David Keenan is your quintessential live performer, so naturally lockdown has been hard on the Louth man, a character who mixes poetry and music in a style somewhat reminiscent of classic troubadours like Bob Dylan, focusing his tracks heavily on building an intense live show.

Like many of us, then, Keenan has spent part of lockdown reminiscing about what used to be. Specifically, he’s been looking back at his live efforts, and tying together years worth of tour films – clips dating back to when he started out promoting his work by sticking posters on city walls – with footage from his Olympia Theatre date earlier this year.

“The inability to express yourself live, and just to have contact with each other, it’s been hard,” Keenan tells me when I ask about how he’s spent his time in recent months. 

“What I’ve made in the film is condensed from three years, from Rob Benson, including open mic lights at the start though to the Olympia Theatre. It’s about the positive impact that music brings to a life, and the musical community in Ireland.”

“It’s also about finding a tribe, self acceptance and realising a dream, which is what the Olympia show was for me. It was finding a band, kicking up some dust around Dublin, and the collective encouragement of my tribe, and facing fear face on.”

“I was on tour in March. All summer was obviously cancelled, but the film bookends the story of this chapter of my life. The passing of Gar Kane, by bandmate, features heavily in the film, and I’m still reeling from that. I think it will help to keep my spirit of live music alive, and the story shows the collective graft from everyone involved. There was no big management company or label or anything, it was just word of mouth. People helped me a lot along the way.”

Perhaps the strangest thing about David Keenan’s wild developmental story – still unfolding slowly after years of slow-building to the heights of an Olympia Theatre headline slow – is how long it’s taken the Dundalk man to release an album.

Keenan is an intense character, his words flowing with the considered, poetic bent of someone who’s spent a lot of time thinking about what the world means, and his own place in it.

Talking to him about his music is a strange experience, uncomfortably intimate at times, having a top-class songwriter look you in the eye and talk off the cuff in a way that isn’t all that dissimilar to the way he delivers his lyrics. The album ‘A Beginner’s Guide To Bravery’ is now just around the corner, being due just after Christmas, and is very much a long-term project.

“It’s a consequence of living,” Keenan says of his record. “It’s a kind of bookmarking of a certain period. There are songs on the record from four years ago, and others I wrote this year. They’re a byproduct of my own individuality, so in a way they’ve been developing since I was a child.”

“A collection of things have aligned. I’ve been releasing EPs for a couple of years, with the intention of getting a body of songs that tell a story. It’s always been about telling that story, not just a collection of strangers on a record. There’s a lineage between each song, but they have to have their own personality, too. It’s the story of my evolution, moving to Dublin, finding a stride, the emotional journeys.”

“It’s also been about getting the right band, and recordings that I was happy with. That was a lot about getting people I trusted into the band. I did it live, and that was important to me. Life isn’t click tracked.”