Irish musician Patrick O’Laoghaire, who performs under the moniker I Have a Tribe, is a brilliantly-gifted songwriter and his talent is displayed once again in his latest single, ‘Fly Like a Bird’. O’Laoghaire’s characterful, gritty voice drifts above delicate, jazz-tinged folk instrumentation, gliding on beautiful musical currents. O’Laoghaire says of the song: “I had no idea that this song was actually being recorded. A man stuck his head out of a studio and said he was looking for someone to play a piano so he could check if he had the microphones set up correctly. So I sat down and played and sang a tune. Afterwards he said, ‘I hope you don’t mind, I recorded that.’ And he played it back, and another man passing by heard it and said, ‘Hey, I like that, mind if I add some trumpet?’ And then it was done. It was only afterwards that I realised they were both musicians who’s playing I’d been enjoying for years: David Chalmin [Thom Yorke, Rufus Wainwright] and Trevor Hagen [Bon Iver]. I never knew what they looked like.” There’s a bit of musical magic to this story that seems entirely fitting for I Have a Tribe and this song in particular.
The video fits perfectly with the song itself, featuring expansive footage of beautiful landscapes, taken from a bird’s eye view.
The single is from the highly-anticipated second album ‘Changing the Guard’, which will be available on 6th October 2023. The new collection is a heart-warming exploration of life and is full of warmth and humanity. O’Laoghaire describes the process of writing songs for the album and, again, there’s a sense of magic in the process: “I’m not a man for straight lines. I’d have made a bad architect. If I designed buildings they wouldn’t last long but while they were standing I’d hope there was plenty of space for love in them. For a while I wanted to be a carpenter and construct things well balanced and solid and secure. But after a while I swapped rulers and measuring tapes to come back to song-lines. There’s no straight lines in a song, there’s only song-lines. A song’s shape you can play with and it changes all the time. It can shape itself to fit the room it’s being sung in. It changes shape to embrace whomever it’s being sung for. So in that sense, everybody in the room has a part and an effect on the song being sung. I haven’t travelled in straight lines myself and I tend to resist the notion of beginnings and endings. I’ve had the fortune along my way to play with musicians whose songs and whose ways I’ve loved for a long time. It’s a fine feeling, to share a tune with a musician who moves you, and I’m grateful. I sat down with Feist once and she said to me, ‘Let’s write a song, but let’s pretend it’s already written; Let’s see what happens if we start to sing, and trust the song will make itself known.’ So we started to sing, and it turned out, it wasn’t pretending at all – the song was there in the room waiting and all we had to do was listen and translate it into words and notes and song-lines. And this is the way I tend to write songs. It’s not writing at all really, it’s more like listening. If you listen close enough there’s a song there and if you listen closely to a song there’s love in it somewhere.” It’s an intriguing approach that yields absorbing results. Enjoy.
