Junior Brother

Kerry-born musician Ronan Kealy has carved out a distinctive space in Irish music as Junior Brother, with his blend of traditional folk sensibilities and contemporary songwriting. Known for his intricate guitar work, haunting vocals, and songs that weave together mythology, landscape, and modern life. September 5th 2025, he released his third album, The End – Perhaps his most ambitious work yet; a chronological document of life during lockdown that maps a specific period from late 2020 to mid-2021. Written while moving between Dublin and his family home in Kerry, the album captures both the isolation and creative intensity of that unique time. This freedom from live performance constraints proved liberating: “Not worrying about writing for a live experience, just a hundred percent writing for the album. And because of that, I think it’s my best album.”

For this session, Junior Brother welcomed us into his space at The Complex in Dublin, where he performed his original song Take Guilt alongside covers of Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting and Richard and Linda Thompson’s The End of the Rainbow.

Finding the heart of Cloudbusting

“I took a bit of thinking,” Junior Brother explains about selecting the covers. “I suppose I was thinking of different covers and what to do and then I was drawn more towards the piano. That sound on Cloudbusting is so huge and open, and I thought it would suit the piano,” Kealy says. “The Hounds of Love is one of my favourite albums and so I thought it’d be good to have an opportunity to get inside that song.”

His approach to covering the Kate Bush classic wasn’t about making it his own, but about something more fundamental: “I suppose I wasn’t really even trying to make it my own that much. I was just trying to get to the heart of the song or what I view the heart of the song to be.” The arrangement proved deceptively challenging: “It definitely took a lot of practice to get it together. I don’t play the piano that often either, so it took lots and lots of practices to get the arrangement right.”

Junior Brother’s connection to Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love runs deeper than musical appreciation – it connects to Kealy’s relationship with the Kerry landscape that has shaped his artistic vision. “I bought it on CD from HMV in Cork, and I just fell in love with it immediately,” he recalls. “I associated the sound and the world of that album so deeply with the landscape where I’m from. It’s the most effective album I’ve heard that is somebody explaining to you, their dream.”

This connection between music and landscape isn’t coincidental. Ronan Kealy later learned that Bush had built her studio in the English countryside: “I remember hearing later on that she bought a house, built the studio, and every day she just would wake up to this incredible views and landscape of the countryside. And that makes so much sense. You can you can hear it so, so intensely in the sound of the album.”

“It’s just so incredibly depressive that it’s also quite uplifting, I think.”

Junior Brother’s choice to cover Richard and Linda Thompson’s The End of the Rainbow reflects his appreciation for songwriting that transcends its era. “Richard Thompson is one of the best songwriters ever. He’s just incredible. And you can also tell that he’s soaked in folk music. He’s soaked in such old styles of music and it all just leads into his writing style to the point where a song like The End of the Rainbow could have been written in any century, probably in the last five or six hundred years. So it has that timeless quality to it as well.”

But it’s the song’s emotional depth that really draws him in: “It plumbs such dark, dark depths that the first time I heard it I didn’t even really spot just how dark the song is. And I think that’s because it has that timeless quality. When you look at the lyrics, it’s the most depressing thing that I’ve ever read. But you put it to music then and it just sounds classic and timeless. The End of the Rainbow has that for me. It’s one of the best songs ever written. It’s a perfect song and it’s just so incredibly depressive that it’s also quite uplifting, I think.”

A direct response to our times

Junior Brother’s original song Take Guilt, which represents a departure from his typically more abstract lyrical approach. The song emerged from a specific moment of moral reckoning triggered by hearing Minor Threat’s Guilty of Being White. “I listened to it and it turned my stomach, to be honest. Really, really horrible take,” Junior Brother explains. When he discovered that Ian MacKaye still stood by the song’s message years later, it prompted a creative response: “So I sat down and kind of wrote this as a direct response to that. So take guilt instead of saying, oh, I’m being made to feel guilty about this. I’m like, oh, yeah, but take that guilt and just swallow it and then that might do something to you that might help you maybe get a bit of a perspective on what the actual, you know, other side thinks you know and then might get you closer to that other side.”

The song also grapples with the overwhelming nature of modern information consumption: “There was protests going on that had gotten to a point where people were actually self-immolating themselves. You could just watch on your phone. How are you supposed to then swipe up and see a video of a cat? Swipe up and see a comedy sketch and then swipe again and see something else horrific.”

This digital overwhelm became central to the song’s message: “It’s so easy for us to read or see something like that, and then just discard it. To feel such strong emotions and then be able to just forget about it, you know? And it’s about that privilege too.”

The writing process was unusually fluid for Junior Brother: “This flowed very easily while I was writing it, which doesn’t often happen. I often keep sculpting until I have something that’s probably a lot different from what I started out. But Take Guilt kind of just flowed very, very simply.”

He had Irish singer Christy Moore’s voice in mind while writing, which led to an unexpected connection: “Through a series of strange events Christy ended up ringing me on my phone telling me he liked the song. A strange bit of serendipity.”

Photos

Keep watching

Thank you for watching and enjoying this session. You’ll probably like some other sessions from The Influences’ archive too, like these earlier ones we filmed with Irish musicians.

2025 acoustic guitar tambourine acoustic session alternative Irish folk chronological album contemporary folk coronavirus lockdown music County Kerry artist direct songwriting Dublin folk scene Dublin recording folk ballad tradition folk covers folk music session guilt and privilege imagined landscape intimate performance Irish cultural identity Irish folk music Irish music scene Irish mythology music Irish roots music Irish singer songwriter Irish traditional music Junior Brother Kate Bush Cloudbusting cover Kate Bush Hounds of Love Kerry County Council Kerry musician landscape and music live acoustic music lockdown album Minor Threat response modern Irish folk Palestine protests music pandemic creativity piano covers real landscape Richard Linda Thompson Richard Thompson End of the Rainbow rural Ireland music Take Guilt The Complex Dublin The End album The Influences session timeless songwriting