Declan O’Donovan shares his single, “Get Thee Behind The Wheel”
Declan O’Donovan‘s sound is reflected by the picturesque backdrop between his home of Whitehorse in Canada’s Yukon and the urban centres from Toronto to Montreal that he frequents. For over a decade, the Canadian has succeeded in creating stylistically unique fusions of the most diverse of songwriting approaches.
The music for the new single, “Get Thee Behind the Wheel,” was written on a purple baby grand piano in a basement filled with spiders on Vancouver Island. The owner of the piano and the house where it lived was an unfettered conspiracy theorist (and hoarder). They would show up regularly and unannounced and inundate O’Donovan with his theories of the world. O’Donovan has no doubt that the setting and mindset of this weird ass time and place informed the strange rhythms and melodies in the song.
Watch the live video for “Get Thee Behind the Wheel” below, and learn more about Declan O’Donovan via our Five Questions With segment.
Care to introduce yourself to our readers?
Hello readers. I’m Declan, I come from the Yukon, and I encourage you to read through the next four questions!
Tell us a bit about your most recent release.
“Get Thee Behind the Wheel” is a trip. It’s a song that was first written by using the piano more like a drum. The lyrics grew into something biblical and absurd, playing with themes of temptation and motivation and animals, and came out on the other end of the studio as a pretty good way to keep people busy counting to five.
Where do you tend to pull inspiration from when writing?
I think my job is just to digest what the cosmos puts on my plate in the form of music and art, stories, relationships, the outdoors, mysticism, and science. Things that hit me without words, where it’s the feel and space and rhythm that does the explaining. Then I live with and try to process what’s come in or at least allow it to influence me and change my mind, and hopefully, out of this comes something valuable which can give back to the place it came from. That all sounded kind of lofty. I’m mainly a dude sitting in a room with a piano banging my head on the keys. You can find some great songs hidden in a piano when you stop using your hands.
Do you have any upcoming shows or festivals you’d like to tell us about?
I’m currently on tour in Europe with shows in Hungary, Germany, Spain, and Ireland.
What’s your goal for 2022?
Make it to 2023. That’s the goal.
Connect with Declan O’Donovan:
Website
Bandcamp
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram