Declan O’Rourke has never been especially easy to place. There are moments in his music that sound unmistakably Irish, others that reach towards the great singer-songwriters of the 1960s and ’70s, and others that carry something more continental: chanson, classical guitar, strings. Across eight studio albums, those different languages have increasingly come to coexist.
His new album, Oceanic, brings many of these elements together. Recorded in Sydney with longtime friend and collaborator Jim Moginie of Midnight Oil, it also brings O’Rourke back to a country bound up with the beginnings of his life as a songwriter. He first committed songs to tape in Australia at 19; his acclaimed 2004 debut, Since Kyabram, took its name from a rural Australian town. More than two decades later, Oceanic finds him returning to Australia with a lifetime of music behind him.
The record moves accordingly. “Earl Grey and Edwin” sets delicate classical guitar against cello; “The Poet” inhabits the spacious, late-night world of Leonard Cohen or Richard Hawley; elsewhere there are traces of pop, folk, orchestration and older European songwriting traditions. Yet O’Rourke seems less interested in identifying those influences than in resisting the idea that an artist should have to choose between them.
I spoke to O’Rourke from a quiet park just off Paris’s 5th arrondissement. The sun was shining, and birds were chirping around me, a fitting accompaniment to his wistful, poetic reflections on love, memory and the passage of time. We talked about artistic identity, old friendships, Joni Mitchell, writing novels instead of songs, and why Oceanic seemed, in the end, to name itself.
Your music draws on so many different traditions — Irish folk, chanson, classical guitar. Have you ever felt pressure to define yourself as a particular kind of artist?
No, I never struggled with asking who I was. But the industry worries about that, because it wants to put you in a box.
I’ve always thought that if you give an artist a palette with all kinds of colours, you can’t expect them to stick with yellow or red. I want to explore everything as an artist, and to feel everything I feel every day. Our experiences and flavours are everywhere now, which is fascinating. We’re international people. Everything you hear gets into your vocabulary, into your database of sound.
I love exploring that and not trying to limit myself in any way. If I feel I can write a song that comes out a certain way, and I feel I’m doing it justice — and it doesn’t feel as though I’m stealing from anyone — then I just go with it. In fact, if something I’m doing sounds too much like something else, I get an allergic reaction to that.
I write for myself first of all. If other people like it, that’s great.
You mentioned writing for yourself first. Glen Hansard said something similar— that you have to love your own work before worrying about an audience. Is that how you’ve always approached things?
Yeah. I think people respond to an authentic way of expressing yourself, so for me that’s really important.
I’ve always done quite well. I’m not a mainstream superstar, but that doesn’t make me value what I do any less. I take a little bit of pride in that. If everybody was following me, I think I’d be doing something wrong. I don’t want to be exclusive to a certain kind of person, but what we do isn’t going to be for everybody.
As long as I stick to my compass and go where north is for me, I can’t really lose anything. I don’t worry about it. I think I have a nice career. I’ve managed to do what I do and make a living from it. I can support myself musically and nutritionally, and I’ve been doing that my whole adult life.
The industry is making that harder because it’s broken, but that’s not going to stop me.
I have an inner sense that I’m getting to the people I need to get to, and there’s always a sense that it’s growing. I can feel my reach to people growing. So I trust that it’s doing what it needs to do, and I continue to grow and prosper. I know there’s a certain game we have to play on some level, but I trust my own compass.
“The boy who is still inside me and the 50-year-old poet are the same person.”
I wanted to ask you about “The Poet”, which might be my favourite song on the album. It reminds me of Leonard Cohen and Richard Hawley, and there’s something wonderfully melancholy about it. Where did the song come from?
What it was for me was this idea that everyone you’ve ever been in love with in your life, you’re probably always still in love with them.
Those feelings can be unlocked at the drop of a hat. It can be some random trigger that reminds you — a smell, a sound, a photograph. I believe they’re all still in there. The feelings you had are locked in there somewhere, and I think we hide from that as people.
The song literally explores one of those relationships: the nostalgia, those feelings that are locked away and that caught me by surprise.
And in a way, that’s what makes you a poet. Those are the ingredients of it. The idea of unrequited love, and of not being able to say what I wanted to say as a child, stuck with me. I’m still trying to say it now in everything that I do.
The boy who is still inside me and the 50-year-old poet are the same person.
It’s interesting what you say about memories staying with us. That seems to come through in “Earl Grey and Edwin” as well. I love the classical guitar and cello on that song. Was that sound a deliberate choice?
No. If anything, I would always try to make something move towards being accessible and contemporary from wherever I begin. I don’t really set out to make something sound a certain way.
Some instinct makes me want to share a feeling, and that will start with a thought or some words. Then I just try to imagine how that would sound as a song. You keep listening and start assembling it, almost as though it’s a jigsaw coming from somewhere else. I’ll either reject what arrives if I don’t like it, or I keep following it. It’s a very fun game — trying to entertain yourself.
