As an extraordinary filmmaker, Myles O’Reilly documented a special era in emerging Irish music, mostly from 2009 – 2020. He calls it ‘an epic journey filled with enormous creativity and passion’. Since then, he’s returned to music and gradually embarked on a journey of writing and performing his own compositions. Resulting in many solo albums (nine in the last four years, a tenth set for release in September!) and two collaborative albums with Rónán Ó Snodaigh – the latest, The Beautiful Road, an absolute masterpiece.
During Kilkenny Arts Festival in August 2023, I met up with Myles O’Reilly before his performance with Manchán Magan at the Watergate Theatre and pointed the cameras towards him for once, while he played Shine and covers of Lau’s Ghosts and Low’s Point Of Disgust.
A million unforeseen circumstances
Following from a little distance, the joy of creating radiates from Myles O’Reily, whether it’s his film making, his solo music, or the music with Rónán Ó Snodaigh. “I was very bad in school. I was terrible at learning things; I had no enthusiasm for subjects. It’s not that I just didn’t like the subjects; it’s that I just couldn’t. I have a learning disability—ADHD. Attention deficit hyperactivity. I would like to call it hyper creativity disorder. But where I did excel, of course, was in creative things. When I did drawings, when I painted, in music class and music school, and all the way up through my school years, I only really excelled and showed passion and drive for the creative things.”
“That meant using the right side of my brain and not really using the left—the calculus side of my brain. It doesn’t function very well, and it hasn’t functioned very well. Thankfully, my mother loved me so much and encouraged me so much that I never thought there was something wrong with me. I failed my school, I failed my Leaving Cert, I failed my college, everything until I just quit it all and started playing music.”
“Creating is all I can do, and it makes me happy”, Myles O’Reilly knows: “It’s effortless for me to do creative things. It’s very fulfilling for me; sometimes I can do them very quickly. It’s great that more people notice my work now, and I’m rewarded financially more for my work, and everything’s going well. I just stuck to my guns. But look, I literally couldn’t do anything else.”
Shapes and sounds
“Rónán is the exact same. He might have a different version; everyone has slightly different aspects of neuro divergence. But Rónán’s very similar to mine. We think in shapes and sounds, and even when we talk to each other and when we talk to others, it might sound more poetic. The order in which we say things is normally quite skewed compared to neuro typical answers. We give kind of poetic answers to things. But thankfully, we understand each other, and that’s one of the reasons why he has inspired me so much; He’s just so able to be a master of his craft. We inspire each other to really embrace the way we think about creating and what that does to us, what that is to our hearts and our minds.”
“It was a late night in the smoking area of Whelan’s, and I was having a conversation with my friend and musician Branwen Kavangh. It was at the height of my film making era. She was so kind taking the opportunity to remind me that I had a singing voice and that I should use it. ‘Just learn one song, one song that’s new, that excites you. It’ll do you the world of good.’ Some people often inquired about my musical ambitions, and Branwen was one of those precious few. I appreciated that she wouldn’t let it go, even though I had completely let go of the idea of singing again.”
“Her words stayed in my mind for years, and I often thought that if I were to learn a song, it should be Ghosts by Lau—I just adore Kris Drever’s melody. Then, as it happens, a million unforeseen circumstances led to me playing music again, and so in tribute to Branwen, Ghosts became the first new song I have learned since my return to music.”
‘Point of Disgust symbolizes our relationship.’
Myles O’Reilly played music from when he was a teenager up until his mid-30s. “In my twenties I had a different reason for singing as I do now. Back then, the intention was much different. I mean, I was looking for true love, I was looking for a partner, I was singing a lot of love songs, and I was singing a lot of different stuff. When I found my wife, and I found my true love, that intention went away – and singing suddenly wasn’t something that I would utilize as often. I just came back to it because I found a different intention.”
His mother always loved his singing, Myles O’Reilly remembers: “She encouraged it so much, and that’s really why I did it all the way through my childhood and all the way through my twenties. When the film making took over, my mother wasn’t as keen; I really felt that she wanted me so much to shine in a more forward way, to be in front of the camera, and to kind of inspire in the way that I inspired her.”