This little light of mine
Myles O'Reilly moved from early musical success in his twenties to dramatically abandoning music for filmmaking; now, in his forties, he's re-learning the art of letting his musical side shine.
“I broke up with musician-me one day.”
“I left, and that was it. I’m not a violent person, but I smashed my guitar and gave my other guitars away, all on the same day. It was a bad, bad breakup.”
Myles O’Reilly chuckles down the line. It’s a vivid description of the time he ditched music - at the time, he believed permanently - for filmmaking.
If you were around in the mid-naughties, and listening to Irish radio, you probably will have heard some of Myles’ pre-musical-breakup songs: with his bandmates as Juno Falls, he was on the cusp of mainstream success outside of Ireland, and had definitely made his mark on this small island, just before the end began.
Juno fell
Juno Fall’s catchy, upbeat This Song Is Your Own had received a lot of Irish airplay, there had been a tour supporting Scottish pop-rockers Travis, and they had signed to Richard Branson’s V2 label in 2006, recording their second album, Weightless, in studios in the UK, Ireland and Nashville.
Then, Branson suddenly decided to exit the recording industry just as Weightless got its UK release and, by all accounts, in the resulting melée of restructuring, the album got lost in the noise.
That’s the official line.
In reality, Myles tells me, it was the “final nail in the coffin” in a process in which he had come to feel uncomfortable with the level of creative compromise he tolerated in pursuit of mainstream success.
“Through trying to get to that label position, I had made a lot of creative compromises,” he says. “I didn’t even know myself musically, or what emotions I wanted to put into the music anymore.”
“There was a point where I listened back to everything I had done and realised that none of it was me, that the sound and the person were all fake. I was hugely disappointed with myself, that after ten or fifteen years of making music with my friends, that’s where I was.”
And so the break-up, the dramatic guitar-smashing, the pledge to ditch music for good.
But the world of music was not so easy to give up: in 2010 he turned to film, and specifically to his own unique brand of music documentary, in which he often melds music with the environment in which it’s performed, and with lived experience of the people playing it.
Arbutus Yarns
Under the moniker of Arbutus Yarns, Myles has spent the past decade working with musicians including Lisa Hannigan, Ye Vagabonds, Glen Hansard, Crowded House, David Keenan and many others, sometimes making music videos and sometimes making short documentaries to accompany songs and live performances.
Having become utterly disillusioned with his own earlier creative compromises, Myles found himself drawn to certain musicians who he believed had taken a different path.
“I had to start filming music and experiencing others who I really admire, people with a heightened sense of creative agency that I never had as a young impressionable musician,” he says. “I just turned my lens on people who had never tried to be anything else, people with this amazing sense of their own intent.”
As an independent filmmaker, Myles met with considerable success: he ended up curating his own Arbutus Yarns stage at Body & Soul music festival, he shot an online series called This Ain’t No Disco with frequent collaborator Dónal Dineen. This year his mesmerising feature-length documentary on the life of folk singer Liam Weldon screened at IndieCork film festival.
A return to music
Now for a brand-new cliché: it was the Covid lockdowns of 2020 that pushed Myles to re-unite with his musician self after such a bitter break-up so many moons ago.
“I had nothing to do and there were a lot of film projects that just fell by the wayside,” he says. “Within the first two weeks of the lockdown, my wife started painting and drawing, and she’s never done that before. I just really wanted to play and so a friend lent me a Moog synthesiser and that’s where it started.”
“I started to hear what notes my heartbeat wanted to hear.”
If you got back with an ex after ten years apart, you could expect to find them changed, and Myles’ inner musician had matured and was now motivated by emotional authenticity.
“I was blown away that you can find these rich tonalities, all the tonalities you can find in acoustic instruments, in a synthesiser. I was going, ‘oh, I can do a million different things!’ I started to see what direction I’d like to go in in this vast spectrum of possibilities and there was huge satisfaction in that: I started to hear what notes my heartbeat wanted to hear.”
He believes he has his filmmaking, and the musicians he's worked with down through the years, to thank for that.
“I spent so much time listening to music and being inspired and stepping into musicians’ lives with my lens,” he says. “There was a lot of learning in that, from some of the people I really admire.”
“Maybe the reason I film musicians is that I get to tap into the pure well water of the source of inspiration that they have. Maybe I’m borrowing inspiration from some of the people I’ve filmed.”