“Earl Grey and Edwin” is about a friend who taught me classical guitar. The central motif just came out of nowhere in my head.
The parts of art that fascinate me are often from different eras. I think there are flavours that are timeless or ageless, and just because they’re from a different time doesn’t mean they don’t fit us now. There are beautiful things in art that we love, and I love when something like that comes to me.
The guitar helps the nostalgia because you’re singing from now about something from the past. While I was writing the song, I was being triggered by memories of this friendship and this friend I have great affection for. I think I chipped away at it for maybe a year or two.
When I finished it, I tried to get in touch with him to show him the song and realised I hadn’t actually been in contact with him for six or seven years. I started exhausting all these little avenues — email addresses, phone numbers — and I couldn’t raise him. I really started to worry.
It took me until early this year — about ten years at that point — to actually find him. It was such a relief. I went out to Australia in April, took someone with a video camera, reconnected with him, and we filmed a video for the song. It was a very heartwarming day, and we’re in touch now.
So the song became a way of re-finding him.
And then the day before yesterday I put up a photograph I’d taken of him in 1996, when we were on a course for the dole. A couple of hours later I got this long note from someone who lives about two hours away from me in Ireland. She said, “I couldn’t believe it when I saw my old guitar teacher from Melbourne from years ago.”
I just thought: wow. The fan club for Edwin is growing.
I was also listening to “In Painter’s Light”, which reminded me musically of Joni Mitchell. She’s always identified strongly as a painter, and I know painting has been important to you too. How do you see the relationship between painting, songwriting and writing novels?
Painting is a long-neglected other pursuit for me. I have a romantic notion about it because when I was growing up, as a child and a teenager, I wanted to be an artist. My granddad was a painter, and I always thought I was inheriting his love for that. I got his paints.
But at a certain point, music took over. I went with music naturally, and I’ve always longed for art still. Every once in a while I’ll paint something just for fun. I love art.
I don’t regret choosing music, but I do long for the other as well, almost like a lost love.
I think Joni Mitchell at times has been quite bitter about music and almost self-deprecating about her music in that context — almost as though it stole art from her.
When I started writing books and really dove into that, I stopped writing music. Writing a book is even more all-encompassing than music because you have to immerse yourself completely. But I didn’t miss creating music, in that sense, because that box was being ticked by the other process.
I didn’t find it different at all. My songs have a beginning, a middle and an end. Writing a book is like writing a big song, with a beginning, a middle and an end.
I realised that I’m just a creative person, and the form isn’t as relevant as people think. Some people discovered my music through the books, which was a lovely surprise. So it’s not up to me to decide what other people might think of me. It’s just up to me to create and to enjoy that.
There’s a great expression: “It’s none of my business what everyone else thinks about me.” That goes for life as well as music.
It’s interesting that writing novels took you away from songwriting for a while. Was returning to music part of what led to Oceanic? And where did the title come from?
I wrote two books between 2020 and 2023, and in all that time I wasn’t writing songs — or at least I didn’t think I was.
Slowly these little sketches started to form. I almost felt I’d forgotten how to do it, that I’d broken whatever this long chain of connection that songwriting is. But then these songs started to crop up, and it kind of just made itself. I ended up with a thick pile of songs early last year.
I’d written the whale song in a studio called Oceanic. I had all these new songs, and I wanted to road-test them. I think I had eight or ten brand-new songs I wanted to try, so I asked an artist friend of mine to make a poster. I told him I didn’t want the image to be me — just some kind of image.
He came back with this picture of whales floating across the sky, almost as though they were leaving.
I thought: I can’t do a tour with this image without having a song about a whale.
So I wrote the whale song, which is about climate change. I’d written songs about the sea in the past as well. And then I arrived in Jim’s studio, which is called Oceanic, with a couple of these ideas.
I borrowed the studio’s name. It just seemed to encompass everything: this life that covers two continents, and the ocean in between.
And Jim loved it.
Oceanic, Declan O’Rourke’s eighth studio album, was released on 16 October 2026 via Maiesta Music. It is available on CD and vinyl, and digitally through iTunes, with a wider streaming release scheduled for 20 November 2026. For more information, music and tour dates, visit declanorourke.com.
Tour Dates – 2026:
OCTOBER
17 DUBLIN, Vicar Street
22 WEXFORD, Wexford Spiegeltent Festival
NOVEMBER
6 TYRONE, Craic Theatre and Arts Centre, Coalisland
7 KILLARNEY, Gleneagle Club
13 ENNIS, Glór
14 CAVAN, Townhall Arts Centre
15 NAVAN, Solstice Arts Centre
21 DERRY, Guildhall
In-stores:
OCTOBER
16 Spindizzy Records, Dublin, 6pm
18 Zhivago Gifts, Galway, 1pm
18 Steamboat, Limerick, 5pm
21 Music Zone, Cork, 5pm
28 Rough Trade East, London, 7pm