Michael J. Sheehy - Distance Is the Soul of Beauty (2020)

This is a press release for my first album in over a decade. It differs from previous efforts, in that the songs aren’t shot through with the usual depression and depravity my listeners have come to expect. Below are some ramblings on the songs and the circumstances in which it was made.

It’s a small part of a larger collection of songs that I’ve been working on over the past two to three years. When I quit drinking, almost nine years ago, I was working in a pub and had all but given up on solo writing. It had been a while since I’d written and it would be a while longer. I was two years into sobriety before, gradually, songs began to trickle, first through my work with Miraculous Mule then through my collaboration/reunion with my former Dream City Film Club band mate Alex Vald as United Sounds of Joy. A little over three years ago my wife became pregnant and the prospect of fatherhood seemed to spark something within me. The songs on this album and many more besides were written then or within the first year of my daughter’s life. They are not about fatherhood or my daughter (thankfully, perhaps) but they are informed by everything I was feeling.

I have been working on a much more complex and altogether grander record over the past couple of years, snatching time outside of my main gig as stay-at-home-dad; to write, record and mix during evenings and weekends. That particular piece was starting to become a bit of a monolith in my mind. I kept fucking with it, striving for some kind of perfection, dumping songs, reworking others. The fact that I hadn’t released a solo album in over a decade was scratching away at the back of my mind. Then COVID-19 happened.

The Great Pause gave me the impetus to try something different. It felt like all bets were off, so I decided to shelve the record I’d been agonising over and do something simple, stripped back and direct. These songs were languishing as half-finished demos on my laptop. I set about completing them about 6 weeks into lockdown. The idea was to make something quickly, let it go, move on to the next thing. I try to think of each album as nothing more than a stepping-stone to the next. When I’ve allowed myself to think of them as something more, they become bloated, self-important monsters, which I shelve or make the mistake of releasing and investing with far too much hope.

The songs are for the listener to project onto and get lost in. They are late night recordings. I’ve chosen songs that feel intimate and mostly gentle. But, being me, I’ve inserted the occasional shock to shake the listener out of any state of reverie the songs may inspire. Some of them are influenced by the writings of Julian of Norwich and Simone Weil. The title comes from Weil’s writing on God. Like much of Weil’s work, I look at the phrase “Distance is the soul of beauty” and I don’t quite get it. Sometimes, I think I fully grasp its meaning but then it slips through my fingers. I’m not religious. If I subscribe to anything it’s probably some kind of mystical atheism: God can only exist if we dream her into existence, it’s a projection that can only be as beautiful or ugly as we are. What I get from the writing of people like Weil and perhaps Alan Watts is this sense that the void between us and the ineffable is about as close as we’re ever going to get to “It”. So, dive in! Maybe that’s what “Distance is the soul of beauty” means, but then again...