Jim O’Rourke Interview

                                       Jim O’Rourke Interview - April 2026

‘Maverick’ is a word that seems to have been coined specifically to describe Jim O’Rourke. To enumerate his various band affiliations, collaborations and solo projects, which span several genres over the last 40+ years, would leave little room in this article for selected portions of the actual interview. Shorthand will have to suffice: he is best known among ‘indie’ music listeners for his late ’90s/early ’00s production and membership of Sonic Youth, his production work on Wilco’s two most experimental albums Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born, mixing Joanna Newsom’s magna opera Ys and Have One On Me, and his run of singer/songwritery albums taking their titles from the titles of Nic Roeg films (more of which anon). O’Rourke has lived in Japan for the last fifteen years, and frequently collaborates musically with his domestic partner Eiko Ishibashi. The two met when Ishibashi played flute on an album of Burt Bacharach covers which O'Rourke was producing. Their most recent record together is last year’s Paraedolia. They play the National Concert Hall on Saturday and Sunday, April 25th and 26th, the second date augmented by hardanger d’amore fiddle player and former member of The Gloaming, Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh. 

DT: Tell me about how living in Japan influences your work. Why did you relocate there in the first place?

JO’R: I just felt very at home here, from the first time I came. Plus, it’s easy to disappear, especially since I moved out of Tokyo into the countryside.

DT: It kind of removes you from the American or Western indie scene. For someone who wants to be alone, you get an awful lot done.

JO’R: It’s because I like to work every day. And I get more done by myself. I personally never really had anything to do with, what you say, the Western indie scene, otherwise that I worked in it. I worked as an engineer and producer in that world for quite a few years. But, I mean, that isn’t really my background, I don’t come from that. I didn’t grow up playing in bands.

DT: But you were in Sonic Youth, you were in Wilco, as well as producing them, who were two of the biggest bands of the time.

JO’R: It so happened that I did work with people like that. The Sonic Youth thing was almost an accident that I ended up playing with them, because the first record that I worked with them as an engineer and producer was at a period where Kim really didn’t want to play bass, and she hadn’t played bass on the previous record, and they felt that maybe they should put some bass on the record. And since I was staying at the studio, they just said, ‘Well, if you have any ideas for bass parts, put them down after we go home.’ So I ended up playing bass on the whole record and so they were like, ‘Oh, you know, now you have to go out on tour with us. We need you to play the bass parts.’ And at the time, it was like, ‘Oh, this would be great.’ I enjoyed working with them, enjoyed being with them, so it seemed like a great idea. ‘Sure. Why not? That’ll be fun.’ And Wilco. I mean, Jeff (Tweedy) and I had our own project (Loose Fur) with Glenn (Kotche), which was also before he was in Wilco, because he played drums with me.  Jeff just liked a record I had made around that time called Bad Timing. He heard something that he thought was, at that point, what was missing from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I wasn’t really involved, the record was pretty much recorded when I started working with them. It’s from the next record, Jeff just felt I should be involved from the beginning. 

DT: But those records are noticeably different from the rest of their work, mostly because of your presence.

JO’R: But also because of where Jeff was at the time. And also, I think the version of the band that did A Ghost Is Born – and this isn’t meant as a slight to other members before and afterwards – but that was my favourite incarnation of that band. I thought that the members were really super talented, but also there was a modesty in their playing, and they were all like multi-instrumentalists. So it was a really good combination. So I think that had a lot to do with it. It was really a new band, even though it was still the same people from before, but they were kind of going at it from a new perspective. So I think that’s why those records sound different from before and afterwards, because of people that weren’t there and the people that were there.

DT: That’s very modest of you. You don’t want to take all the credit.

JO’R: If I did a record of theirs now, it would sound different because, you know, my way of working and taste would have changed from then. But at that point, there were a lot of bands where I was coming from another direction, because my background is in playing in orchestras and being a composer and playing jazz. A lot of the musicians at that time were interested in me working with them. They were people who were coming from their music towards this other music. There was starting to be an overlap of interest in that music. So I was someone who could help them with that. But I’ve been asked by other people, even kind of recently, and I would say, I really don’t think I can help you with anything, because that’s not what I’m good at. You want to make this kind of record, and that’s not what I do. So I think I was a good person to be a good watch out on the bridge, as they crossed over.

DT: How do you feel about that whole period now, looking back?

