“I want to know this place as intimately as possible”: For Those I Love on Dublin’s influence, walking across Ireland, and hidden layers
For Those I Love. Photo by Hugh Quberzky
Interview by Jerome Blazé
With his new album Carving The Stone now out in the world, For Those I Love is reflecting on the process that brought it to life. Like his self-titled debut, Carving The Stone is built around spoken word, an approach David Balfe says is less a stylistic choice than a necessity. “I don’t have the tools to sing. I knew I had stories I wanted to tell and I knew there needed to be ways for me to tell them,” he explains. This time, the delivery is even more direct, carried by the cadences of everyday Dublin speech and the voices of friends, family, and loved ones woven through the record. “Maybe I don’t need to do anything more than this. I can present with just the voice and that’s strong enough.”
Alongside that voice are the layers that make his music so distinctive: field recordings from Dublin, samples buried deep in the mix, and even hidden monologues, like the closing track’s long roll call of names, a tribute to the people who’ve shaped his life and creativity. “I bury so much into the DNA of tracks that people will never hear,” he says. For Those I Love sees the record not just as music, but as a map of his city and his relationships: “I want to know this place as intimately as possible… If I ever see a road I haven’t been on, I’m going to go down that road and I’m going to try and get to know it.”
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Jerome: Hey Dave, good to meet you.
David: Hi Jerome, how are you?
Jerome: Good, how are you?
David: Yeah, I'm alright, happy to be here.
Jerome: How are you feeling with the album coming out in a few days?
David: Yeah, just fatigued [laughs].
Jerome: Yeah, have you've been doing a lot of press stuff?
David: Not so much press stuff, it's just the juggling of everyday life of regular work and then of like tour prep and stuff. I've been doing a lot of other things. I've been building stage sets and stuff. I think I just took a bit too much on myself. I'm like, “Oh, I'll build it! I want to build it this time!” So I'm out in my backyard with the toolbox out, sawing away [laughs]. And so there are a lot of late nights, early mornings, but it's good.
Jerome: I was going to ask this later, but I saw that you're kind of levelling up your live show. Could you delve into that without spoiling too much?
David: Sure! Yeah. I mean, I might talk myself into a corner that I can't escape from now as well.
Jerome: Yeah, yeah [laughs].
David: Because there's time left before this... So maybe I’ll realise, maybe I'll go through a bit of this and then go, it doesn't work, it’s doesn’t work. So in the past, I've kept my live show very slim. What I’ve done in the past is, I've spent weeks and months building sort of a unique version or a series of unique versions of the live set instrumentally and then prepped all of the visuals beforehand. Then instead of playing anything live, pretty much just gone out with a printed file. So I'm essentially just playing a pre-prepared backing track and my visuals, and then using all of that space to have a really, really direct experience with the audience as a focus.
Jerome: Which I think is awesome to strip it down in that way and have it be that exposed, because I feel like your music feels like that a lot of the time.
David:Thank you. And, you know, I think maybe there was a bit of... I was maybe a little bit hesitant before I did those for shows, that that would be the way, maybe this isn't a good enough way to bring this show live. But I wanted such a direct connection with the audience and that it felt like having any sort of barrier in between me and them, having any sort of break in connection, having me torn away and start playing with synths. However, this time I've been adding a little bit more in. I've been adding some live synths and some live samplers into the mix, but as well as having a bit more of a live connection with the visuals.
Jerome: Yeah cool!
I've been building this like... I'm building basically like a CCTV rig, and like a CCTV mast as the centre point of the show. It could be that the record deals with sort of the more negative points of surveillance. And I wanted something that emphasised parts of the confrontation, parts of the record, while still being something that was visually captivating. So I've been building a live CCTV… it has like a modular CCTV mast so that it can pack down to interchange sizes. But with a live camera feed through the cameras, but one camera that goes to the microphone instead. So on certain songs, the microphone, the camera is like here on my face… So yeah, there's a little bit more going on. And the scale of the shows that I have over the course of the tour are very different. So like I've requested to play, for instance, like a place called Mike the Pies, which is tiny. It's a 100 person cap. So… it's like a really famous Irish venue. Like I don't know how I'm going to do it. The room itself is much more modest. I don't know how I'm going to do it in there, and then take it to another place that's 1600 or whatever. Or you know, the festival shows, which are way bigger.
Jerome: So you need something that can scale for the venues that you're playing in?
David: Exactly! Yeah. So it is different.
Jerome: Such as the CCTV mast.
