: It can be hard to make sense of because I’m not a great fan of coming back to a phrase. A chorus is this kind of overarching notion that can thread through the verses where you go into more detail. But it is kind of hard to come up with a chorus that you can push out, volume-wise; the singer’s supposed to be impassioned by it. You’re essentially shouting it. It’s hard to come up with a phrase that has all those things.
For me it’s a bit hard anyway because I’m so unsure of myself that I can’t shout anything. [Laughs]
N: You don’t identify with the idea of having a message.
F: I’ve got a lot of doubt about…everything I say. I don’t know, the longer you live, the more you see, the more things start to follow a pattern. So it was just kind of natural that I’d start to talk a bit more about the way the world is as opposed to just about the way I feel about…being lonely.
N: Has being a stepfather had anything to do with that?
F: I guess. I learned a lot about what the world is like for a younger person, for a younger brain. Naturally enough, it’s just a nightmare for children trying to grow up, have any kind of, like…unbridled joy, you know. It doesn’t seem available to them, because in the back of the copy book is this constant message that everything is fucked, and it’s fucked pretty soon.
Many of Flannery’s interview answers began with “I don’t know” and ended on a note that threw all he’d been saying into doubt. He asked me what I meant by things; wondered aloud if he was getting it wrong.
F: If you can see the world for what it is but you can’t act on it because you’re constantly doubting yourself or you’re, you know, you kind of get wrapped up in theorising about what could be true. You end up going nowhere.
Flannery has built up a lexicon of metaphors for that exact futility in his songs.
I dove in a lake and I swam to the bottom
and I found me a seat on a rock down there
and just when I thought I could hear the answer
I had to come up for air
N: Is the doubting a disposition or a choice? Is there a moral element to doubting so much?
F: It depends on what you’re planning to do.
N: If you’re planning to live a good life.
F: It’s a difficult thing…In that case, doubt is kind of useful, because, to live a good life, it would seem to suggest that you kind of have to make some sacrifices, to make things fairer, so then you have to start doubting what parts of your life you’re actually entitled to and what parts you should probably try to do without. Doubt is useful there. But again, [laughs] doubt cuts both ways. You start doubting, “Well, if I completely pauperise myself then how useful am I to the world.”
*
The raw energy that made I Own You Flannery’s most exciting release came from the political stance it took. On his 2019 follow-up, the most political Flannery gets is
Where’s the place I can stand and not owe someone something
A man alone and wondering again. That seemed like a capitulation from songs that connected deprivation with the inequality of a capitalist system. I asked Flannery why he hadn’t stayed with the anger
F: If you want to affect change then anger is very useful, because it’ll drive you to action. I don’t have as much of it as I did, and I don’t know is it just by virtue of getting older. The years go past and not a huge amount changes and you feel, “Okay, this is the pace that progress runs at. There’s probably no point losing my mind trying to speed it up”. But it seems that if you fully adopt that attitude, you’ll just do nothing at all to help the slow little machine run, so, you kind of have to strike a balance.
But the political element of his songwriting did not disappear. A week before the 2020 US election he released a single named after the swing state of Minnesota and secured Anais Mitchell to sing it.
The song is the opposite of divisive
I hope you understand
that if you don’t move towards them
dreams get broken
As Flannery traded political anger for something more conciliatory, he also began to release joke songs.
F: I’ve been a little bit too closed off. I feel like I could do with getting a bit younger. A bit more playful and not so self-aware.
“Fuck off world”, the first funny song Flannery wrote, gives a very direct answer to where did the political Mick Flannery go.
I know I’m supposed to think about injustice
I know I’m supposed to fight the good fight
I know I’m supposed to care about progress
but with all of that in mind tonight, you might
fuck off world, fuck off politics
I’m going in the woods with a stick
There’s also a warehouse of silly songs that Flannery wrote with his friend Andrew House. They go by Christy Skulls. Their Spotify monthly-listens float at around 30.
F: He does most of “the hits”. I just sing them or come up with the music—I’m Elton John, he’s Bernie Tobin.
One song goes
Trees are pretty tough to punch
Because they can take a punch
Another
Oh silly dog,
You thought they’d hold the door for you
Thought they’d hold the door for you
But they never do [with plaintive howling]
That last is a good fit with Flannery’s own songs—a bitter truth.
N: Your song ‘Tomorrow’s Paper’ [from White Lies, Flannery’s first album after signing with EMI] was a kind of “Fuck you” to the industry.
F: Yeah, but, I don’t know if the industry listens to the lyrics. They just hear the beat and go “Yeah. There’s the single. We don’t care if it’s ragging on us”. [Laughs]
N: Are you out of that world now?
F: I am, yeah. The deal I signed was pretty bad. I was twenty-one and I didn’t know what I was doing. I signed a five-album deal with EMI. I didn’t know at the time that it was going to be too restrictive. And unfortunately EMI then were bought by Universal two albums into that deal, and, you know, Universal wouldn’t really have had my back in the same way, because they didn’t sign me. I was just someone who got transferred over in the buyout.
N: ESCQ, who you did two co-writes with on the 2019 album, seem to be part of that commercial world. Whereas the people you’re co-writing with now, Anne Egge and Susan O’Neill (SON) [with whom Flannery has a forthcoming duet album], seem far-removed from that.
F: It’s strange but the people involved are rather similar. If I were to listen to the ESCQ songs and not know who they were, I would kind of assume they were straight-laced fellas, looking to make some cash. [laughs] I did meet some people like that. I met one guy, in a co-write situation, and one of the first things he said was that his dream was to get a song into a car commercial. I was like “Fuck me, I’m in the wrong house this day!” But the ESCQ guys are not like that at all. I hope they don’t mind but, they’re kind of hippyish fellas. They were very open minded. I think they were set a challenge when it came to me. I think Sheena Keane [Flannery’s manager] might have said to them “Can you take this guy out of his comfort zone?”
*
With more choruses and up-beat co-writes, Flannery’s last studio release, the 2019 Mick Flannery album is the most commercial-sounding he’s produced to date. But the song that’s become his most played son Spotify, “I’ll Be out Here”, is no hit track.
The world is rigged and cold and no one hardly wants to know that
God damn / it feels so lonely / driftin away from you / it feels so lonely I don’t know but / If you want me I’ll be out here / dancin
F: It has a little air of some positivity in it. I don’t know if everyone can hear it, but, it’s supposed to be there.
N: Does it surprise you that that’s the song that’s the most played.
F: Yeah it does because I kind of had made an effort to make some of the other ones “accessible”. Big enough choruses in them and stuff like that. But it’s a different kind of consumer world these days. That song has been put on a few big playlists and I think that’s why it has more plays.
Another of the album’s tracks, “Star to Star”, is the closest thing to a pop anthem Flannery has written.
I don’t know where we are
but I love you with all my heart
with all my heart
N: It sounds like something you could just sing along to in a club. The verse seems like an optional extra.
F: That was kind of the point. I kind of wanted to have people not listen to the verse lyrics at first. [laughs] So I put them low down and mumbly. Well, not really, but, people don’t, generally, pay too much attention. If they know a chorus is coming they’re just kind of waiting for it.
In the past Flannery has spoken about being hyper-conscious of not “selling out”, so I was surprised by how he related to “Star to Star”.
F: I like the fact that I managed a chorus
N: But a chorus doesn’t seem like the hardest thing to write.
F: It can be hard to make sense of because I’m not a great fan of coming back to a phrase. A chorus is this kind of overarching notion that can thread through the verses where you go into more detail. But it is kind of hard to come up with a chorus that you can push out, volume-wise; the singer’s supposed to be impassioned by it. You’re essentially shouting it. It’s hard to come up with a phrase that has all those things.
For me it’s a bit hard anyway because I’m so unsure of myself that I can’t shout anything. [Laughs]
N: You don’t identify with the idea of having a message.