Kíla singer and bodhrán player Ronán Ó Snodaigh has become a collaborator: Myles produced, and performed on, Ronán’s latest album, Tá Go Maith. He says it’s a relationship that has endured both his musical and non-musical life phases.
“Ronán was the only person in my life who never gave up poking me; he’d call around to the house and ask me why I wasn’t playing music. He’d leave instruments at my front door and drive away.”
“So this time when he called over, I was only delighted to go, ‘by the way, I am playing again.’ We had a little jam and that became Tá an t’Ádh Liom. He had a lot of songs under his belt after lockdown: there was a mood created from that environment of being at home all the time with no work that he held onto, and that really was the album Tá Go Maith.”
On top of his work with Ronán, Myles has been immersing himself in the world of ambient music and collaborating with others; he’s become as prolific in music as ever he was in film, releasing five albums in two years other than his collaboration with Ronán, including his most recent album, An Ode To Soft Landings.
Let it Shine
“I was young, I had a voice, I didn’t know it,” he sings on Shine, released on Cocooning Heart this past summer.
Myles turns 49 this month. Moving back to music and performance in his late forties has not been without its worries.
Ageism is “rampant, it’s out there” in the world of music, Myles knows. “A lot of musicians don’t do themselves any favours because they keep making the same style of music they made in their early twenties and they haven’t allowed their style of music to mature,” he says.
“But audiences also need to mature: there’s a lot of adults that are listening to music written by adolescents. Audiences listen to young stars singing about falling in and out of love: we accept that this is what music is about. It’s a hard landscape to navigate as a musician essentially starting out in their forties. But I realise that the less I actually think about that, the better I do.”
“I do expect to be wheeled out in a wheelchair doing gigs thirty years from now and not worrying about if people view me as too old, because that’s just ridiculous. There’s a perception out there that music is for young people and it’s really not true.”
A “love letter to Cork city”
Myles is from Dublin, and lives there, but he’s always had a soft spot for Cork: his first Juno Falls album was recorded in West Cork, his wife Aideen is from Cork.
His twenty minute film A City Under Quiet Lights was shot during the annual Quiet Lights folk festival last year, and it’s screening this weekend at Cork International Film Festival as part of the Irish Shorts Competition.
“I got to choose five artists to film and, really, they soundtracked my wanderings around Cork as I filmed people just kind of enjoying their Christmas season,” he says.
“There’s a connectivity in Cork, where everyone’s mother knows everyone else’s son’s cousin and who got married and who died. To see people out on the street after being locked down getting to go back out and enjoy Christmas again: there was a real sense of rejoicing and that community connectivity. I got to soundtrack all of that with my choice of music. It’s like a hypersensitive reflection on Cork and its people.”
It is a moving film, which forms tentative but strong connections between the notes played and the places they’re being played in.
Laura Quirke and Joshua Burnside join voices in Coughlans, Junior Brother plays amongst the bellropes of St Anne’s Church, Niamh O’Regan plays with the Shakey Bridge behind her. And all the while, fryers frying, night falling, barbers cutting hair, swimmers taking the icy plunge in Myrtleville.
A return to Quiet Lights
There’s a nice symmetry, then, to musician-Myles returning to Quiet Lights this year to perform. He’s going to be doing a three-hour performance called Ambient Pharmacy alongside Gareth Redmond and Simon O’Reilly: billed as a “sound bath,” the improvised performance is free for audience members to leave and enter at will.
“There are a couple of friendly scales that only Cork people sing, and I’m looking forward to making music with that in a church,” he says.
“I’m going to go in with a rough outline, but as soon as I start playing sine waves into a church, they are going to bounce around and reflect back to me, which I’ll listen to and reply to. It’s constantly evolving sound and the church will be playing as much as I am.”
Despite his rejuvenated love of music and desire to perform, though, Myles won’t be ditching filmmaking any time soon. He says he’s now spending roughly equal amounts of time on music and film.
Myles O’Reilly the filmmaker:
A City Under Quiet Lights screens as part of Irish Shorts 3: Pure Cork (under competition) in Cork International Film Festival at 1.30pm on Saturday, November 19 in The Everyman, with winners announced after the screening. Tickets here.
Myles O’Reilly the musician:
Myles O’Reilly’s Ambient Pharmacy is on as part of Quiet Lights Festival 2022, from 2pm to 5pm on Sunday, November 27 in St Peter’s, Cork. Admission free. Info here