JO’R: It really took over my life for a while. Also it was sort of the end of an era. It wasn’t too much later that being able to make records that way and work that way became kind of impossible. And I didn’t want to go into the professional world. I was starting to get asked to do records, but I didn’t really care about their music. I didn’t like being in that situation, because I only wanted to work with people who I thought I could do something for them. I found something in it that was interesting to me, and more and more I knew my place in that role was like, it’s time had come to an end. So I don’t feel bad about not continuing with it. I think I did what I could do, and then I got out before it got awkward.

DT: How does your collaboration with Eiko Ishibashi work? Because she’s more of a traditional songwriter than you are now, as well as being an improvising musician.

JO’R: She’s fairly similar to me. Actually, her background was playing drums in a punk band when she was young, but also she was a classically trained pianist, and did get a lot of film soundtrack things, and played in a lot of improvised music settings, with all sorts of people. So the singer songwriter things – I think for her it is very similar to what it was for me. I think she and I approach things the same way: we have you could say a question or a quandary that we want to work through, and sometimes that involves songwriting and making records like that. But I know she doesn’t think of it as her main thing, it’s just part of the wheel of things that she does.

DT: Is there any difference between working with her and working with other people, because you’re in a relationship?

JO’R: We’re not married, but we’ve been together for 15 years. So, of course, there’s that. There’s a lot of shorthand. I don’t really have to explain myself very much, and she doesn’t have to explain herself very much. When we do the shows together, for her, it’s 100% improvised, and it’s like 90% improvised for me, but because I sort of restrict what materials I get to use it makes like a set list so I can somewhat recreate things from show to show, but they’re never going to be the same version. I can change the order live but Eiko doesn’t know what order I’m going to play things in or what I’m going to do. So for her, it’s 100% improvised. I just restricted a little bit to create that formal structure that everything hangs on.

DT: Where did you come across Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh?

JO’R: I played in Dublin three and a half years ago, and the promoter of that was involved with the World Expo in Osaka last year, and for the Irish Pavilion he was bringing over Caoimhín. I knew he was in The Gloaming, that’s where I knew him from. Caoimhín was interested in meeting me because he was starting to think about using computers with his own performances. So he came out to my studio for a few days, and we worked together and made stuff, and I showed him how I worked and then we did a performance at the Expo and also at the Irish Consulate, based on all the work we had done beforehand. And it was great. 

DT: Your parents were Irish, and you spent time here during your childhood. Do you still have family here? 

JO’R: Both of my parents were orphans, so no. But my parents never lost their accents. They never really integrated in Chicago. All their friends were Irish. There was very little American culture in my house.

DT: Do you feel an affinity when you’re here? 

JO’R: I do. I mean, Dublin feels different to me than what I remember as a kid. Even the people are a little bit different, you know? But the melancholy never goes away. That special kind of guilt. I may have been born in Chicago, but there’s a lot of Irish DNA in me, just from how I look at the world, how I either accept it or don’t accept it. I had a kind of strict Irish Catholic upbringing. I was an altar boy, so there’s that.

DT: So was I! Which we’ve both vehemently rejected. You’ve famously said, ‘I’m not a musician’. Instead, you ‘do stuff’. What is it you do? Would you be able to describe it or do it without referencing music? 

JO’R: Well, I mean, again, this probably has a lot to do with the Irish thing: I’m a bit embarrassed of having spent this much time in my life playing instruments and stuff, because they’re just for me things that I have to use to make the things I want to make. I don’t have any particular love for instruments. I’m not really interested in playing them. If I could make things without having to use them, I would. I find this is just me, because I know the bulk of people who make music don’t think this way. But I get no joy out of playing an instrument. I feel maybe embarrassment more than anything else, because the work is what’s important, not me. If I could get myself out of the equation completely, that would be the best. It’s just this attitude that the work is what’s important, that was instilled in me by my parents.

DT: You can probably do a lot now without instruments.

JO’R: Oh yeah, I don’t use them very much at all anymore. I sold most of them a few years ago. I mostly just do everything in this room now, with my few remaining things.

DT: Would Brian Eno be a good reference point, as a non-musician and producer?

JO’R: Not really. I have all respect for Brian. But I think our background and approach are quite different. I had a question like that before, and I did think of someone, but he was probably a film director.

DT: That’s what I was trying to get at with the original question, which is that maybe it’s a conceptual thing. Maybe it’s not specifically to do with music, and you were very into film and books as a kid. So it’s kind of an aesthetic that’s general for the arts. Like your fascination with Nic Roeg: is that because of the way he edits his films? Is it something to do with non-linear time?