David: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jerome: Cool. Wow. Well, it sounds incredible. I'm sad I won't be able to see… There's no plans to come down this way, is there? Or have you... I was going to ask all this stuff at the end [laughs].
David: [laughs] Yeah. There is no... unfortunately, there's no plans to... You see, there was initially plans, but they just didn't line up with the rest of the tour stuff for the rest of the year. The album had gotten delayed so many times for a whole variety of reasons. One of which was me. I ended up breaking my leg midway through… filming…
Jerome: Yeah, I saw! [laughs]
David: …I was shooting the first video and that kind of delayed things even further. So quite a lot of things ended up changing. But I will be there at some stage. I promise it.
Jerome: Yeah, cool. Amazing. Incredible. I wanted to come back to the album quickly and just talk about the gap between your last record and this record. I read online that you were kind of waiting for the moment to happen, or waiting for the inspiration to return. But I was wondering more specifically if there was anything that triggered that return of inspiration and turned the tap back on?
David: I'd love to be able to give like a really romantic answer to that and pinpoint the exact moment. But to be totally honest, it didn't really fall like that. I guess what had happened was I felt this collective build occur, where each day I'd leave my house at 7… 7.30 in the morning and I'd be walking… It's a short enough walk that I do every morning. It would be, I was going somewhere about 20 minutes away. And what I found happening was each morning, I started to write more and more into my notes app, or I'd stop and scrawl down more and more stuff into a notepad. And these couplets started coming out with a bit more frequency.
All of this stuff was being done as like, I suppose, a coping mechanism. In a sense, it was a way to try and rationalise, to make sense of what I felt was a building pressure within Dublin. So I don't know if there was really any one moment, but what there was is just this collective of moments that built into almost like a boiling point. And then ultimately, one day I realised that, yes, there is more to say. I'm not just going to be taking up space here. I feel like there's value in these topics. And I just couldn't get away from it at that stage. The writing just was so free flowing.
Jerome: It's like a slow kind of compiling of information and lyrics?
David: Absolutely. Yeah. And that was it. That was all a conceptual build. None of that was like a sonic practice. I wasn't making accompanying music to those ideas at that point. And I, you know, I've talked about this with a bit of frequency, but I had left Dublin then when I decided that I was going to write more. I had left Dublin and I went to the countryside for a month and I stayed in this house. I didn't see anybody else for the entire month. And I fully bought into the myth, to like isolate yourself. Great records are made when you isolate yourself, all this stuff. And loads of my peers that write music were like, no, you need a break. You need to get away from everything. You need to just be in music. And I wrote every single day from morning until night. And it was just, it was all terrible! Every note that I wrote was wrong. None of it made sense. And it just didn't accompany anything. I didn't realise this until I started putting the pressure on and now I keep talking about it in each one of the interviews, because it's just, I feel like I have to acknowledge it so that people don't think I've been making it up, because it's so ridiculous. But on the very last day that I was in the house in the countryside, I packed up, got rid of all the synths, packed up all the strings, packed up the guitars, all the microphones. The only thing I had left was a MIDI keyboard and my computer. And I wrote the opening chords to the last song on the album. And it's the only thing that I took back with me from that whole month writing. And then as soon as I got back to Dublin, I packed up all the gear straight away, back into this little tiny area, and I made a record in this tiny little room where I could touch both walls if I just put my arms out to the side. And I just wrote and I wrote and I wrote. Those opening cards became, the opening cards to the last song became the first thing that fed the rest of the record. That was the only one where I was like, “This is a moment”. I wrote them and I went, “Oh shit, okay, there's something here. There is value in this.”
For Those I Love. Photo by Hugh Quberzky
Jerome: Yeah, yeah. I don't know if Melody, explained but I'm a musician.
David: Yeah, yeah, yeah!
Jerome: And I've got my own studio at home. I don't want to talk about myself for too long because I've got so many more questions, but that rang true to something that I've been doing recently, taking a MIDI keyboard and just going to various parks and train stations around Sydney. And just spending like half an hour making something. And I take microphones to field record as well.
David: Yeah, nice!
Jerome: And it's like being the most creatively productive thing I've ever done. And it's funny when you strip away, you can have this synth and that synth and it's a tale as old as time. It's like, yeah, strip away all that stuff. You're actually… the creative confines of having nothing is maybe the most creatively productive thing to do.
David: I agree. Are you treating the field recordings? Or are you letting them bed into the tracks naturally?
