KEELEY On the Making Of ‘Beautiful Mysterious’
What was the creative process like for this particular album?
The songs began falling out of the sky around me in early 2018, and by the end of that year I had the first batch of songs from which ‘Beautiful Mysterious’ would be assembled from, in addition to the first batch of songs for my other first two records "Drawn To The Flame" and "Floating Above Everything Else". The writing and recording of all three records began simultaneously, which is very unusual for any recording artist to commence work on three separate albums simultaneously.
However, while all three records were started at roughly the same time, they all took different paths towards completion, and ‘Beautiful Mysterious’ ended up taking much longer to complete than either of the other two records. I very much knew the album I wanted ‘Beautiful Mysterious’ to be in terms of the story I wanted to tell with it but the sound of the record would be determined by a number of things, one of which being the songs themselves suggesting the sonic atmospheres that would be most fitting for them to have, and another factor being whoever was going to end up producing the record, which was something I would only discover the following year, 2019, when Alan Maguire, my studio partner, and I found one another in cyberspace, and we commenced our creative union.
So I always had a very clear goal in mind for the concept behind ‘Beautiful Mysterious,’ but the sound of it, and the specific songs to tell the story, and the recording and re-recording of those songs, would take shape over a much longer period of time, actually four and a half years.
That said, four and a half years might seem like a crazily long time to make a record, but it genuinely could have and actually should have taken even longer. I kept thinking it was finished, and then realising months later as the songs evolved live and in rehearsals that I needed to re-record parts of the album. This kept happening, and indeed is STILL happening now! I'd dearly love another couple of days in the studio to update the parts of the songs that have changed even further recently, but back in January 2024 the record went into manufacturing so alas that ship has sailed!
It drives me mad how the songs keep evolving and yet I can't update them on the record to match the pace of their ongoing development but I can't say that I wasn't given ample opportunity to make changes already. ‘Beautiful Mysterious’ was mastered on three separate occasions BEFORE it was even released which I believe is unprecedented in music history. I've never heard of an album being mastered twice before it came out, let alone three times! So this record has involved quite the process, and then some!
Can you share any memorable experiences or stories from performing songs from 'Beautiful Mysterious' live?
The very first time I performed an entire set of songs live about my songwriting muse Inga Maria Hauser, which was at a venue called The Underground in Dublin in March 2020, four days before my native Ireland would be plunged into a total lockdown from which it wouldn't emerge for two whole years, was an otherworldly and deeply emotional experience. We only played 5 songs that night, but I cried while doing so. That night was the first time I had occupied the particular headspace that playing these songs live involves, and the sound of the music flowing out of the foldbacks and the amps and PA system in conjunction with the beautiful blue lighting onstage that night left me totally entranced and entering the sacred sonic space where the songs take me every time, especially the slower and dreamier songs.
Which song(s) from the album do you think best represents your artistic vision?
Track 4, "Days In a Daze". The most blissed-out and dreamy track on the record, it's otherworldly yet utterly rooted in reality. It speaks of the magic of the mundane, and the heartbreakingly bittersweet ironies of Inga's last days. There's a beautifully woozy, graceful glide to it that I love and that I knew we needed to capture with it. It's my favourite song I've ever written and yet it's by far the simplest. It has only two chords in the entire song, and only two verses, and no chorus or bridge or middle-eight. It's a hypnotic hymn, a sacred sonic space to wander within.
How did you first become interested in music, and when did you start playing your instrument or singing?
I first became interested in music when as a child I became obsessed with the first ever hit single to utilise sampling, M.A.R.R.S.' "Pump Up The Volume" which was my first ever favourite song. That prompted me to ask for my first album, and my first personal stereo (a Walkman) for Christmas and through that and listening to the radio I discovered the first band/duo that I loved, Pet Shop Boys, who I still love to this day. Their #1 single "West End Girls" became my next favourite song, a song that ended up having a big underlying influence on the songs I would go on to write, and the sense of place in all the songs. Then later I discovered The Smiths who I fell head over heels in love with, and who set the course of my life more than anyone or anything else. That seismic eruption resulted in me wanting only to live, eat, sleep and breathe music, and be in a band, and make records, and write songs, and play live, and nothing else. And now here I am doing all those things, and nothing else.
Your lyrics often tell stories. Can you talk about your approach to storytelling through music?
I'm very unusual in that although my songs are deeply personal, I'm not the subject of any of them. I don't write about myself, but perversely that's far more "me" to do that than if I did write about myself. Other songwriters seem intent on inflicting their innermost thoughts and feelings on the listener as if it's never occurred to them that there might be another way to communicate, I suspect because it hasn't.
All my songs exist in a curious timewarp, because they're all written to, or through, or about, someone who was in the world until 1988, a year that I'm obsessed with. My songs are effectively a vehicle for their voice. I spent the past 8 years researching as much as possible about them and their life so I could be as accurate as possible in transmitting their truth to the wider world and in doing so, try to keep them in the world, and create a space for their legacy to be able to grow or at least for it to exist. Their story moves me and touches me more than anything or anyone else has.
Through a strange sort of emotional porthole, my mind travels back in time, back to 1988 or even earlier, to connect with their essence, through the places they went to and the things they did and how they described feeling about it. And I gather what I can from that dimension, and then I travel forwards back into the now armed with the art, and the songs write themselves through me from there, but only after I've gone to that place to connect emotionally and mentally with that. Which is what makes the songs so pure. Because the songs are essentially writing themselves through me and I'm just the conduit, the channel, the circuitry to enable their emergence, a doorway to another world.
