The Groove Tube: Drawing her inspiration from the world around

Titled Eternity Bores Me, the record continues A Lilac Decline’s ascent into the shimmering expanse, marking a shoegaze-y, dreampop catalogue of songs that feels some distance away from the gently plucked lo-fi sound on Dannell’s 2017 debut.

With So Cow’s Brian Kelly on drums, the solo project has slowly morphed into a three-piece band.

Harnessing that power while retaining Dannell’s sweet and evocative vocals, it all adds up to a trancey haze with soft edges. A single for the album, Shadow Days, is out now.

“I always felt that it was one of my favourite songs off the album,” Dannell says.

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“It was one of the first songs I wrote for it, as far back as 2021. I was on an art residency in a place called the Ballinglen Arts Foundation. Keith was there with me as well – he was set up with his recording equipment and working on his own music.

“I ended up recording a couple of songs there, or the bones of them that we later added to with Brian Kelly. It was a really inspiring setting. We were living in a house in Ballycastle for a month and just focusing on art and music.”

Many people in Galway would know Dannell primarily as a visual artist.

With music, it is rare that her creative process is quite so focused. She says it helps to be surrounded by creative things.

“A lot of my songs happen kind of piecemeal,” Dannell explains.

“I don’t usually sit down with the idea of writing a song. I tinker around on the guitar a bit and sometimes I come up with a few lyrics that I might type into my phone and save, and that might lead to something.

“So it’s usually quite an organic process, but that particular time I was focused on it a bit more, just because we had all the gear set up and the instruments with us.

“Otherwise, the songs have happened bit by bit over the last few years, sometimes over in Sweden when I’m visiting my mum and here in Galway as well.”

The oldest track on Eternity Bores Me is called Breathing In which arrived at the tail end of the pandemic and opines on the joys of being able to experience the world again. A lot of the tracks, she says, are inspired by landscapes and settings she finds herself in.

“The place I’m from in Sweden is a rural area in the middle of the country, whereas here in Galway we’re right on the coast,” she says.

“They’re quite different landscapes in that sense. There are deep forests where I’m from, and that influences my visual art a lot. But I suppose the response in terms of songwriting is often a more immediate thing.”

One example of that immediacy is Storms, a track that came together on a night of heavy rain back home in Sweden.

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Another reaction to the world around her, Coasts, is inspired by the shoreline in Ballycastle. That short-term thinking feeds into the title of the album, which is a follow-on from A Lilac Decline’s last record, Shelter From the Shadows.

“That album was quite a dark time for me because when I was writing the songs, my dad had just passed away,” Dannell says. “A lot of it was a way to try to deal with that and console me in some ways. I wanted this album to be a little bit lighter in a sense.

“I realised as I went along, without planning it, a lot of the songs are dealing with the larger aspects of the world we live in.

“The universe, planets and how small we are in the context of all these things, and how that can be almost reassuring. There’s a constant in it – we’re here but the world carries on in some ways in a wider perspective.

“Eternity Bores Me is that idea of not trying to plan or think too far ahead because that can be really daunting or even pointless at times.

“Being able to enjoy the here and now a bit more is something that I’ve tried to think about more in recent years. We don’t know how long we have or what’s going to happen.”

Dannell and Wallace made a music video for Shadow Days which was released online in March. It was fun to make, she says, incorporating “black metal make-up”, a forest and a dimly lit séance.

“I work with film as well as a visual artist. I’m primarily a painter but I also work with film and installation and stuff like that. I always have a visual language I suppose, so it’s quite easy to make something like that on a whim. There was no budget or anything like that. It was just us shooting and editing.”

Collaborating with your partner can be a difficult dynamic, but it suits Dannell and Wallace perfectly.

“It’s a really nice thing that we can record music ourselves. We’re not reliant on going to a recording studio and being able to fund that. We can actually have an idea for a song and just start recording it at home. That can gestate for a while and we can add to it later. A lot of the songs will be works in progress over quite a long time.”

Brian Kelly was introduced on the second A Lilac Decline album to add drums to a couple of tracks, but it was still a solo project for Dannell. Coming out of Covid, she, Kelly and Wallace played a handful of gigs together, cementing A Lilac Decline as more of a three-piece.

All three hope to perform as A Lilac Decline over the summer, though no gigs have been officially announced yet.