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Owen Brady - Prepare To Be Happy

You can tell that Owen Brady has been singing for his supper since he was a nipper. The confidence and the panache when he opens his gob to sing are all bellwethers of that.

Here's a singer and a musician who has put in the graft, played all those gigs you're supposed to play when you're paying your dues and came out the other end still in love with the music.

That lust is important. After all, every note of Brady's new album shows his infatuation with music. Those cool melodies, Charlie Parker licks and Puccini arias which were running through his head for years before he recorded this album have made their way into the mix to shape the kind of record they really don¹t make any more.

Brady's bunch of songs tips the fedora to everyone from James Taylor and Evie Sands to Little Jimmy Scott and Smokey Robinson. It's a sound which is very comfortable in its own skin and has no intention of changing its tune for anyone.

By the way, it¹s not Brady's debut record. By the time he hit his teen years, the Dubliner already had two albums to his credit.

He was a boy soprano in the Palestrina Choir in the capital city's Pro-Cathedral "the only thing to do when you want to start singing when you¹re seven years of age is to join a choir" and his first album was a fund-raiser for Temple Street Children¹s Hospital which was sold in supermarkets and church stalls. He smiles when he remembers the cover a serious youngster in robes surrounded by candles.

While his mates ran around chasing footballs, Brady was chasing choral rehearsals. "I was running around recording albums, singing in choirs, doing gigs and generally being a full-time singer.

I remember my mother would pick me up from school and hand me a wet towel to rub off whatever mud was on my clothes and a bottle of Lucozade and a sandwich for my dinner, before driving me off to a rehearsal. Then she'd pick me up from that and drive me to another rehearsal."

When you're that young, you¹re impressionable and you do what you told.

It's music, at the end of the day. If you'¹re standing in a choir and you're doing music that sounds great, you do love it."

To get a break, he went to a boarding school better known for sports than singing, but the music found him there anyway. He was soon setting up choirs, entering competitions and winning prizes. There was no doubt in his mind what he¹d be doing for the rest of his life.

College? That would be University College Dublin and, yes, of course, he studied the music of Beethoven and Bach in the lecture halls, choral music with the college choral society and Radiohead songs and 'Raglan Road' with the barbershop quartet he was also in.

By night, well, Brady could be found in the city's piano bars and venues.

From The Viper Room and Bar Number Five 5 to pizza restaraunts and lounges, Brady would sing and play and hone his chops alongside bunches of other musicians.

"We'd play standards and mess them up, we'd never do songs straight", he remembers. They'd do "Beautiful Love" like you¹d never heard it before.

Frank Sinatra's "Fly Me To The Moon" would get a salsa makeover. You'd think you were hearing "Everything Happens to Me" for the first time. They'd also slip in a few originals here and there. No-one blinked or asked for their money back.

Brady would do every gig he got asked to do provided it sounded fun. Gigs where he¹d meet the band for the very first time by the side of the stage.

Gigs in basement rooms on Tuesday nights where just the staff and a clutch of old soaks at the bar would lend an ear. Gigs in back-rooms in country towns where he'd wonder just what the hell he was doing there.

He reckons himself he's played in about 50 or so bands, choirs and outfits since he begun. There might be more, but he wasn't keeping count.

"All that singing was about experience. All those gigs were about finding out how to sing in front of a brass section or in front of a full room, learning how to win over a crowd who knew nothing about you when they walked into the bar an hour before. Sometimes the gigs would be good, but sometimes they would be amazing. It was all practise for what was to come."

When you listen to Brady's new album, you can hear for yourself just how well all that grinding has paid off. Recorded in London with Andrew Hale, the producer and keyboard player with Sade and Sweetback who has worked with Corrine Bailey Rae and Burt Bacharach, the album catches Brady taking giant steps. He's not singing other people's standards anymore, he's singing his own.

The hook-up with Hale was hugely important. They met, they played records and they got on right from the get-go. "He's a player and he¹s a writer too so we just started writing together right away. It became apparent pretty quickly that he was the right person for me to work with.

"We¹d have coversations where you¹d agree on everything, we¹d make connections about music, we'd have the exact same ideas about how a song should go, we were into the same sounds. He was talking my language right from the start."

Co-producer Nick Philips completed the team and they worked for months in Hale's London studio. Their aim was simple: "a record with cool melodies, cool harmonies, cool backing vocals and catchy tunes".

Brady lodged with friends in the city and worked on his music every day for six months. He thought of nothing else but the songs he was putting down. He says he was never happier.

"I went over with a bunch of my songs written with just guitar and voice and we started out with that. It was very idyllic, very freewheeling. You hear people talk about stress and pressure, but recording the album was one of the most stress-free experiences I¹ve ever had."

Remember that Brady is a singer and a musician who has toiled at the coalface. He's done the hostile gigs in Thurles, the corporate shows in faceless hotel reception rooms and more choral versions of "With Or Without You" that a body will ever need. Doing his own music and digging his own grooves? That's easy by comparison.

And, naturally, Brady is chuffed to bits with how the album and his songs turned out in the wash. "The sound on the songs I took to London is practically the sound we ended up with. Nice melodies, interesting chords, great backing vocals - those three elements combined with the basic love any musician has for a good groove.

"That was the sound we ended up with because I suppose it was the sound I was most confident and comfortable with. It's what I'm about, it's what I'm happiest with."

And he has every reason to be chuffed. This is an album which is as timeless as they come, an album rich with songs measured and weighed and crafted to catch your ear again and again. The sway and the groove are natural, the delivery is perfect and the style is unmistakeable. For Owen Brady, singer, the next chapter is going to be pretty damn good.