Raise What’s Left

After three years of perpetually touring the world and with another tour on the horizon, you’d think Dave King, lead singer of Irish folk/punk/rebel forebears Flogging Molly, would revel in his downtime. Instead, he’s giving interviews, responding to fan mail and making a special trip with the band to Northern California to repay an old favor and “get back in the swing of things” with a couple shows on the side. He is finding some time to relax, though. During our interview (understandably postponed a couple hours so he could catch his hometown European football team on TV), Dave sipped tea from his home, looked over his garden, and in a slight, rolling brogue, the poetic lyricist from Dublin broke it down on everything from his creative inspiration to the intensity fans experience at Flogging Molly shows — similar, he said, to how he gets when watching football. And though he never said it outright, Dave made one thing very clear: when Flogging Molly comes to town, you’d better be damn sure there’s plenty of Guinness.

It was two years between Drunken Lullabies and Within a Mile of Home. Do you think there’s much difference between the two?
Oh yeah. I think there’s much more maturity in Within a Mile of Home. I think we as a band have grown closer, and I think musically we’ve gotten a lot better. There’s definitely a growth. I find myself actually playing the album quite a lot, because I never really had a chance to listen to it. I was still recording it when we were on the road. We’ve been constantly on the road, so when people say, “It’s been almost two years before the album came out,” well, we’ve been all over the world like four times. It was really hectic for us. This is the first time off I’ve had in…I can’t remember.

I know you have a pretty big following up here [in Chico, CA]. Do you find that in other cities?
Yeah, obviously it varies from town to town. But we’re very lucky in the fact that we do have a big, very loyal fan base. It’s like from young boys and girls to 75-year-old boys and girls. It’s pretty insane

Where do the 75-year-olds hear about you?
They either hear it from their children and they come see us, or it’s the other way around. I’ve had kids come up to me and go, “My parents got me into you guys.” Which is great, ‘cause that’s the way it was for me when I was younger. I think it’s good that at least parents and children can communicate on some level, you know?

You’ve said your mother had a lot of influence on your music. What instrument did you start out on?
Singing. In my mom’s house when I was very young, they used to bring people home from the pub on Saturday night or Sunday night and they’d all sit around in a circle and all take turns and sing. We only lived in a little one bedroom apartment. My mother would play the piano and my uncle played the accordion, and there was all sorts of things going on. It was a very inspirational type of background to come from. Then they bought me an acoustic guitar when I was a kid, when I was about six or seven, and I’ve just been fiddling around with that ever since.

Where does the inspiration for your songwriting come from now?
It comes mostly from my past, but it also pertains to a lot of what’s going on in the present, the climate I’m in. I just work it out of me, you know? It definitely has to come from an emotion and it has to be heartfelt, for me anyway, to reconcile that. I sing a lot about my father. I use his passing as an entrance to another door. I never really mourned my father’s death because I was so young. In fact, when he was buried I was at a football game. So I never really understood the grief; and I think the older I got, the grief became more apparent. By answering that grief, it opened so many other doors at the same time.

When you perform, does that emotion carry over?
Oh, absolutely. It’s amazing for me to be living in a different country and to be singing a song about a man nobody in the audience knew, but yet through that song, they seem to know him. And that’s an amazing feeling. It’s just given me such a purpose in life.

A lot of your songs also deal with the history of Ireland. I read that you compose your songs on a typewriter from 1916, the year of the Irish uprising, and it wasn’t an intentional purchase?
No, not at all. It’s like it was meant to be. But for me, to have a computer, there’s no history involved in it. Writing on a typewriter that was made so long ago, how many fingers have tapped on that? That is intriguing to know that someone else — or many other people, probably — have written [on that typewriter] a letter, a love letter, a poem or a gas bill, who knows?

I read a review of a show you played that was similar to a pub, where all seven of you were crammed onstage. Is there anything beneficial to playing those clubs, or would you rather it be a bigger venue?
I’m not really bothered. The only thing about playing the bigger venues is that I get very quiet before I go onstage, believe it or not. Can you imagine me not talking? But it’s true, I get really quiet and very nervous and I like to be alone. When we’re playing bigger venues usually I can find a space [to be alone]. So when I’m in a club, I just have to drink more.

What’s your drink of choice?
Guinness.

How much Guinness to you think is poured at an average Flogging Molly show?
Let me put it to you this way: [At a show my neighbor was playing], I walked up to the bar and ordered a Guinness. And the bar man said to me, “Wow, the two nights you played here” — it was back to back — “the bar sold more alcohol than it ever had before.” I remember another time we were playing the House of Blues [in LA] and our manager called up the venue and said, “How much Guinness do you have?” And the guy goes, “We’ve got plenty; we’ve got five kegs.” And our manager said, “You know what, you’d better double that.” And it was all gone before we ever got onstage. The tour that we’re doing in March, Guinness is helping us out. They’ve never ever done that for any other band.

I thought that was very apropos.
I was very surprised when I heard it. When you’re a band as big as we are — when I say big, I mean the amount of people we have on the road with us — every penny helps. We’ve been approached by many beer companies and things like that, but we’ve always refused it, because we don’t drink the stuff. But I’ve probably spent more money on Guinness than they’re actually giving us to do the tour [laughs]. Over the years I’ve definitely tallied up a few. So to me, it’s like, I’m onstage, I drink Guinness anyway, so if people are going to offer us money [from a product] that I actually sponsor myself, well then I’m okay with that.

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