Junior Brother Went to the End. Now He’s Working Out What Comes Next.
There are records you make because you know exactly where you’re going, and records you make because, for a while, there is nowhere to go. Junior Brother’s The End belongs firmly to the second category.
– WORDS BY CJ / PHOTOS COURTESY OF JUNIOR BROTHER
Junior Brother’s The End was written during a period when Ronan Kealy had nowhere to go and very little reason to think about what would happen to the songs once they left the room. Back at his family home in County Kerry, Ireland, during lockdown, with no gigs on the horizon, Kealy stopped arranging music around the practicalities of playing it live. “The songs were not arranged to be played live, and so they became more complex,” he says, describing them as charged with “the strange, unprecedented confidence that comes with pleasing nobody but yourself.” A year removed from the record, he still sees it as something he probably couldn’t make again. “I’m incredibly proud of this bunch of songs, while also being slightly frightened of them.”
That isolation fed directly into The End. Kealy spent lockdown walking around the landscape where he grew up and listening to recordings from the UCD Folklore Archive. Stories about fairy forts, circular mounds surrounded by old warnings about people becoming confused or losing their way, started to feel increasingly contemporary. “The stories I was hearing of old people losing their way in these strange, circular mounds of earth called ‘Fairy Forts’ seemed so perfectly matched to the malicious hypnotic draw of the doom scroll,” he says. The connection between old Irish superstition and modern technology wasn’t something he went looking for. It was simply there.
The same approach carries into the album’s instrumentation. Kealy deliberately restricted himself largely to acoustic guitar, mandolin, tin whistle, accordion and drums, then tried to force a much wider set of influences through those tools, including post-rock, modernism, avant-garde music and early music from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He may be using instruments associated with traditional Irish music, but Junior Brother has never sounded like a straightforward folk project. Kealy feels connected to the current resurgence in Irish traditional music, but doesn’t necessarily see himself as part of it. “I do and I don’t,” he says. “I think I sit squarely in the realm of singer/songwriter.”
The songs themselves can move just as freely between small personal moments and much larger subjects. The chorus of “Week End” came directly from a text exchange with Kealy’s girlfriend during lockdown. He asked how her weekend was going and her reply became the lyric, with the increasingly unsettled arrangement gradually changing the meaning of those ordinary words. “I enjoy when music interacts with lyrics like that,” he says. “It means the song’s lyrics have to be read alongside the music to be fully understood.”
Elsewhere, the starting point can be much more explicit. “Take Guilt” was written partly in response to Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation in protest against the war in Gaza and partly after Kealy heard Minor Threat’s “Guilty of Being White,” which he describes as “the greatest load of bullshit I’ve ever come across.” The song became a way of addressing privilege and what happens when it is allowed to turn into resentment. “With these two terrible guiding lights, I endeavoured to make the song deal with privilege and how it can bubble up into hatred if it is not dealt with face-on.”
Despite The End becoming less conventional than what came before it, the record earned Junior Brother a second Choice Music Prize nomination. That surprised Kealy more than the first. “At the time of writing I really didn’t know or care if anyone would ever hear these songs,” he says. “The positive reaction just goes to show that following your gut is always worth it.”
The record has continued changing onstage. Kealy plays most of the instruments himself on Junior Brother albums, but bringing a full band into the songs means giving up some of that control and allowing other musicians to reshape the material. “The other creative minds can take that material and not only recreate the arrangements, but bring their own lives into the songs,” he says. Repeated performances then push them further. “The songs can either stay relatively as they are, or stretch and mutate their forms. Performing them repeatedly allows the songs to do as they wish.”
For a record called The End, it has left Kealy with plenty to take forward. He is already working on the next Junior Brother album, and after spending three records testing how far the project can move in different directions, his attention has turned toward bringing those ideas together. “The next album I’m working on at the minute takes everything I’ve learned from the past three records and refines it all,” he says. “Because of that I think it might be the best thing I’ve done yet.”
