Last week, I caught up with the incredibly talented Cathal Fitz for coffee and a chat, after he’d spent some time in playing and going to gigs in Scotland, and ahead of his performance at the Hug and Pint on the 18th of September. We talked about his influences as a musician, his life as a parent and so much more. Read what he has to say below.
How’re you feeling about your shows in Glasgow so far?
I’ve had the best time, genuinely. It feels exactly like home, you know? We went into an Irish bar yesterday, just to go have a look, and the way the singers were playing, the way the crowd was, it felt exactly like home. There’s a great buzz around the city, and it feels very, very much like Ireland, which I love because I find it hard being away from home for too long. So for me to be here for five days and still feel so connected to my roots and my home, I feel really, really happy, and I just love playing here. We came back from Belladrum, and I never say no to playing anywhere. So we just put out all the feelers, play anywhere once, need to come and play for a little while before I head back. We’ve done it. I just really, really enjoyed it. It’s been really special.
That’s so nice to hear. I also listened to Paper Planes, and was wondering who would you say are your influences when it comes to songwriting?
There’s so many different ones. When I think about songwriting in general, for me it’s not just music. It’s like… my first inspiration was my dad. We used to have a holiday home in West Cork, which is my favorite place on the whole planet. And we used to have loads of these different tapes on in the car, and it was a long journey, so we’d constantly have music on. So Tom Waits, Johnny Cash, Glen Hansard, Damien Rice, Cat Stevens, Neil Young. I grew up listening to these amazing songwriters that he’d constantly have on repeat. He’d be very much like myself, once he finds a particular album or an artist that he likes, he’ll play it to death. So I got to really analyze each lyric and each song in its entirety. And this was long before I ever wanted to be a musician. It was just what he did. Poetry has always been my thing.
One of my biggest inspirations was my English teacher in school because it could be 9 o’clock on a Monday morning, and his eyes would be tearing up with passion, because he’s quoting Shakespeare or quoting poetry. He really made me fall in love with the idea of connecting what you feel to words, and then… recently, there’s people my age – and sometimes when you’re younger and you’re looking at artists like Tom Waits, you always think “I could never do this”, because, you know, they’re way older than me, or they’re way more established. But there’s people my age now playing stadiums and arenas, which is crazy to think about as we get older. That we’re at that age where people can do these things. So Zach Bryan and all these amazing artists are playing, and they’re showing me that anyone can live a dream.
When I listened to you, the first person that came to mind was Damien Rice.
Damien Rice, no way. Damien Rice is my favorite songwriter of all. There’s one particular album. It’s called O by Damien Rice, and the first song is a song called Delicate. That album was recorded pretty much live in his bedroom. It’s a small little box room, and you can hear the creaking of the floorboards. There’s no reverb. It’s really raw.
I started working with an artist called Ryan Sheridan, who’s a phenomenal songwriter from Ireland. And our first conversation was, he asked me “what do I want to sound like?”. And I had said that there’s a song by Damien Rice called “Delicate”, and if I could match the feeling and the just overall musical category of that song, that I’d have accomplished something.
And the two of us got quite emotional on the phone call because that’s the song he uses as an example for artists of what they should aspire to be is that song, “Delicate” by Damien Rice, because it starts off slow, really quiet… you really have to listen, and it pulls you in, and the whole album in entirety is just a masterpiece. So that’s a really really nice observation. So thank you. That makes me really happy.
You’ve been performing in Ireland as well as Glasgow. Do you think that there are any differences between the two places, or anything they could learn from each other?
So, I think in Cork there is what I would have loved to have had here last night, and we tried to find it, and it just didn’t work. So in Cork, right? There’s particular bars that are almost like – even on a Saturday – are open sessions. They might be small, dingy pubs in the middle of the city somewhere that you just walk into. We call them the musicians’ bars, right? Where musicians will just gather around, it might be their night off, and they’ll go into a pub and they’ll just start playing, and it’ll almost go around like a round table where just the person gives a song and the next person gives a song.
Not that it doesn’t exist here, but we didn’t find it yesterday. But in Cork, we have a particular bar called Charlie’s Pub, which is my favorite place in the whole world. That you walk in there and you could have a local singer, his first open mic, or you could have Mick Flannery, who’s an established touring artist in America, and they all just come in and play together. But Cork does, at the moment, (and I don’t know if it’s post-COVID), but it does have a lack of venues. Glasgow has so many, even just 100 capacity venues for music. We don’t have that as much, you know.
I was lucky enough to sell out my hometown show recently, but it took us a while to try and get a venue on a particular date because there’s just not a whole lot of variety and opportunity in Cork at the moment. But the places that are in Cork are very, very well respected and well established. So where we may not have the quantity that Glasgow has, we definitely have the same quality, but it might be, you know, something down the line for Cork to try and expand it, because there’s amazing musicians, like just phenomenal musicians in Cork. So I think it’s just about trying to establish the quantity now to match the quality that we have. I think that’s the only comparison that I could see.
So if we were planning a trip to Ireland, where should we go?
