Kevin Fowley 'À Feu Doux' launch @ The Cobblestone

Kevin Fowley marks the release of his new record with a launch gig at The Cobblestone, Dublin.

Very special guests to be announced.

Fowley's second record, À Feu Doux, is a collection of French lullabies and traditional folk songs dating as far back as the 14th century.

Available for pre-order now from Basin Rock:

https://www.basinrock.co.uk/records/kevin-fowly-a-feu-doux/

https://kevinfowley.bandcamp.com/album/feu-doux

Recorded and produced by Kevin Fowley and Ross Chaney, the record features Chaney (R.F. Chaney, John Francis Flynn, Subplots) on synths, samplers, and modular processing, and Caimin Gilmore (Lisa Hannigan, Ye Vagabonds, John Francis Flynn) on double bass.

Mixed by Brendan Jenkinson (Villagers, Aoife Nessa Francis) and mastered by Grammy award-winning engineer Ben Rawlins.

Growing up, Kevin Fowley split his time between living in France and Ireland. He listened to French lullabies sung by his mother in one room, while his father would be playing Donegal tunes on the fiddle in another. “I’m lucky to have been brought up bilingual and bicultural,” he says. “What I find interesting is that I usually think in English, but if I intentionally start thinking in French, a markedly different side of my personality comes through, encouraging different thought patterns.” 

And this is apparent on his beautiful record of French lullabies À Feu Doux, which encompasses musical elements from both worlds, as it seamlessly glides across folk, jazz, and a rich yet shimmering in between sound that feels reflective of a man who has soaked up such a rich yet varied collection of musical influences since day one.  

The four lullabies recorded here were sung to Fowley and his siblings when they were children. His mother and grandmother would sing them to him as they were passed down yet another generation to him. Then a few years ago Fowley’s grandparents made a book for his nieces, a collection of 122 French songs and nursery rhymes. Soon enough Fowley found himself reconnecting with those songs that soundtracked his childhood and began shaping them into the foundations of À Feu Doux. 

The result is a genuinely unique listen and one that embodies Fowley’s distinct upbringing and musical makeup. The social and cultural sensibilities that Fowley was exposed to from a young age were highly pronounced by schooling in both France and Ireland. “French school was definitely distinct from the catholic all boys itchy uniform grey nineties Dublin experience,” he says. “France was long days, knees out, canteens, cursive writing, no Jesus.”

However, while he's keen to point out that he’s “not a proper folkie”, Fowley did absorb the rich Irish musical culture that he was surrounded by. As a child he recalls evenings in pubs eating crisps while his father played sessions. He even had a go at the fiddle himself for a while, as well as the tin whistle, but they didn’t stick. Instead, Fowley gravitated towards the guitar and fell under the spell of folk and blues players, such as Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James and Davey Graham. “There’s a real emotional honesty in that unvarnished, exposed sort of style,” he says. 

Unvarnished and exposed is a feeling that floats through À Feu Doux like a gentle gust of wind creeping in through the open window at night. The music is deeply intimate and tender, with Fowley’s delicate yet resonant voice feeling like a loving whisper in the ear. If this feels like being in the room with someone as they play quietly in the corner, it’s largely because it was structured that way: most of what you hear on the record was performed in an attic in Dublin. “Having the time and the space to record at home helped capture the atmosphere I was looking for,” Fowley says. “I wanted to keep in the room noise, the chair and floorboard creaks. It gives a sense of time and place. “Real night time music” is what Caimin called it. That sounds about right.” 

Caimin Gilmore plays double bass on À Feu Doux, which was co-produced with Ross Chaney and mixed by Brendan Jenkinson (who has produced albums by the likes of John Francis Flynn and Aoife Nessa Frances). When they got together, the aim was to tap into, and unearth, the deeply embedded lullabies from Fowley’s childhood, retaining the core melodies, but then reharmonising them and changing the pace and flow of the songs.   

From the opening ‘Ne Pleure Pas Jeannette’, about a young woman who wants to marry a man who is imprisoned and faces being hanged, it sets the tone for the release that contains all the dreamy, late night hypnotic associations with lullaby music. Yet it also feels like the kind of music that could come pouring out of a smokey back room jazz bar late at night. Factor in that soul and gospel are also a huge influence on Fowley and what you have here is a singular record that exists in a liminal space akin to existing in a dream world.  

One of the other many dualities that exists on À Feu Doux is that despite the elegant and poignant nature of the very pretty music, the lullabies themselves possess dark themes and subject matter: hanged lovers, being rebuffed because you’re considered sexually impure, and a general air of unrequited love throughout. It’s a very adult record for something so rooted in childhood songs. “You can imagine in the 15th and 16th centuries when the songs were written that parents would sing them to frighten their children into obedience,” says Fowley.   

The final track ‘Aux Marches Du Palais’,  closes it all out with a subtle yet stirring vocal and tender guitar (Fowley often just plays with his thumb for a softer, rounder tone) it ends with a tale of a woman and a cobbler who fall in love. They make plans to sleep in a square bed so big that a river runs through it and all the king's horses drink from the river and there’s  flowers at every corner of the bed. It’s here that they'll sleep together until the end of the world. It feels like a fitting ending to a record that in many ways began its journey rooted in Fowley’s own memories of sleep, with the hushed melodies of a loved one soothing him night after night as a child. 

Host or Publisher Kevin Fowley