JO’R: Big influence. Because I saw his stuff when I was in high school. And the question of how you deal with non-linear time is very easy in many of the arts, like in writing and in film. But in music, it’s really, really difficult to deal with non-linear time and to evoke non-linear time outside of just things being a reference. I can now refer to something that happened before, but you can’t do the things that you can do in film or in writing, but especially Roeg’s, especially that early period of his, and especially Performance. When I first saw those, they were really shocking to me. I had never seen any director do that. It taught me a lot about context, because for me, context is really important. How you can change the meaning of even just a single image by that change of context. Ryusuke Hamaguchi is a more contemporary director who is also very, very good at that. So I think in a way I’m probably actually just like a critic more than anything, and that instead of writing criticism, I make sounds. You know, it’s like when Godard said that the best way to make a critique of a film is to make another film. And I really took to that when I was young. That really made sense to me.

Walking On Dry Land By Denis Kehoe

Walking On Dry Land                                                                                  

By Denis Kehoe

(Serpent’s Tail, £10.99stg original paperback)

Denis Kehoe scored a palpable hit with Nights Beneath the Nation, his debut novel of three years ago, which oscillated between twin, interconnected narratives set respectively in 1950s and contemporary Dublin. This, his sophomore effort, employs a similar structural device, alternating between Angolan capital Luanda (mostly) in 2006-7, and Lisbon and Luanda from 1965 to 1977.

The near present-day portion concerns Ana de Castro, a 32-year-old woman raised in Lisbon by her father Jose and stepmother Helena, who has been living in Dublin since late adolescence. Aware from an early age that Helena was not her birth mother, she sets out on a pilgrimage to Luanda, via Lisbon, during the Christmas/New Year holiday season, to locate the woman her father had an affair with over thirty years previously. Armed only with a faded photograph of two women, a name, Solange, and a vague notion that this woman had been and possibly still is a nightclub singer, she stays with her elder half-brother Tiago and his family, while pursuing these clues through several contacts. Eventually, after an internet search and an e mail response from Solagne, mother and long-lost daughter meet up.

The portion set in the past details Jose and Helena’s courtship and marriage in Lisbon, and their subsequent emigration from Salazar’s Portugal to then-Portuguese colony Angola. The ambivalence of both parties in the early stages of their relationship is subtly rendered: they weren’t exactly crazy about each other, but evidently got along well enough to think they could make a go of it. Of course, most of the atmospheric scenes from thirty or forty year ago can only be imaginative reconstruction or even pure conjecture on Ana’s part: Helena has died of breast cancer, and Jose, now elderly and retired in Lisbon, never gets to make a personal appearance. The accumulation of unanswered questions which persist past the terminal point of the narrative (for example, why would Helena consent to raise a child who was not her own, much less one who is the progeny of her philandering husband?) linger teasingly in the air, lending it a sense of unreality. True, real life doesn’t provide neat closure, but there are some obvious conversations Ana could have to help her on her quest and elucidate her understanding of her origins, which are never allowed to take place, maybe because they would tamper with the novel’s carefully manufactured mystery.  

Perhaps inevitably, Ana’s discovery of the mother who had no hand in bringing her up, while it answers some questions, proves to be underwhelming. It dissolves in some banal and quotidian observations on romantic relationships between the two women, where they discuss the loss of self which accompanies the compromise necessary for all committed couplings.

Ana is a PhD student in Film Studies in Dublin, and teaches film in UCD and NCAD, and this professional background sanctions much use of film references. Indeed, the novel is drenched in them. It gives nothing away to say that the last two sentences of the book are: ‘The image turns to a freeze-frame. Frame after frame after frame, as the strip of celluloid film slips out of the projector.’ However, Ana’s constant casting of herself and her parents as screen idols can grow a little forced, and further contributes to that overriding impression of unreality.  

