Two decades ago, on the Irish indie scene, a young band called The Immediate were considered to be the hottest property in town. After a single album, one member, Conor O’Brien, went on to found the now-iconic Villagers. Meanwhile his friend and bandmate David Hedderman moved to Berlin to pursue an artistic career.
While Hedderman was both teaching and producing a vast array of beautiful artwork, however, he was also quietly working away on music in the background, gently grinding out an album entitled ‘Pulling At The Briars’ which is a far cry from his earlier incarnation. Personal, gentle and rootsy, the record took 15 years to pull together.
“When I left The Immediate I spent just one year in Dublin and then I moved to Berlin with my guitar always with me,” Hedderman says. “I would play as a kind of therapy, a positive way of connecting with music. I don’t really remember writing a lot of the songs, they came out as this cathartic thing. I’d always play them on my own, and then with different musicians. When it came to recording the album, I was able to pull it together.”
“I think whenever something’s gotten serious for me, I’ve liked to jump with something else. After 15 years of getting my visual art to a certain level, I didn’t feel like I could keep doing the same thing. I had a beautiful studio for years with open life drawing sessions four days a week. When the rent went up I let it go, and I didn’t really know what I was going to do. Eventually the album idea came up. I had about 15 songs, and I wanted to document them.”
“My music and my art don’t really cross over, but I did get an email about doing an exhibition and a gig at the same time, and that did appeal to me. Doing something in a different kind of way, to play and to exhibit work. I think I’m at the point with this album where I want it to grow organically. With art and with the music business, they’re difficult worlds. I’m always trying to do things without force, even though that can be quite impossible.”
“There are certain things you have to do,” he continues. “But there are quite a lot of musicians who are also artists. The way we live in the music and art business, and that I keep away from galleries and institutions… you just have to lose everything you’ve got and put yourself out there.”
“Conor [O’Brien] plays on and produces the record, so it does have some connections back to that time. Sometimes I think the less said about it the better, but one of my favourite songs is the instrumental song. I like it a lot because there’s not a lot to tell about it. I wrote it 13 years ago in my head, but I could never play it the way it sounded in my head. It was almost like a soundtrack. It kept getting morphed, cut and changed, with little bits added on and stuff.”
“We only had five days to record the album, which helped as I didn’t get too stuck in the process of it having to be perfect. I was rehearsing so much, and I played this one song in the kitchen for a friend and it was obvious it sounded so bad. Big credit to Peter Broderick in the studio, as he got the song completely even with all the weird time signatures and counter melodies.”
“It became this gorgeous thing. For that song alone – it’s called ‘In Your Own Way’ – it was all worth it. It’s just wide open, like a jazz thing, poetic. It doesn’t tell you what to feel, it’s more like an open door that invites you in and lets you go.”
