What happens when you’ve been in a band, and know you’re really good at what you do – you tour Ireland and Europe, releasing albums that win not just awards but, yes, people’s hearts – yet the world at large isn’t interested?
Like a plane in a storm, you circle, waiting for the all-clear from air-traffic control, except it doesn’t happen, so you fly off into the atmosphere and eventually arrive somewhere else at a different time and in a different part of your life.
As the former members of, respectively, the Irish bands Delorentos and Republic of Loose, both of which have gone to the musical equivalent of the boneyard, Kieran McGuinness and Emily Aylmer must be familiar with the feeling of being respected and applauded without any noticeable financial return.
Time passes, of course, and marriage, kids and jobs come along, but as Aylmer became a secondary-school teacher and McGuinness a music-development officer with Music Generation (as well as presenting an award-winning music show, Guestlist, on Radio Nova), an irritating itch under their creative skin needed to be scratched. A Kind of Dreaming is the balm, and how comforting it is – at least superficially.
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We had sex maybe once a month. The constant rejection was soul-crushing, it felt like my ex didn’t even like me
Dig under the surface of the sublime acoustic pop-folk that eases way into your head, however, and you detect traces of what could be construed as very serious pillow talk that isn’t, we can only presume, necessarily autobiographical.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m not enough,” McGuinness sings in Trying, “like, someday I’ll wake up and you’ve packed up all my stuff. Some days are rough…” Aylmer takes her turn in Tonight, They’ll Find Me Lost (“So lost I’m down in myself, so lost I need some help from you, not from anyone else”).
Other songs are less anxiety-inducing. Sunlight is gorgeously soft-focused (“when I’m sleeping underneath the sky, I realise you’re my day and night”); Aurora is the embodiment of delicate romantic optimism (“Are you still mine? Do you think about me sometimes?”); Flickers of You is a testament of faith (“All we are are reflections in both our dreams”), while Nothing as Hard as Love is as self-explanatory as the title implies.
It’s a tough gig, being parents to three young children and trying again (without unrealistic expectations) for some sort of profile, but you have to say that Driven Snow seem to be going about it the right way.
“If and when we release songs,” Aylmer told The Irish Times in the summer of 2022, “people will either take notice or they won’t.” Our advice? Pay attention.
