A few years ago, driving from his home in Galway to his brother-in-law’s wedding in Wicklow, the American songwriter Peter Broderick was overcome by thoughts of death. He was in his mid-30s, the age at which his grandfather had a heart attack from which he never fully recovered. At the wedding, Broderick found an empty room and, working quickly, wrote the bones of his song What Happened to Your Heart.
The sadness out of his system, he returned to the party – and half an hour later was dad-dancing for all he was worth. But What Happened to Your Heart became the eerie centrepoint of Broderick’s 2020 album, Blackberry.
Broderick will be heading east from Galway again this weekend to participate in an evening of music and art at the National Concert Hall, in Dublin, curated by the London-based record label Erased Tapes, with which he has worked for almost 15 years. He has never entirely fitted in as an artist, which makes him the perfect ambassador for Erased Tapes, an eclectic stable championing sounds as diverse as jazz, techno and heartfelt acoustic pop.
The performance at the NCH will crown a productive several months for Broderick. In his career, he has bounced from confessional songs such as What Happened to Your Heart to the more abstract ambient music that is the dominant influence on his most recent album, Burren, a collaboration with the contemporary classical composer Trevor Oswalt, aka East Forest, that they recorded in the Mordor-like expanses of north Co Clare.
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“We rented a place in the Burren. There is a house they offer to artists at a discounted rate. We were taken aback by the surroundings. By the end of the week we were trying to be vessels for this beautiful landscape, if it wanted to speak. And now we’ve got the album.”
Broderick grew up in a small town in Oregon (not far from Oswalt, as it happens). He moved to Ireland after meeting his future wife, the Galway singer-songwriter Brigid Mae Power, when she was booked as his support at a concert in Cork. They continue to live together in rural Galway, halfway between the city and Spiddal, though they are no longer a couple. It’s all good, he says.
“We are married, but we are officially separated. But we still cohabit. It’s one of these modern-day, make-it-work scenarios. Luckily, it’s all amicable enough. We’re still very close and working together on a lot of different levels.”
In Galway he has cultivated one of his big passions outside music: foraging for food. “It started with learning that things that grow around us everywhere, such as dandelions or nettles, are highly nutritious plants with a lot of health benefits. I’m not a doctor. I can’t make any claims in that department. But I do know that I feel better when I engage with and imbibe these things. That’s become a very big part of my life. Last week I was out camping with this friend of mine. We were eating the stuff that grows wild.”
He enjoys the adventure. And, as a creative person, he says, it’s invaluable to leave the house now and then. “It’s good to get outside if you are sitting at a computer answering emails all day. As musicians we like to pretend we play music all the time. Oftentimes we’re sitting there answering emails. Or putting stuff on social media, which is a big part of our work nowadays. If you offset that with spending time outdoors, it balances it out a lot. After a while it starts to seep into the music.”
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Working with Erased Tapes has been an honour, he says. He is looking forward to coming to the NCH and participating in a celebration of a label that has always done things in a distinctive way, whether that be collaborating with the techno duo Kiasmos, the electronic drone artist Rival Consoles or the “chamber jazz” of Penguin Cafe.
“The man who runs it, Robert [Raths], I see him as a total visionary. I don’t necessarily understand the vision all the time, but he’s definitely got one. And the longer I’ve known him, the more I’ve started to respect the thing that he’s curating,” Broderick says. “The night in Dublin is going to be an eclectic evening. I’m really excited for it.”
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“I used to work on a music show in Germany as a set designer. That was my first contact with the music industry. Do you know the band Scooter? They were huge in Germany in the 1990s. I was aware of their music. I wouldn’t say I was a fan. As soon as I knew what techno was about they were kind of embarrassing. But when I met them in person they were so nice. We had a nice conversation, and you realise you have a lot in common, even though musically it was a very different thing.
“And then, the other way around, you meet your idols and it’s sometimes very dangerous. You realise, ‘Oh s**t, they are bloody awkward and mean sometimes.’ You never get to meet them properly: they are often shielded and manoeuvred through life in a way that is not very humane or real. After a while I started feeling quite sorry for them. A lot of them have drug problems. A lot of them didn’t enjoy what they were doing, which is sad.
“Later, when I started Erased Tapes, there was no active plan, let alone any idea of working in the music industry. To put it quite bluntly, we live in a time when maybe the arts, in general, are criminally undervalued. At the same time there are these bizarre things that can happen in terms of pop culture. You can reach a lot of people by accident. If anything it has got more extreme. Maybe that wasn’t possible in the 1980s and 1990s when I grew up listening to music – it was always prefiltered by radio DJs and record labels that have the budgets. Erased Tapes is the opposite. We came from very much a DIY background, because there is no other way. It also seemed silly to try and compete with what had been done in the past.
“We had to reinvent our own tools, so to speak. When I was in my teenage years you had to rent a professional recording studio. It cost a lot of money. Not many people around me had that kind of cash. A lot of bands were in the same ballpark. They maybe had a moment when they played some shows and people were into what they were doing. It seemed so far away to be able to capture that on record, let alone get it into the right hands and have it played on John Peel on the BBC. That seemed so crazily impossible. That kind of mindset I don’t want to forget. I want us to remember how special it is to release music.”
Perspectives: Erased Tapes, with Peter Broderick, Penguin Cafe, Rival Consoles, Anne Müller and a DJ set by Kiasmos, is at the National Concert Hall, Dublin 2, on Saturday, May 20th
