Goldbug

Goldbugs’ debut album Swings and Roundabouts is not just a standalone body of work, it is a life story contained within song. The more Danilo - alias Goldbug - gradually revealed about his life in our conversation, the more clearly it shone through within his music. Of course lyrically, the elements of self-explanation make themselves clear, but this is also in reference to the melodic, expansive and atmospheric world Goldbug carefully weaves through the album.

A bustling scene of Dublin City breezed past in a lengthening Summer’s evening outside the tall windows of The Music Cafe as we sat down to discuss all things concerning Swings and Roundabouts. Danilo peeled back each layer of his life story to date with self-contained care, journeying through his time growing up in the deep countryside of the Provence region of France, his gradual disillusionment with a sheltered religious upbringing, as well as the deep pang of loneliness that accompanied uprooting and moving to Dublin freshly eighteen.

How are you feeling about your debut album release? Good? Excited? Nervous?

Quite terrified, I guess, in a way. I'm excited because it's been a long time coming, but sharing new music is a bit scary. I actually finished the album about three years ago. I've sat on it for so long. And I think it took so much out of me to make the album that after that I had to let it go. And I couldn't think about it.

And I just let it sit for a couple years. I had to give myself back the courage, and then slowly I got back around. And now we're here. This year, putting out the full thing.

I guess sometimes you make it, and then for some reason, maybe you're so into making an album that it becomes overwhelming. Because I've heard it so much. I think the process of putting it out now will feel like me being in love with it again.

When did you first start writing music?

Songwriting came late for me in a sense, so did my love for music. My brother and sister were very into music, and I was actually quite a science/math person. I kind of was like “music isn't my thing, I'm the smart one in the family.”

I was pushing it away for a while in my life until I was in my late teens and I had my first big crush on someone. And they asked me “What kind of music do you know?” and I didn't know anything. I couldn't talk about music. And that flipped the switch in my brain. From that moment, I just started to consume music obsessively, and it never went away.

How did that switch feel?

It felt like I had to catch up on a whole life's worth of things. My friends were cool, they knew all this stuff about music. Popular music wasn't really a thing in my household that much. I guess when that switch came around, and I started to listen to music I actually realized I kind of did music my whole life, by being in choirs.

When I came to Ireland, I went to UCD first to study biology. And I did a few years there. I remember everyone was always looking at me. I couldn't feel like I was at home anywhere.

And then I went out of the course and I started playing in bands. And suddenly I was like, God, there are all these kinds of people… people I vibe with so much. And it just made sense in my brain. It was like, this is where I'm meant to be.

Do you ever go back to visit where you grew up?

Yeah, I go back during the Summer. It's like the middle of nowhere, in the very south of France. A little village in the countryside. It's just so quiet and nice, it's the reset I need. I wish I didn't have to fly back to France to get that kind of reset. It's good for that. It's a little religious community, like a medieval village. A few stone houses, which were abandoned in the 60s or 70s. Both of my grandparents on my mom and dad's side are religious missionaries. And my parents are as well.

There's nothing around the village, and I really love that. It's kind of a part of me, I just like isolation and nature. Quiet. I definitely am a country boy. I think you can kind of hear that in places on the album.

Definitely, you can get a sense of that nature influence.

There's a song called ‘Backyard Birdbath' that's closer to the end of the record, which is literally me looking out in my backyard in France. That was a hundred percent just pulling from the scene there, and the village. I try to recreate bird sounds with inorganic instruments on that track. There's so much nature. Birds, cicadas, crickets. I stuck them in the tune, and all over the record.

I also wrote a lot of the album here in Dublin so it's also kind of me being nostalgic for the quietness of home. I do love my insects. My first love when I was a kid was animals and insects and nature, so no wonder the album feels outdoorsy.

It's so isolated where I’m from - you're so connected to the nature that you're almost part of it. And being in nature was all I had to do because I barely had any friends. My school was an hour away by train, so all my friends were far away. It was a lot of keeping yourself busy by building tree houses. That got really annoying when I was a teenager and you know you are growing out of it. You want to be around buzzy places so, that's kind of why at 18 I came here as well.

There's a lot of callbacks to reflecting on your childhood in the album. Would you agree with that?

Yea, definitely. Even for Swings and Roundabouts, the album name, I thought of like Snakes and Ladders. I don't know why I reminisce so much over that. I guess I had a kind of peculiar childhood. It was very closed off. And I guess now as an adult I kind of look back on being oblivious to things in a nice way, maybe I was just happy out in my bubble.

I guess that's kind of how I feel about music. It's like being happy out in your bubble of creation. I'm kind of nostalgic for the kind of peace you have as a kid, which I want to get now, as an adult, but it's been hard to obviously tap into that. Life's kind of crazy. When I got to Ireland everything was thrown at me. I had been so sheltered. My band friends were saying things like, “I played in rock bands since I was 12 years old, started smoking cigarettes, drinking at 12…” At 12 years old I was climbing a tree to eat cherries and trying to catch frogs.

What sort of role did religion play in your life, growing up?

My grandparents and my parents are religious missionaries and I went to some missionary schools growing up and was always involved in church stuff. Religion was… pushed onto me in every way. When I moved here, I figured out I can kind of maybe think about things myself, by exploring the world, having my first relationships…

But I felt like I was pulled in two directions. From this thing that was such a big part of my first twenty years of my life and now, the more recent parts of my life..

In these songs, it's just me sometimes talking out loud, trying to figure out what I believe or what's important to me, and just being completely confused with it all, really. Maybe I'm not so much now, but a lot of the songs I wrote have been in the last five years and I was much more confused about things maybe six, seven years ago.

What are you most excited for in the future of Goldbug?

I'm going back up in August with Chris (Ryan) to make more music with him and do the second record, which is just exciting. We produced the record together. And I'm really excited to release the first album and to play my show in Bello Bar.

And we have a little show in Latvia as well. It's just a random spot none of us have ever been to.

These little things are kind of all new things, which is exciting. But at the end of the day, all I care about really is writing music. So I'm just happy to write the next stuff. I'd love to have another album ready for next year.

I don't know if that'll happen, but that's the most exciting thing to me.

Swings and Roundabouts is out on Friday, June 26th. Goldbugs’ album launch show will take place in Bello Bar on Friday, July 3rd. Tickets are on sale through foggynotions.ie For more information and to pre-order the album on Vinyl, see goldbug.bandcamp.com