Jerome: So I just started trying a new… initially, I was just letting the field recording sit and just having them really loud in my headphones. So I'm kind of listening to the world with a microscope and just like really trying to sit in that feeling. But last week I tried like gating the field recordings to my midi keyboard. So it was like jumping up and down with the piano chords or the synth I was playing. I'm keen to explore a little bit more of that stuff. I mean, and then I go away and like sample the whole thing and sort of rework it. So anyway, I don't want to talk about myself for too long [laughs].
David: No no, I'm just curious because I find a lot of value in field recording as well. I bury so much into the DNA of tracks that people will never hear. But I just, I don't know what it is, but I find adding in the atmosphere of places that I'm writing about helps build colour to the tracks in a way that you never hear, but you do feel…
Jerome: You feel it.
David: It buries so much. Even like the closing album or the closing track on the album, the very end. If you listen like really, really intently, you can kind of hear voices, but there's no way to pick out what is being said. But the closing track on the album, I know I'm kind of jumping around here, but maybe it's relevant to just building things into that, into the DNA of tracks. But the closing track in the album just has this long monologue of names of just all of the people in my life that I love and that have been encouraging, that have played a role in my expression of creativity in any way.
Jerome: And is that you saying those names?
David: Yeah, it's just me. It's literally just me calling out a list of the people that the record is for and the people that it's in celebration of and in thanks of.
Jerome: Like credits almost.
David: Almost like credits, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you'll never hear it, but it's part of the DNA of the record, like the permanence of it being there. When I was doing the first pass of the mix of the record myself, I did the first pass and then Ben Baptie did the actual mix and took it to a totally different level.
Jerome: Oh I didn’t know Ben worked on it. That's cool.
David: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But when I try and pull out the voice and get rid of it, it genuinely felt like something was missing from the track.
Jerome: That's the thing. You think these things are so subtle and I can't make out the words. It's like it's barely there, but then you mute it… and it's like, this doesn't feel as special anymore.
David: And I feel that way of field recordings as well. I feel like they add a whole new DNA to it, to a piece of creative… I'm a believer.
Jerome: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Believer of the field recordings [laughs].
David: [laughs] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jerome: Yeah. And it's something only you can record as well, especially when it comes to that sort of more like foley sort of sampling. I actually had a question about sampling, if you could just sort of talk me through some of the samples on the record. Because I've listened to your music so much. But just when I was listening today, I really, for whatever reason, I started hearing all the samples and thinking of it as sample based music a little bit more. And I realised that it seems to be quite a big part of your process.
David: Absolutely! So, I mean, the first record was incredibly sample heavy. And it was sample heavy for a whole host of reasons. So, for one, the first record was incredibly sample heavy because my writing process was so restricted. I couldn't play any strings at the time. I didn't have access to microphones to do anything adventurous. I had no ability to bring in session players. And I used sampling at the time as a tool to bring about elements of expression that I couldn't make otherwise. And I kind of thought going into the next record that I wouldn't need the same reliance on that. I was begged by all the people around me to not use samples in the next record, because the first one, the first record, I don't know, we had to clear 73 samples, I think it was.
Jerome: Oh my god, madness [laughs]
David: Yeah! It was a lot. It was the whole budget of the record in itself. Do you know what I mean? My friends and family were like, don't do that. Don't spend the whole budget clearing samples. And I was going, “Yeah, no, I definitely won't…” [laughs]. Then you start to do the right process and you realise that when used earnestly and used respectfully, a sample, it can offer something to a song that there's no capacity for me to rival. An example of that would be on that closing track. And it is a sample, but it's very different to the way I used sampling in my first record, because I've tried to keep it as bare bones and as untreated. But on the closing track, there's a sample of Black Waters by Jean Ritchie. It's the last voice you hear directly on the album. It follows sort of my closing vocal, which I think tries to touch on a sense of hope and the use of ‘Black Waters’ by Jean Ritchie, you get basically a bit of a distilled version of her track, where it focuses one, on her first verse, which I think reflects so many of the themes that are present on the album, a sense of a negatively changing home. Following that, the very last thing you hear is another verse from Jean Ritchie, where she starts to find a sense of hope about her place of home, “No More Black Waters, Black Waters No More In My Land”. And there, for me, if I was to use a sample like that in this capacity, there was no scope in my mind to use it the way I did in the way I used sampling in the first record and to tear it apart and rebuild it. Instead, I just wanted to give platform to a very earnest version of Jean Ritchie's delivery, not unlike on the second track on the album, No Quiet, where the closing part of the album is a sample of a woman called Nellie Ní Dhomhnaill from Ranafast Gaeltacht in Donegal in Ireland. And she's singing a very incredibly beautiful Irish song.
