Simple Kid: Cork musician makes welcome return with third album
Simple Kid, aka Cork musician Kieran Mac Feely.
Kieran Mac Feely is the enduring object of affection for a generation of Cork music fans. In the early 2000s, under the Simple Kid moniker, his two albums of unique indie pop were well received internationally and had the Douglas musician getting mentions in all the right places, even playing support slots for the Kings of Leon and others.
While that chapter faded out, and Mac Feely turned in other directions, he kept making music. He’s just released a third album SK3, a compilation of a decade’s ad-hoc songwriting.
“The main thing to understand is that these are done very late at night,” says Mac Feely from his home in the UK, where he teaches music at a secondary school. “I have a loft up here, and I would do my days' living as a dad and working parent, with young kids in particular, then this was my release.
“So it was whispering and creeping around - a bizarre process, really, plugging things in super-quietly. There's a couple of songs on the album that kind of make me laugh, they sound like they should be sung out loud, but I could hear myself whispering because it's three or four in the morning, and I just don't have that luxury.”
Given that Mac Feely is firmly engaged in life as a family man, a recurring theme on the album is dealing with the changing of life’s seasons: he gawps back at old selves, reckons with art and obligation, and on album opener ‘The Road’, urges listeners to take stock of where they are on life’s journey.
“I'm 46 years of age, and I started these when I was 36. I'd gone from touring on my own as a young man, assuming I had a future of more of the same. By the time I'd finished SK2 and all the tours and stuff like that, I just thought this was my life.
“Then changes came along, and some of them were very hard, a lot of financial stuff, young kids coming along, so by the time I came up for air, I was a very different person, with a very different set of limitations. Instead of becoming an alcoholic and buying a Harley-Davidson or having an affair, I set about trying to work it out, really.”
SK3 was released independently over Bandcamp and streaming services this time around - a knowingly low-key freeing into the world, more than a formal release, far from the hype machine of the established music business in which Mac Feely resided for many years.
“I have very little expertise in the modern music industry. I've got friends who work in it, whether it's kind of media or around music. They come and visit me sometimes, and I can't always keep up, I don't really understand what they're talking about. I'm just completely divorced from it. I'm very slow on social media, I think I really like to have time for myself to daydream, I find the intrusion of social media just too much.
“What's really nice is that I didn't really ever make money from a record. That's all in the hands of different people, you might get told you've sold a certain amount, you might get kind of a batch of money sometimes. So I like the complete directness of Bandcamp.”
Mac Feely has kept his expectations low for the reach of the new album. “I put it up there thinking, 'I'll probably never really hear anything about it', and quite a few people [have latched on]. It's nice to be remembered in some way - a lovely little icing on the cake for my summer.”
Having finally completed a trilogy of Simple Kid albums, the inevitable question of a return to gigging rears its head. It’s not gone unheeded, but for all of his talk of modesty and art as an escape in a different life, there’s a flash of Mac Feely’s familiar ambition.
"The problem for me is a problem I've always had - the album's quite elaborate. If you give me a computer with endless options, I tend to use them. I sometimes sit down and listen to a song like 'The Road' and think of myself on stage with an acoustic guitar, and I go 'how in the world would you make that translate?'.
“Never say never, because about a year ago somebody was asking me 'would you ever put an album out?', and I was like 'never', and that happened, so you never know."
- Simple Kid’s SK3: Health and Safety album is available now on https://simplekid.bandcamp.com/
Current listening: “Lewis Cole and Knower, weird internet prodigy musicians.”
Current reading: “I'm currently reading Charlie Kaufman's Antkind, really enjoying it, very funny.”
Best recent gig: “I went to see a band called Aircooled, including a friend of mine down the road, literally at the beachfront in St Leonard’s. It was great, like electronic, motorik stuff.”
Recent viewing: “I am watching the Michael Jordan documentary, The Last Dance, with my son on Netflix. Totally amazing insight into the mind of somebody who has to win. Very different to someone like me.”
Current podcast: “I'm studying at the moment, and there's a podcast called Three People in My Head, on psychotherapy, which I'm listening to for that reason.”