Cork. You have to go to Cork. If you go to Ireland, you have to go to Cork and Galway, they would be my favorite places if you’re a music lover. Dublin is great, but Dublin feels very much like a capital city, and as important capital cities are for you know a country’s overall success and GDP or whatever – it has lost a little bit of the raw Irishness, a small bit. Now there’s still places you can go there, phenomenal. But Cork and Galway, in particular, seem to be these cities that are not too big, not too small. They’re just right. There’s amazing things to do with coastlines and experiences full of rich history. But for the music scene, there’s places like Hollins, which I’m headlining in October, which is fantastic.
In Galway, there’s places like the Roshan Gove, and you walk into any bar and there’s really talented musicians playing, and I think that’s been our main trait over the last few hundred years – that we all love storytelling and love music and it’s what ignites us, it’s what keeps us going. And at the moment, the Irish music scene is so saturated. In the most positive way you can imagine, because I think the way the world is at the moment, there’s a lot of negatives and a lot of hatred, I I always find that Ireland, because of its history, is now a beacon for the way we should look at things – with a bit more empathy and a bit more love and a bit more compassion, and that is the Irish motto. It’s to show love and compassion and kindness, and stand up for social climates, stand up for social justice, and no one’s better than anyone. We all just need to be in this together. We all treat each other with respect, and that message is needed now more than ever. Irish music with that message rooted deep in it is really popular at the moment. I’m really really proud about that as an Irish person, that that’s our message. And where things are getting quite difficult across the world, that message is rising to try and combat whatever’s going on. So that’s my two cents. That wasn’t the question, (chuckles) but it’s like a spider web…
Who’d play you in a movie?
Oh, Gerard Butler. Do you know him?
Of course.
Yeah, 100% Gerard Butler, but a younger one. It’s funny enough because the reason me and my girlfriend met was… we met in an Irish bar, and I was singing Galway Girl as she walked in. And whenever the two of us have a bit of a tiff or a fight, we always rewatch PS I Love You because it’s almost the story of how we met. It’s a random guy and a random Irish guy playing in a pub, this girl comes over to Ireland after having a heartbreak. So whenever we have a little bit of an argument or a fight, we decide to sit down and rewatch PS I Love You, and we both start crying when he dies. So yeah, it’s Gerard Butler, 100%.
I love it. What advice would you give the version of yourself who was starting out in this industry as opposed to where you are now? As in, what’s something you know now which you didn’t know then?
You know what? I don’t think there’s any advice I’d give because I’ve only been doing this since about two and a half years ago, so it’s very new to me, the whole music industry. So there’s no advice I would give my younger self because it’s only two years ago. I’m just trying every day to wake up and try and learn something new. I think you have a decision every day, and I think it’s just advice from me right now because I’m still so early on in this career that I never want to get to the point where I think I know everything, or that I can give advice to people. I do genuinely try and learn every day, and I don’t know a whole lot about music in general, like music theory. I don’t know how to read music. I don’t know what chords are. I have to get people to, you know, move the capo up and down and transport the cords.
One of my favorite books is *Man’s Search for Meaning* by Viktor Frankl, and there’s a quote in that book, and it says that between stimulus and response there is a space, and in that space allows our personal freedom. So, every day, you’re going to get an opportunity to either progress or stay the same. And even if it’s only 1% – and this could be with social media, with writing music, with being a dad, which I am, being a partner, being a musician is that you’ve a choice every day. Are you going to try and get a little bit better, or are you going to try and stay the same? You can, if you try and get better every day with everything, you’re going to be successful. Some days you might only have 60% of the energy that you can use, but if you give 60% of your best, it’s better than not doing anything. And that’s the biggest challenge for me. As you know I gig a lot, and I’m quite tired from it, and I’m a dad, and got a lot of stuff going on. And I think because I’m an artist and a writer, I see the world in quite a fragile way, and it makes me sad.
I think I feel a collective empathy for everything in the world at the moment, and it makes me quite sad. So my biggest advice, or my biggest challenge, every day is deciding – am I going to give this a go, or am I going to let fear, self-doubt, anxiety, pressure overcome me?
You know, if I was giving advice to a new artist, it would be go talk to people, like make connections with people, go for coffee with people, keep music the most important thing because it’s very easy to get caught up with wanting to be a social media star or a TikTok superstar or all that kind of stuff. If you’re making music for the right reasons, and making music because you love making music, not because you want to make yourself rich from it.
You’re making music because music is art, and art is the way that people collectively will come together and try and change the world, and that’s what you need to be doing. If you’re trying to make music for a quick buck to get on radio to try and get money, it’s not going to work. So the advice I would probably give to myself and to other artists is put the music first, and then get a team around you of people who are incredibly strong where you’re weak.
