Plumbing dark emotional depths before ascending to hopeful heights, Dublin folk artist Callum Orr’s debut album The Trials of Knowing is out today. The focus track, ‘Dust’, was first written as a poem in 2020 and provides the emotional core of the album.
Inspired by an abstract dream of himself and his wife as two piles of dust lying next to each other after the end of the world, ‘Dust’ is Orr’s contribution to Ireland’s recent traditional folk revival. “Something so mundane as dust can be imbued with a power and a holiness due to the fact that it used to be a human who loved and was loved,” Orr says. As he sings on the track: “We were here and we loved well / Truly through the trials of knowing.”
Knowing that one day we will all die and the stories of our lives will end can send one into a tailspin; for Orr it was an unlikely source of inspiration. The Trials of Knowing was written as Orr grappled with his mother’s cancer diagnosis and our collective impending mortality. Anthropologist Ernest Becker’s book The Denial of Death was a huge influence on the resulting songs, including Becker’s main thesis that all human efforts are futile attempts to immortalise ourselves as heroes, while at the same time we repress our fear of death. Co-produced by Orr and Ailbhe Reddy, The Trials of Knowing was recorded between Asta Kalapa studios in Wexford, Orr’s home in Dublin 7, and various other spaces in Dublin. This is an album in two halves, following Orr’s journey from the darkness of nihilism into the light of love and life’s innumerable joys—however fleeting that life may be.
The album opens with Orr at his most cutting and ego-driven in ‘Prop’, a break-up song written in 2019. His words are steeped in sarcasm on the chorus as he sings, “And oh what an honour / To be inside your palm / Oh what a pleasure it was / To be your prop.” The blissful indie rock sound of ‘Floorboards’ is deceptive, the track itself exploring “the feeling of emptiness when all the things I find meaning in—friendship, family, reading, exercise, meditation—cease working, and I’m left pulling up the metaphorical floorboards looking for more meaning and finding nothing there.”
Next is the bleakly poignant ‘Crushing Machine’, written in 2021 after Orr’s mother was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. “I had this feeling of hopelessness in the face of this machine of death, envisioning that I and everyone I love are just sitting on this conveyor belt waiting for this final violence of being destroyed and taken from life,” Orr explains. The song closes with a poem Orr penned called “Flicker on a Sea,” read by his cousin Ailbhe Keogan, “about the vast sea of the universe and how insignificant we are in it.”
‘Homesick’ is the oldest track on the album, written as Orr moved back to Dublin from Canada in 2018, only to find his home utterly changed. He kept returning to the quote, “Nostalgia is homesickness for a place to which you can’t return,” and that yearning for the past is reflected in the lo-fi, warmly textured recording, like a forgotten tape that’s been unearthed years later. ‘The One Who Does Everything Slow’ is about that first spark of nascent love, which catches fire on the vulnerably optimistic ‘As Long As I Have Time’. The song is littered with evocative details—“porridge and Chet Baker”—from when Orr and his wife first began their long-distance relationship, separated by a lockdown and an entire ocean. Orr’s voice is joined by that of Reddy, along with lush, sweet strings that he arranged.
Track Listing
1. Prop
2. Floorboards
3. Crushing Machine
4. Dust
5. Homesick
6. The One Who Does Everything Slow
7. As Long As I Have Time
8. Hello Marianne
9. Keeping Faith
10. God’s Breath
‘Hello Marianne’ is named for his mother, and was written as he felt a wave of optimism after her cancer diagnosis. “It was metastatic cancer and doctors were putting time limits on her life. She was completely destroyed by the thoughts of leaving us behind,” Orr recalls. “Regardless, I felt an immense sense of optimism and faith that things were going to be okay—which proved to be true, as she’s still here. So this song is to convey that sense of hope to her.” The song’s title is a nod to Leonard Cohen’s ‘So Long, Marianne’, which also happens to be one of Orr’s mother’s favourite tracks.
Anyone who’s felt “dead at my desk” can relate to ‘Keeping Faith’. Over twinkling piano and deftly plucked guitar, Orr ruminates on whether to choose the quiet fulfilment of a more traditional path—marriage, job, house, kids—or risk the material insecurity of an adventurous creative. He opts for the former and makes the ultimate act of faith: trusting that he’s made the right decision. The song also features one of the album’s rare co-writers: pianist and backing vocalist Ross Hannon.
Finally, autumn arrives—brisk, nostalgic, stirring—in the form of album closer ‘God’s Breath’. Recorded live and featuring Seánie Bermingham, the song’s instrumental outro conjures up raw, overwhelming emotions. Orr’s love of traditional folk comes to the fore as he sings: “I could step sideways in time / and be back beside your love.” He explains, “Something about the coldness in the air and the dramatic autumn skies and the smell of burning peat allows you time travel back to previous periods in your life.” No matter who enters or leaves our lives, those sensory memories will always be with us, a way to conjure up our loved ones in just a moment.