Passing through the crossroads

Ryan Sheridan erased an entire album because he thought it wasn’t good enough, he tells Ed Power. What he did next went straight to number one

RYAN SHERIDAN was worried. It was 2013 and, after months of increasingly unsatisfying toil, the Monaghan singer stood at a crossroads. The clutch of new songs he had written weren’t terrible, exactly. But they lacked the rawness he had always felt essential to his musical identity. He knew what he had to do. Press ‘erase’ and start over.

“I had recorded my album with a rocky ‘band’ sound. I wasn’t happy. So I scrapped it and began again.”