Pa Sheehy has found a new road since the end of Walking On Cars

The Kerry musician has just released his first solo EP, The Art Of Disappearing

Tue, 28 Sep, 2021 - 09:00

Ed Power

Some bands break up on stage. Others by text message. When Pa Sheehy finally made peace with the fact that he had to walk away from chart-topping Kerry outfit, Walking On Cars, he asked the rest of the group to meet for a heart-to-heart.

“It was a difficult conversation,” he says over Zoom. “There were tears. There was a moment of reflection. We all looked at each other and nodded our heads and said, “f**k it, we did alright, didn’t we?’”

Sheehy is now negotiating the tricky next chapter of his career. He has just released his debut solo EP, The Art of Disappearing, and tours Ireland in October. Drawing on a number of painful episodes from his life, the record is far more stripped down than the arena-ready nu-folk with which Walking On Cars were synonymous. He sees it as the first step on a journey towards a new musical identity.

“It feels like I’m starting all over again,” he says from his home studio in Ventry, on the Dingle Peninsula in Kerry. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’ve a tour booked, an EP coming out. It’s new ground for me.”

Walking On Cars were about as big as it is possible for an Irish band to be without breaking through internationally (though they had a loyal following on the Continent and elsewhere). They headlined 3Arena and played the main stage at Electric Picnic. Their first album, Everything This Way, also rocketed to number one in 2016. And yet, by the end, it had all started to feel slightly hollow to Sheehy.

“We’d been together 10 years. We’d done so much. It felt, in the last couple of years, that the magic had started to fade away,” he says. “We tried to recapture it and held on to it for a good while. But it became apparent that a little bit of that magic was dead and gone. We could have held on for another album or two. I don’t think that would have served anyone.”

In lockdown, Sheehy went through a long dark night of the soul. He looked back on past incidents from his life: regrets, missed opportunities and mistakes for which he wished he could make up. Some of those experiences are poured into the new song Róisín, about a lost period when he was studying arts at UCC.

“I was in Cork for a year and a half,” he says. “The craic was too good. I’d left school and didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was really lost.”

At school in Dingle he’d dreamed of either playing soccer or being a musician. He wasn’t in the headspace to succeed at either. At a loss, he followed the example of his friends and went to college. There, he drank too much and stayed out too late – and began to lose sight of who he was and what he wanted.

“I look back on my time in Cork: it was the worst of times, it was the best of times,” he says. “I felt like me and my buddies only fitted in during Rag Week. We were on a different wavelength to a lot of the students.”

Pa Sheehy spent time in Cork as a student at UCC: 'The craic was too good.'

He bares his soul even more honestly on ‘I Saw You At A Funeral’, another stand-out from the EP. It’s addressed to his father, with whom he hasn’t always seen eye-to-eye.

“I saw you at a funeral/You didn’t say hello,” he sings. “But I know you saw me standing on the grass just by the road.”

“I always tend to write about the things that are wrong in my life. This is one part of my life that was difficult. It was something I didn’t want to write about, because it’s quite close to the bone and quite close to home. But since I wrote it, there has definitely been an improvement.

“My relationship with my father isn’t the best in the world. But it’s way better than it was. There is healing. I’ll take that.”

As he faces into life after Walking On Cars, it’s clear Sheehy doesn’t have regrets. During lockdown he had to accept that the group to which he owed so much had reached the end of its natural lifespan. After making peace with that, everything else fell into place.

“I knew my decision was going to impact on the rest of the band for sure. It was something I had to think about and not be erratic in. I dwelt on it for a long time when the lockdown happened. It gave me time to analyse whether I was happy as a human. Was I happy where I was in my life? The truth was, I wasn’t happy. It was the first time in 10 years I wasn’t thinking about the next show. I wasn’t thinking about the next song. There was calmness. There was time to reflect. It became apparent that it was time to go.”