Dublin-Based Band Signs Worldwide Deal with V2
Just Back After a Month Long Tour of the UK Supporting TRAVIS
Much Anticipated Follow-Up to 2004's "Starlight Drive" Album Featuring the Hit Single "This Song Is Your Own"
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So, what do you do when you sign your first big record deal ?
Head for the bright lights of London, take the plaudits, and listen to everyone telling you how wonderful you are ?
Not for Juno Falls frontman and songwriter Myles O’Reilly.
Packing his bags, Myles left behind his native Dublin and headed for the tranquility of Dingle, on Ireland’s rugged west coast. “ Don’t get me wrong”, says Myles, “I love Dublin. It has a great energy and the music scene is very healthy there, but for me the remoteness and honesty of somewhere like Dingle makes the creative process so much more natural”.
Living in Dingle while writing material for the new album brought it’s own perils. While returning to Dingle from Dublin in the early hours of a wintery morning, Myles knew that he was almost home. The grey silhouette of Mount Brandon loomed ahead, as the narrow country roads snaked onwards. Nearly there.
“ Suddenly I’m fighting with the car, battling to keep it on the road. Failing !”
Upside down and compressed into the only space left inside the car, Myles struggled to pull himself free. “ I remember making my way back onto the road and looking back at what was left of the car”, he says. “It wasn’t until several days later that it dawned on me just how lucky I was to have walked away from it without a scratch.”
“ Some of what I had been writing about prior to the crash now seemed trivial to me”, says Myles. "I had be given a second chance, and naturally there was a lot of emotion that came from that which helped inspire me without effort"
Returning to Dublin several months later with a lap-top full of songs, Myles began the process of “putting meat on the bones of the songs” with the rest of the band, Elton Mullaly (formerly of Brando) on bass and drummer Dave Lawless.
"They brought something really special to the songs," explains Myles. "Juno Falls complete the picture. The band made the songs breath and released them from the whole singer-songwriter genre“.
Recorded at various points over the course of the last year, including Wicklow, London, Dublin and Nashville, the result is a collection of beautifully crafted songs, sometimes intimate, sometimes fragile, always honest and unmistakably Juno Falls.
"I've always loved pop songs because they're braver than any other kind of music: you're trying to be universal and appeal to a whole lot of people. But there's a side of me that's always been attracted to the beauty and the sadness of artists like Elbow or Rufus Wainwright”.
Road-tested on a month-long tour of the UK and Ireland with Travis, the new songs have already found their live legs. "Fran [Healy, Travis singer] heard 'The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off' on my Myspace page and liked it so much, he asked us to come on tour with them," explains the frontman.
The first fruits of this creative journey can be heard when the mini-album 'Atom Bomb' hits the shelves in September 2007, followed by the band's international debut album in October.
The title track of the mini-album, 'Atom Bomb' is "symbolic of human nature encroaching on the natural order of things", according to Myles. Not that you'd necessarily guess that from a quick listen: deliberately vague, the song is more a gentle prod than a full-frontal assault, morphing from a gently plucked guitar intro to a lush string-laden crescendo that sounds like it was conceived in a Turkish opera house (all the strings on the new material were played by renowned traditional/classical musician Cora Venus-Lunny).
Another standout track, 'Slowly Fizzy' is about "how alcohol can make you do stupid things, particularly to the people you love most," Myles explains with a rueful smile.
'Four' was initially written as a joke: "I'd been told that '3' was the magic number, and wanted to disprove that theory," he smiles, before adding mischievously, "I also thought that I could make a whole lot of money out of any TV channel of the 4 variety. Honestly, it wasn't meant to be taken particularly seriously but everyone who heard it loved it and that's how it ended up on the mini-album."
Thankfully, the strength and depth of the songs on both 'Atom Bomb' and the forthcoming album ensures that Juno Falls will not be spending much time in the songwriting outback. With a host of live dates penciled in for the rest of 2007, Myles' diary is already filling up and, with the new songs poised to win over plenty of new Juno Falls fans, his calendar is only going to get busier.