F: I’ve got a lot of doubt about…everything I say. I don’t know, the longer you live, the more you see, the more things start to follow a pattern. So it was just kind of natural that I’d start to talk a bit more about the way the world is as opposed to just about the way I feel about…being lonely.
N: Has being a stepfather had anything to do with that?
F: I guess. I learned a lot about what the world is like for a younger person, for a younger brain. Naturally enough, it’s just a nightmare for children trying to grow up, have any kind of, like…unbridled joy, you know. It doesn’t seem available to them, because in the back of the copy book is this constant message that everything is fucked, and it’s fucked pretty soon.
Many of Flannery’s interview answers began with “I don’t know” and ended on a note that threw all he’d been saying into doubt. He asked me what I meant by things; wondered aloud if he was getting it wrong.
F: If you can see the world for what it is but you can’t act on it because you’re constantly doubting yourself or you’re, you know, you kind of get wrapped up in theorising about what could be true. You end up going nowhere.
Flannery has built up a lexicon of metaphors for that exact futility in his songs.
I dove in a lake and I swam to the bottom
and I found me a seat on a rock down there
and just when I thought I could hear the answer
I had to come up for air
N: Is the doubting a disposition or a choice? Is there a moral element to doubting so much?
F: It depends on what you’re planning to do.
N: If you’re planning to live a good life.
F: It’s a difficult thing…In that case, doubt is kind of useful, because, to live a good life, it would seem to suggest that you kind of have to make some sacrifices, to make things fairer, so then you have to start doubting what parts of your life you’re actually entitled to and what parts you should probably try to do without. Doubt is useful there. But again, [laughs] doubt cuts both ways. You start doubting, “Well, if I completely pauperise myself then how useful am I to the world.”
*
The raw energy that made I Own You Flannery’s most exciting release came from the political stance it took. On his 2019 follow-up, the most political Flannery gets is
Where’s the place I can stand and not owe someone something
A man alone and wondering again. That seemed like a capitulation from songs that connected deprivation with the inequality of a capitalist system. I asked Flannery why he hadn’t stayed with the anger.
F: If you want to affect change then anger is very useful, because it’ll drive you to action. I don’t have as much of it as I did, and I don’t know is it just by virtue of getting older. The years go past and not huge amounts changes and you feel, “Okay, this is the pace that progress runs at. There’s probably no point losing my mind trying to speed it up”. But it seems that if you fully adopt that attitude, you’ll just do nothing at all to help the slow little machine run, so, you kind of have to strike a balance.
But the political element of his songwriting did not disappear. A week before the 2020 US election he released a single named after the swing state of Minnesota and secured Anais Mitchell to sing it.
The song is the opposite of divisive
I hope you understand
that if you don’t move towards them
dreams get broken
As Flannery traded political anger for something more conciliatory, he also began to release joke songs.
F: I’ve been a little bit too closed off. I feel like I could do with getting a bit younger. A bit more playful and not so self-aware.
“Fuck off world”, the first funny song Flannery wrote, gives a very direct answer to where did the political Mick Flannery go.
I know I’m supposed to think about injustice
I know I’m supposed to fight the good fight
I know I’m supposed to care about progress
but with all of that in mind tonight, you might
fuck off world, fuck off politics
I’m going in the woods with a stick
There’s also a warehouse of silly songs that Flannery wrote with his friend Andrew House. They go by Christy Skulls. Their Spotify monthly-listens float at around 30.
F: He does most of “the hits”. I just sing them or come up with the music—I’m Elton John, he’s Bernie Tobin.
One song goes
Trees are pretty tough to punch
Because they can take a punch
Another
Oh silly dog,
You thought they’d hold the door for you
Thought they’d hold the door for you
But they never do [with plaintive howling]
That last is a good fit with Flannery’s own songs—a bitter truth.
Mary Nagle studied music and journalism. She has worked as an administrator for various music and literary festivals in Cork.