'A difficult but really beautiful time': Ólafur Arnalds on his album with late Cork musician Talos

Irish Examiner

6 days ago

It was a match made in heaven. Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds and Cork musician Eoin French, aka Talos, had been talking about doing something together for months. Their respective managements had been trying to get them in the same room together too.
The latter had been a fan of Arnalds for years and was in Iceland to run in the Reykjavik marathon in August 2023. Arnalds invited him to his house. It was like meeting an old friend. The following month, Arnalds was in French's home town of Cork for the third edition of Sounds from a Safe Harbour, the brainchild of Fermoy woman Mary Hickson.
Events took place in various venues around the city, but artists collaborated with each other as part of a residency at the River Lee Hotel the week beforehand. Hickson 'gently suggested' Arnalds and French work together.
'In other words, she forced us in a room and closed the door because she just knew better,' says Arnalds, chuckling at the memory over Zoom from his studio in Iceland. 'She just knew this is going to work out good.'
As their managements, Hickson, and the artists themselves had predicted, it instantly clicked. Bríd O'Donovan, a photographer who documented the residencies, recalls how well they got on: 'They seemed totally locked in every time I was in that room, but at the same time there was a real gentleness and lightness between them.'
Olafur Arnalds on the piano at the River Lee hotel in Cork at the Sounds From A Safe Harbour Festival in 2023. Eoin French is sitting on the ground to the left of the piano. Picture: Bríd O'Donovan
In an hour, they had written a track called Signs. Within three days, they had three songs. The following Saturday, they were herded by Hickson downstairs to the lobby of the hotel where, alongside Ye Vagabonds, Niamh Regan, and others, with Dermot Kennedy among a rapt audience watching on, they performed a song called We Didn't Know We Were Ready, that was created during the residency. It was an apt track, ostensibly about nerves and the feeling of performing on stage.
Recorded by videographers Peadar Ó Goill and Steve O'Connor and posted to Talos' Instagram page in May 2024, it took on a different meaning following the passing of French the following August. Arnalds says he does not try to control what meaning a song has for people, but agrees that it means something else to him now.
'I've seen this song go through several different iterations of what it possibly means to both myself and everyone around us, from before to the time he was ill, to performing it at his funeral, to performing it on Irish television, a few months later. Those words, 'we didn't know we were ready', just every time you say it, you feel different.'
French was back in Iceland when he first fell ill in November 2023. After some time in hospital, Arnalds and his wife provided shelter for French to recover before he was able to return home to Ireland. 'Let's call me the token local friend,' he jokes.
French didn't have much energy, but was able to fill his creative cup in the space, reading and listening to music, from Nina Simone records to punk music to simply listening to Arnalds play piano for him. They also listened to the demos they had made, which formed what would become A Dawning, one of three posthumous releases by Talos.
The first, an EP called Sun Divider that was made with Icelandic musician Atli Orvarsson, came out last December. Arnalds says: 'There was this really difficult but really beautiful time we had. He was starting to feel a little better, a little more like himself, and even though we couldn't make music practically at the time, I feel like that time saved this record the most. It's what made this really become a record.'
Once French was well enough, he returned to his home near Clonakilty in West Cork. It was not long before Arnalds was paying him a visit. Less than a week after attending the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, he was accompanying Niamh Regan on piano during her gig at Levis' of Ballydehob. French was his tour guide in West Cork. He took Arnalds for fish and chips, showed him a stone circle, and brought him to his favourite sea swimming spot.
The cover of A Dawning, the album by Talos and Ólafur Arnalds.
'I really fell in love with that place. Me and my wife even talked about it, like maybe we should just move here, just get a house down here. We were seriously talking about it for a while there. I still feel that way too. A lot of the album was created at this time, after he's back in Cork. We wrote songs like Bedrock and A Dawning, these songs that are more directly related to what was happening we wrote during that time.'
Arnalds was soon back on the road, touring the world with his band Kiasmos on the release of their second album II in July. French fell ill again that summer and passed away on August 11. Arnalds had made time in his schedule to spend time with him in his final days at Marymount Hospice and also played piano at his funeral, held in Connolly's of Leap on Monday, August 12.
'He very much wanted to work on the music until the very, very end, and we did to the point where I asked him to stop, which was strange,' says Arnalds, explaining that 'sometimes it feels like you're creating the most important work of your life, because it has to speak for a whole life.'
The next time Arnalds returned to Ireland, following the funeral, was for a performance of We Didn't Know We Were Ready on the Tommy Tiernan Show, broadcast in the first week of January. 'It was the first time that particular group of people had come together since the lobby of the River Lee hotel,' he explains.
They had rehearsed in Windmill Lane studios in the morning before heading to the RTÉ studios. That time 'became more important than we thought'; people were at different stages of their grief, and it allowed them to process everything together.
Ólafur Arnalds and Eoin French (Talos) working together in Cork during Sounds from a Safe Harbour 2023. Picture: Bríd O'Donovan
All the while, since French's death, since the Tommy Tiernan Show, Arnalds has been working on the eight-track album A Dawning. He says working on the posthumous release has been 'all of it' - tough, wild, funny, surreal, sad - but ultimately he is grateful as it helped him process his own grief.
'It's been one of the greatest fortunes in this whole situation for me personally. It actually feels really good to work on this with him still. I still have a chance to have a project with him, And I can place my grief into something tangible.'
Talking a few weeks ahead of the release, he says he doesn't know how he'd feel once it's actually out and he'd have to stop working on it. 'I don't think I've said goodbye fully yet, because every day I still have to ask him a question.'
Arnalds says the album reaffirmed things for him. He already knew about the power of music, how it can move us, but making A Dawning felt like music as service to a community.
'As someone who works as a musician, who has a career in music, it's really easy to get lost in things that actually don't matter so much. The next big job, or the next big single, or whatever you measure as success, whether that's how many people listen to your music or just what kind of music you make, it so often revolves around the ego - and fair enough. But the thing is, when this all happened, all of those things disappeared for me and this album became the only thing that mattered. And I'm so glad it did, because it showed me and reminded me of the reason for why I make music in the first place.'
A Dawning is out now via Opia Community/Mercury KX.
is out now via Opia Community/Mercury KX. Ólafur Arnalds will take part in the Remembering Talos concert, at Cork Opera House, on Thursday, September 11, as part of the Sounds From A Safe Harbour festival. See soundsfromasafeharbour.com