Talented singer-songwriter Fionn Regan will play the Town Hall Theatre on Wednesday, February 19, fresh from releasing his new album, O Avalanche.
Regan has fine-tuned a sensibility of his own since the acoustic poetry of his debut album, 2006’s Mercury-shortlisted The End of History.
Since then, he has travelled between band-based detours and in 2011 released 100 Acres of Sycamore, including the worry-worn beauty of ‘Dogwood Blossom’. This drew new audiences when it appeared on two TV shows: romantic lockdown hit Normal People and Shane Meadows’ This Is England 86.
Oscar-winning actor Cillian Murphy featured in the video for his 2017 release ‘The Meeting Of The Waters’, while elsewhere Regan has been nominated for Choice, Meteor Ireland and Shortlist awards.
Co-produced with Ian Grimble, O Avalanche steers Regan’s off-the-main-drag feel for climate and landscape toward another creative peak. “It’s like you’re looking into this world where there’s a depth of field, it’s summer, and you’re floating into and out of it,” he says of the album. “The songs can come together in the moment, so it’s not a conscious thing, but when I listen to the record it feels like there’s an eternal optimism about it – a kind of upward-feeling energy.”
His first long-play since 2019’s beautiful Cala, it’s also an album that is, in Regan’s words, “very much on a level” – shimmering with poetic mystery and bolstered by a sustained feel for atmosphere and shape. As Regan explains: “I see it sort of like a film that starts cinematically and develops in abstract ways. It moves in different sequences, backwards and forwards. And if you’re thinking about it in a visual way, there’s a quality about it where it’s always magic hour.”
Capturing the mood, Regan wrote the record while staying in Mallorca, a place he describes as his ‘true north’.
“There’s a sense of an artistic energy there, where you step back a little from the main drag of bigger cities. You’re sat there in the mountains looking towards the cities, rather than the other way. There’s a kind of focus, a feeling that you’re tuned in to something.”
Tickets €22.50/€17.50 from www.tht.ie