So my manager Lauren is the most organized, meticulous, administrative person. I could never do that, but she can, and maybe she couldn’t write a song, but I can. And then you start getting a team together of people, and you treat each member of that team with vast amounts of respect and admiration for their work, and you never see yourself as above or separate from them. And you see everyone in your team, if it’s your guitar tech, if it’s your ghostwriter, ifit’s a videographer, you see them all as equal parts, and then you all race together. Because as soon as you start to think that you’re more important or your job is more important than anyone, you’re going to lose because people will see that and they won’t want to work with you. That’s probably the biggest thing. I was more confident when I first started gigging as a pub musician than I am now. Now, the more I learn, the less I know, and I find that… the more I need people to help me to try and fill in those gaps.
Sorry, I just rambled there (chuckles). My EP is called Concise Waffle.
Organized chaos.
Exactly. Organized chaos.
(laughs)
Do you have a dream venue to play at?
Dream venue? Yeah, the Olympia in Ireland.
It sounds bad to say this, but I would much prefer to play the Olympia to like six, seven hundred people than to play arenas across the world because for me, the best gigs I’ve ever been at are fifty, or a hundred people in a room. It’s dark, it’s dingy, you know, and you’re almost suffocating because there’s no room to breathe. But the band comes out and the background and the stage mightn’t be the most spectacular, but when everyone’s closer together, you could feel the spirit of the venue. The spirit of everyone else in the room, collectively watching this band. I’ve been to arenas or stadiums to see concerts, and it just feels impersonal. It just feels like I’m just sitting in a seat as a ticket number, and you know, there’s people getting up and down. There’s people on their phones. I’m like 100 yards away. I can’t see anything.
I saw a band called Amber Live in Olympia two years ago. Sold out crowd. It was sold out with the six or seven hundred people who wanted to be there. They fought to get a ticket. So the Olympia for me would be the dream venue, or there is a venue in Cork called the Marquis as well, which is my local hometown kind of venue, or City Hall in Cork as well, which is where I played my first ever support gig. My dad works there during the day as an administrator, so that that would be really cool. I think that would be it.
So you like the intimate, kind of packed in like sardines vibe at gigs.
I love it because my music in particular is quite raw and it’s quite heartfelt with the lyrics. I’m not trying to be a pop sensation. I’m not trying to be a generic songwriter. I see the world a particular way. I feel quite deeply, and I want people to feel stuff from my music. The moment when I start to sell these venues and start to get to this level, there will be a point where I’ll have to make a decision: do I want to go to these bigger venues? And Lauren and I havealready spoken about it. It’s the same with labels and everything. I don’t want to do anything that will ever jeopardize the feeling that people will get when they go to a room. So if you go to a room and you feel connected and you feel inspired and you feel like we’re all here together singing these songs, that the roof might cave in because it’s so loud. But once you start to lose that feeling, I’ll be very sad, and I don’t ever want to lose that feeling with music because that’s what brought me into music, is feeling.
Do you have a dream artist, dead or alive, that you would like to share the stage with, or a couple of them?
Damien Rice. I think I’d love to share a stage with Damien Rice. There’s songwriter Zach Bryan. Oh, Johnny Cash, absolutely Johnny Cash. One of my favorite songs is by an artist called Tom Paxton, who’s a really old Canadian singer songwriter, and he used to sing on stage with a guy called Liam Clancy. He was a very famous Irish songwriter as well. And there’s one video that my dad showed me on YouTube back when you had to, you know, when the modem used to have to dial up.
Remember the sounds for modems when they used to have to dial up years ago? (chuckles). You’re too young to remember this.
It was when YouTube first came out, and my dad just sat me down. I was probably like six or seven. He was like, “Oh, watch this video”, and it was a video of Tom Paxton and Liam Clancy, who are two like Irish songwriters singing to a room of maybe 300, again that small, cozy, intimate venue, and they sang a song called “The Last Thing on My Mind”. And if there’s one room or one stage where I could ever be like a fly on the wall or get to perform alongside, it would be that song with those two people.
That was going to be my last question. However, you mentioned being a dad. So how does it feel balancing parenthood with musicianship?
He’s my best friend in the whole world. I love him to bits. He’s the best boy and he loves music. I hate being away from him. But it can be difficult to make money as a musician. So I play a lot of cover gigs, and I’m very thankful to all the bars that get me to play there. So, I’m in a great position at the moment where I get to spend all day with my son, and we can play Lego, and we can go for adventures. We can go camping on nights off, and then I go to work at night, and it can be quite financially restraining that way because ideally maybe you’d have a job a full time job and you know do covers at the weekend but my full time job is parenting because I never want him to grow up and think that I wasn’t around because I was always working so I think right now I’m finding the balance.
His mother is a superstar, she’s an absolute superwoman, and she’s very, very accommodating of me going away for maybe a few days at a time or a week, but when I’m back, I’m back. So at the moment, I’m balancing it pretty well. I don’t think I can plan or project too much about what will happen. It’s more so just, as I said, every day just trying to do that little bit better. I love being a dad. It’s the best thing that ever happened to me. I love it.
Keep up with Cathal Fitz on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/cathalfitzmusic_/?hl=en-gb
Stream “Paper Planes” here: https://open.spotify.com/track/3drgTEzyzjAT0NiEtfVOWQ