And likewise, with that, I felt no desire to push that sample, to retreat it, no formant shifting, barely an EQ, and just paired with my piano, just my piano playing underneath it and letting the qualities of her voice shine through. Because I knew, listening to that, it added so much, in my mind, added so much context to that song that I was unable to capture it myself.
Jerome: Yeah, I love that sort of sampling where you're really just creating an opportunity to present music that is meaningful to you or sound that is meaningful to you.
David: Agreed.
Jerome: Just, like, represent it and give it a different context and help the listener see it in a different light. And I mean, we kind of need people like you to do that, because otherwise, who's going to do it, you know? And it doesn't have to be filtered and pitched and everything for it to be proper sampling. Just placing something as simply as that, is a way to bring new meaning to something.
David: I agree! And I do still do, like, ultra, ultra processed, classic sampling, you know? One of my favourite things I ever did when I was younger, because sampling played such a massive role in my life, but when I was younger I took J Dilla's ‘Donuts’ and I went track by track and made my own version of the album.
Jerome: Oh sick.
David: With each track made a new version of the track using only the samples that he used for that track. And it was an incredible thing to do, because it helped me try and understand new ways of approaching sampling, but also exposed me to how all of this wealth of music that I probably found maybe my favourite song of all time, ‘Just Because I Really Love You’ by Jerry Butler from the Ice Man Cometh, that, you know, Dilla sampled that on ‘Donuts’. And I probably wouldn't have heard that original had I not gone through and tried to really study the craft of how that album was made and make an attempt at making my own version using the same tools that he did.
Jerome: That's like, dude, that's like the Iron Man of, like, production training [laughs].
David: Yeah! [laughs]
Jerome: That's like, you know, that's like extreme conditioning.
David: Well I could have done it with ‘Since I Left You’, by The Avalanches, that would have been, by all measures, I think, would have been much more, much more difficult of an approach.
Jerome: That's like the Olympian level.
David: Yeah, exactly! Yeah, but they're two, possibly my two favorite albums of all time, so.
Jerome: Yeah, incredible. And I can, yeah, I can totally hear that running throughout your music, albeit in, like, such a different way. But yeah, it's really interesting to hear that you've kind of studied that music so closely.
David: Inside out, yeah, yeah.
Jerome: Yeah, yeah. Your first album was a huge part of me getting into doing a bit more spoken word stuff on my music. I remember I was listening to it driving back to my hometown in the country, which it feels quite fitting. And I don't know, I just, I was just like “Oh, I could, I could give this a go too”. I've always sung, but I've always kind of wanted to find a new way to use my voice that isn't singing, but I still want to say things. And I was wondering, I guess doing any form of spoken word is like somewhat of an unconventional choice in music, broadly speaking. I wanted to ask, what made you realise that that's something you can do and who are some of the people that you look up to that also make music in a similar world?
David: Great question. So pretty relatively, I think relatively simple answers to some of it. One, I can't sing. I don't have, I just can't hold a single note. And I've made my attempts at singing in the past and they've been terrible [laughs]. So not dissimilar to the choice to use sampling on the first record as a, you know, due to the restriction of tools, I don't have the tools to sing. So, I knew I had stories I wanted to tell and I knew there needed to be ways for me to tell them.
When I think about it more broadly though, there's, there's a little bit more richness to it. Colloquialism plays a massive part in my music or in the way I tell stories and the people that I'm surrounded by. My friends, particularly somebody like my friend Barry, he's not a musician, he doesn't make music, but I think has, some of the most creative, I think he probably has the most creative use of language out of anybody that I know. That's the sort of stuff that has inspired me to try and utilise the spoken word as the, the vehicle. And he's somebody who's shown me how, activating and limitless, using your own vocabulary and your own colloquialism and your own natural voice can be… he is able to communicate incredibly dense topics in just such sharp and humorous turns of phrase that are so unique. And he surprises me and the rest of my friends every day we're together, he finds a new way to describe something. And it's always so funny, but so visually rich. And so short. It's the ability to take something so grand and break it down into something so short. That's the sort of thing that has driven me to use the spoken voice as the vehicle and storytelling.
My grandfather, when he was around, he just told a lot of stories, you know, he’d just tell us a lot of things. And my family on that side in general will tell the same story a hundred times on a Sunday at my nanny's house. But the way they deliver it differently each time that focus on different colloquialism that embodiment of different character each time is inspiring and bring something new to it. And sort of an understanding of that and acknowledgement that that has always just told me that maybe I don't need to do anything more than this. I can present with just the voice and that's strong enough.
