Fionn Boland

About

I'm a musician from Dublin, currently based in London. My music sits somewhere between folk and psychedelic rock, which came about almost by accident. I originally come from a rock background, having played in a band called Sundown for eight years. After relocating to London, I've started playing weekly pub gigs in Irish pubs around the city, and a big part of these gigs is the trad element. So to get booked for gigs, I had to learn how to play traditional Irish music and started to pick up on the ways that other artists wrote songs in a completely different genre.

One of the biggest things I'm trying to do at the minute is write songs that stand up by themselves. When I played in a band, it felt easier to write when the band could prop it up. I think the true challenge for me right now is making the whole piece stand up by itself and I definitely haven’t mastered that yet but it's been a really fun challenge.

This year I released my first singles, Over My Head and Spirals, and sold out my first headline show at Paper Dress Vintage.

Music

Over My Head

The song was written as a stream of consciousness having spent over 2 years working up the confidence to release music as a solo artist. Once I decided I was going to give it a crack and release music under my own name, I felt I could let my guard down and write from a more personal place. Then came ‘Over My Head’, a moody track about working up the courage to chase your dreams.

A big part of this project has been wanting the visuals to be treated with the same importance as the music itself. So with that in mind, I travelled to Palma to work with Irish filmmaker Rory McMahon. We set about creating a music video that followed a character who is down on their luck trying to work through the problems in their head. This was our first attempt at animating footage and it syncs in line with the arc of the song.

"Over My Head," the official music video.

Spirals

Spirals is a song written about being caught in a storm. For me, the lyrical content has multiple meanings, with one aspect being the experience of writing the song whilst the storm is happening around you, and then on the other hand about internal struggles, and how they can manifest in a spiral-like way sometimes.

To achieve the visuals and artwork, I worked with an Irish filmmaker called Rory McMahon. We travelled to Connemara, to a place called Lough Na Fooey set out to achieve the aesthetic of being alone in an otherworldly place. During the shoot, we got very lucky with a storm breaking out which added to the meaning behind the song and brought the visuals to life. The artwork itself shows a boat washed up to shore representing the aftermath of the storm depicted in the song.

Fionn sitting on a boat on the shore of Lough Na Fooey

Fionn sitting on a chair in the middle of a quiet road in Connemara

"Spirals," the official music video.

Paper Dress Vintage

First headline show

Black and white photo of Fionn singing into a microphone

Fionn singing and playing acoustic guitar under purple and orange stage light

The Paper Dress Vintage neon sign glowing pink behind a guitarist

In August, I played my first headline show as a solo artist, selling out Paper Dress Vintage in Hackney. This acted as proof of concept for a bigger production I'd had in my head for quite some time. Having played pub gigs around the city for the last two years, I was no longer getting the same fulfilment from playing covers and felt like it was time to challenge myself.

It took a village to put together, as I had a six-piece band of very talented musicians join me on the night. On drums and guitar I had Ben Andrewes and Rob Fenner, two members of the South-East London band ‘Siblings’. Bass guitar was Cian Byrne of the Dublin soul band ‘Fizzy Orange’, and on fiddle I had my pub gig partner in crime Ann Moroney. Lastly, my supremely talented girlfriend Annalisa Sorensen joined me on vocals for the evening.

I wanted the gig to serve as a timeline of my music career to date, with songs like "Fisherman's Blues" and "Stuck In The Middle With You" finding their way into the setlist. I have memories of playing both of these songs at some of the earliest gigs I ever played, over ten years ago, and it felt fitting to bring them with me on the night. I played acoustic versions of some Sundown songs like "Graveyard" and "Deal With The Devil", then a mix of my solo music, both released and unreleased, and finished with some of the trad music I play in the pubs.

"Harvest Moon," live at Paper Dress Vintage, London.

SUNDOWN

I started this band with two of my best friends back in 2018. We began in one of our garages, teaching ourselves our instruments as we went. Within the first year we played Indiependence, a festival in Cork.

We went on to release a handful of records I'm proud of and played some great venues around Dublin. The most recent was a four-track EP called "Be There," a mix of old songs we'd never finished and brand new ones, which felt like us taking on a bigger piece of work than we'd tried before. We marked it with a gig at The Workman's Club in November, to a crowd of over 150 people.

1.5M+Streams

"Sleazy Pinstripe," Sundown.