Doran builds musical world close to home

Mullingar singer/songwriter Peter Doran has been penning songs for several decades, but his latest release is a product of a creative comfort he hadn’t previously been afforded.

Pieced together in a custom-built studio inside a 200-year-old farmhouse in the midlands, Doran’s sixth album, All the World is Running on a Mystic Code, was released into the world last week.

It is a study in worldbuilding, littered with characters and imagery from stories both personal and historic. To celebrate, Doran will be playing a string of shows over the coming months, including a Galway date in Monroe’s on September 20.

“I put out an album in 2021 called Voices and it was in the middle of the pandemic,” he says.

“When it eventually came out, there was nothing I could really do to release it. There was nowhere to tour it, nowhere to do anything. That was a strange time to be putting out a record because there was no way to celebrate it with anyone.

“After that, I slowly started working on the studio space here. For me, these things always go in cycles. There’s a cycle of time where you’re writing material.

“When you get enough written, you go into the recording phase and then you’re into the release phase. I was just shifting from the end of that album into the writing cycle for the new one. Songs just started coming together.”

There is a cohesion across the album – but not necessarily by design. The opening track, Mystic Code, is one of the first songs Doran can remember happening upon. It teed up recognisable patterns through, even if they emerged subconsciously.

“On a song-by-song basis, I always talk about that,” he says.

“You need a spark that gets the whole thing going, be it a line or a musical idea that will keep your song going. In that same way I guess, once you begin into the work of recording, you get set on a mode of operating that bleeds into the whole work.”

Caption: Peter Doran.

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