The tropes of Postcolonial Studies are also well ventilated here, with Jose, who works as a publishing editor, thinking: ‘It’s Africa, Angola, Luanda they’re putting into the Portuguese…these young writers, moulding, manipulating the mother tongue to their own devices. Colonising, civilizing, the shiver of a thrill of a Luandino sentence, Kimbundu words, phrases skittering across history and time, taking their place on the pages of a book in another language. Sometimes he remembers, and sometimes he forgets, those writers who have been sent off to the prison camp of Tarrafal in Cape Verde, because of their political affiliations.’; and Solange later opining: ‘ “…all whites believe they are superior in a way, whether it’s in France or Portugal or the States. They still have that attitude, you know, even after all this time, even after everything that’s happened…But the truth is they just can’t imagine that other people see the world differently, that Africans don’t see it the way they do. That our reality, our way of being in this world, is different.” ’

But while there are many evocative descriptions of Luanda, and while there is much to admire here, overall the novel feels over-researched, or does not hide its research well enough. Thus, it lacks the stamp of experiential authenticity which informed Kehoe’s first novel. Hopefully he can recapture that more visceral spirit in the future, of which his undoubted talent is more than capable.

First published in The Sunday Independent.

Nights Beneath The Nation By Denis Kehoe

Nights Beneath The Nation

By Denis Kehoe

(Serpent’s Tail, £9.99stg p/b)

The debut novel from Dubliner Denis Kehoe is narrated by Daniel Ryan, born in 1930 and raised in rural Ireland, who has returned to Dublin to revisit scenes from his young manhood, after an absence of nearly forty years spent developing a successful hairdressing business in New York. His narrative alternates cleverly between 1950/51 and 1997/98, since Daniel has rented a house overlooking the sea at Seapoint in order to write a memoir of a pivotal year in his development, when as a clerk in the Civil Service he tasted his first forbidden fruits of bohemian freedom in the big city. The Dublin of those days may frequently be characterised retrospectively as a stifling provincial backwater, but as Daniel tells it there was still shenanigans to be got up to, even if it was swept under the carpet. Having encountered the enigmatic theatre director Maeve O’Donnell in Bewley’s, she takes Daniel under her wing and helps him locate his nascent sexual identity: at one of her wild parties he kisses a boy, and finds he likes it.

The book is particularly good at capturing the manic energetic adrenalin rush of newly liberated youth, especially when contrasted with its portrait of small town life, where middle aged men ‘became the fathers they had once defined themselves against.’ This heady atmosphere is fuelled in no small measure by the life-changing thrill of first love, for Daniel has met dashing UCD student Anthony, and they fall for each other in a big way. Meanwhile, back in the near present, the older Daniel has become embroiled in a wary friendship with the shadowy Gerard, a twenty-something he met in The George, who also happens to be researching and writing a book about an actor and Spanish Civil War veteran (Republican side) who ran with the same crowd as Daniel did in those days. How much does Gerard already know about Daniel, if anything, and how much does he want to find out?

 The book is very well plotted, with the dual time perspective doing the trick, and even becomes something of a page turner, when a murder mystery element is added to the mix. Daniel and Anthony are happily rehearsing their parts for Maeve’s version of Lorca’s Blood Wedding, of which telling use is made as a mythical underlay, and Anthony is swatting for his finals, when the repressive rigidities of the real world intrude, and things take a turn towards the dark side. Anthony’s right-thinkingly uptight parents discover his affair, and threaten him with the asylum, where they had already had him committed for six months for a previous relationship, unless he gives up Daniel. They’ve even thoughtfully arranged a sham marriage for him, to the daughter of friends of theirs knocked up by a long vanished tourist, doubtless otherwise destined for a Magdalene laundry, and her child for an ‘orphanage’. The nexus of church/state control, bolstered by collusively villainous shrinks intent on pathologising and ‘curing’ homosexuality, is subtly rendered, with reference even being made to Dr. Noel Browne’s abortive Mother and Child scheme. Small wonder the next generation of gays took to the streets. Love in a dark time, indeed.

But Daniel is a queen of the old school, and, like Victor Maskell in John Banville’s The Untouchable, feels only derision for those noisily marching for the right to do it in the street. Even so, if there is a criticism to be made of this fine first outing, it is that sometimes Daniel sounds younger than his 67 years. Also, given the time and place, he seems relatively guilt-free about his then frowned upon and illegal orientation. But, there again, he is an individual, as well as being representative; and few of us were around at the time to know exactly what it was actually like, and even those among us who were might well have been inhabiting vastly different milieux.

What Kehoe has done brilliantly is to examine the ramifications of a gay life, bases on the life experience of an older gay man, and evoked the cruel hypocrisies of a time which condemned homosexuals to a lifetime of public toilet or bathhouse assignations because gay pair-bonding was vigorously discouraged, by family and society. He has also told a good story, and will hopefully tell many more.    

First published in The Sunday Independent