Jerome: Using the tools that are at your disposal.
David: Yeah.
Jerome: Most familiar to you.
David: Yeah exactly. And of course there's been, you know, there's been tons and there's tons of music and you know, with this newer record, it's much angrier. And so, you know, so many, my teen years are spent into my twenties are spent in hardcore punk bands and the delivery that I was listening to then, or even the delivery that I was expressing, it wasn't particularly melodious or anything. It was, it was a real honest version of the voice, just an angry direct voice. I guess I found those things quite inspiring as ways to approach not having to shine up the voice and just using that as the instrument as it comes.
Jerome: Yeah. It's a very natural way of making music and of telling stories. You're not trying to reduce things into fitting into a melody or maybe there's a certain cadence you're trying to fit into, but you can incorporate, and I feel like this is what makes your music so special, you can incorporate your own use of language and it feels very personal and it feels like you're talking straight to the listener, to me, to whoever's listening.
David:Yeah, you can fit a lot more in when you're just talking as well.
Jerome: Yeah. Well, I was going to say, you know, like even that point about like density. I feel like the world even just in one song, let alone like a whole album, because you're able to fit in that volume of language, especially if the language is also poetic and you're building a lot of meaning into even small phrases, I think the sense of place and the sense of identity is like you're really drawn into it. Yeah, it's amazing.
David: Thank you.
Jerome: I think this thing about the sense of place and like the, is obviously such an important part of your music and it's one of the most important things that I love in music, that feeling like you're in the place that the music is written or what it's written about and it's so specific, but it's amazing to see how, at the same time, how widely it's resonated for something that is very specific. I'm just wondering if you could speak to imbuing your music with that specific sense of place, whether obviously it's through your lyrics, but also through your production? You've spoken about sampling, you've spoken about field recordings.
David: My life is very tied to this place, the geography of Dublin. I sent my friend a 6am voice message today saying I have this goal that I want to be able to drive from the bottom of the Tonlegee Road to the top of the Tonlegee Road and get green lights the whole way. I've been driving this one road since I was a child, I've been on this one road and it's a short road, it's a 10 minute road and but there's all these different lights along the way and I'm thinking I've been here forever and I love the idea of being able to do these really mundane things in this place that so few other people have ever done. Last year, or the year before that, I walked from the most westerly point of Dublin to the most easterly point of Dublin, which is short, it took eight and a half hours or something, there are just these like little oddities where, I'm here for such a long time and I'm still finding these like new, unique or odd ways to try and connect with the, the place and see it and know it in new ways.
The way it comes to life in the, the music is natural to that. I'm tied to those ideas, I'm tied to that, I'm tied to the novelty of it and yes I've tried to use places as, as not just the backdrop but as character and particularly in the new record, I try and make very direct references to places I'll call out very niche spots by, by name and yeah, of course, people that don’t live in Dublin probably don't know those roads but I don't think that really matters. I think people, when they listen to it, they bring their own Grange roads to it. They bring parts of their own geography, parts of their own life to those stories.
Jerome: Do you find you naturally find deeper and deeper meaning in your surroundings just because of who you are or do you find you really have to challenge yourself to be like what's a fun way I can kind of see Dublin?
David: No, no challenge to it at all. I just feel… it's just part of me. I made a decision a long time ago that I wasn't going to leave Dublin regardless of how difficult it was becoming and with that, you just gotta find ways to connect to it. I like a challenge but I like finding novelty and I like trying to connect to it. I've played fuck all shows in the past couple of years but I played one, two and a half years ago, it's the one, just a one-off festival show and I just decided I was going to walk to it. It took four and a half days… over the mountains,
Jerome: Oh my god [laughs].
David: …put my gear on my back and I walked to the show. I left my hall door and I walked for four and a half days and then arrived, played the stage and things like that are things I like to do to try and connect with place, with Dublin, with Ireland and just have these newer unique experiences. Yeah, I could go and do that walk but being able to tie it in so directly with some of these great privileges of my life, like being able to perform music, things like that, yeah, they're just all connected. So yeah, just, I don't know, I want to know this place as intimately as possible and I'm just going to find the constant desire to try and look around. If I ever see a road I haven't been on, I'm going to go down that road and I'm going to try and get to know it.
Jerome: Yeah, incredible, amazing. So inspiring. Really, really resonates. Thank you so much.
David: Thank you very much, I really, really appreciate it, really do.
Listen to ‘Carving The Stone’ below.