
Brothers Harry and Alfie Hudson-Taylor are, musically at least, very much a product of the Dublin streets. Long-time buskers, they’ve evolved over a decade into a traveling folk-pop juggernaut, a slow-forged success that has pushed from the corner of Grafton Street to American tours and European adventures. They’re now feeding that travel experience back into their work.
New album ‘Loving Everywhere I Go’ is very much a nod to the highs of it all. “Just being in New York, doing support slots for Hozier, and the EPs being recorded in Seattle, the hub of grunge, gave us a mixture of genres and influences that are not necessarily conscious, but you allow them all to feed in” Alfie Hudson-Taylor tells us.
“The songwriting is very influenced by our travels. We started working on this album back in 2017 in Seattle, and it would have been out a while ago, apart from the Hozier tour happening, so we did an EP instead, and toured that. For the album, the producer really challenged us to try new things.”
“There are little bits of pop and hip-hop that give it a modern edge. It’s not brash, but they’ve been captured in a way that we really like. Some people think we’re real folky and acoustic, others think it’s really pop. It seems to depend on what they normally listen to. So we’re in a weird spot but that makes it very fun to work on the sections of our songs. We sit in this kind of ‘live band’ type space.”
Those times back on Grafton Street feed in too, sometimes literally, like in the lyrics to their homecoming Christmas song ‘How I Know It’s Christmas’, a nod to returning to Dublin after time away. They even played it back on Grafton Street this Christmas.
“The common thread for us has been that people like how we sound live,” Harry explains. “I don’t think the records have always been as good as we sound live. With this new album in particular, I think it does it justice. If anything, we might struggle to replicate some of the recordings on stage. We tried to sound like the best take of 4 rather than 14 this time, a bit more organic than we’d done before in the studio, and that seemed to work for us.”
The result is happy-go-lucky at times, and thoughtful at others; lyrically smart and almost carefree in its harmonies.
“We’re collecting our thoughts now, really,” the brothers joked ahead of the release. “The tunes are anything from seven years old to one year old, and there’s loads for us to talk about. It’s really nice to finally get to speaking about all of this, but we can only really talk about it so much, after that it has to be about the music.”
“The best thing that’s happened to us has been living in two different cities, surprisingly. We used to put off working. Now we’re based half in Dublin and half in Brighton, we have to make the most of our time, and that really works for us. We can’t put things off.”
“I don’t know how Harry feels,” Alfie says, “but now I feel like our last album is nasty. I’ll probably never listen to it again. Obviously you listen to it so many times in the mix and stuff like that, but it’s great to have this out to push instead. We really pushed ourselves to be a bit different songwriting wise, and we’re proud of that.”