Peter Doolan - I Am a Tree Rooted to the Spot and a Snake Moves Around Me,in a Circle

  by Steev Burgess

published: 8 / 7 / 2025

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Peter Doolan has surely given us the longest album title since his last one and Tyrannosaurus Rex's 'My People Were Fair They Had Sky In Their Hair But Now They're Content To Wear Stars On Their Brow’, and there the similarity ends - apart from the fact perhaps, both albums are full of very wordy songs that for the most part move at pace. There is, however, little whimsy here, just raw feelings. Peter Doolan's CD lyric book runs to thirteen pages of poetic, punky, sometimes bitter words, laments and a murder ballad and much else, that I read on the bus which whetted my appetite before spinning the disc. Doolan's songwriting prowess and personality has attracted close to twenty (I lost count three times) collaborating musicians from London's alternative folk and Irish diaspora. The album opens with a deceptively jaunty tune for a melancholy lament about the lovelorn protagonist just being 'The Tissue That Dries Your Tears'. 'Daniel & Matilda' is a well-crafted murder ballad, more like short story in rhyme, which is the odd track out on this album really, a fiction amongst dawning realities. The poetically-titled 'Cinder in the Sky' does not flatter to deceive, as the poet hitches a ride back from the bright lights to go back home to Tipperary ominously "wild and free/like a cinder in the sky. “ ‘Sweet Mavoureen’ (darling or beloved one), takes the pace down, with the strings couching a broken vocal as the poet is watching "sweetness giving her sweetness away" in a tortured waltz where none the less "these old memories keep glistening, seem to keep my light alive". There's something reminiscent of Brian Wilson's 'Caroline No' but only in sentiment, mot sound. You start to realise at this point, that this is a break-up or album of sorry realisation. 'Jingoism and the Pacifist' is a beautiful spoken vocal poem of passion and anger in equal measure, that is read over piano and strings. It is impossible to pick out a segment in this nightmare like scenario of dead fruits, waves like whores kisses on Virginia shores, subversive rivers and honey rotted teeth. I'd have bought the album for the poetry of this track alone though. 'Bit By the Gadfly' has an Oasis-like guitar strum and, come to think of it, Doolan's vocal could perhaps be described as a world-weary version of Liam Gallagher's with an element of another complex wordsmith, Nikki Sudden, with last syllables dragging wearily behind the determined words delivered on the punch of the beat. 'Times are Hard For Dreamers' seems like another slow, acoustic one, but deceptively seems to pick up when the drums, bass and strings kick in as the disillusionment in modern times seems perhaps, embodied in the woman at the centre of the song, rather like the work of Vic Chesnutt. 'The Dust of Your Disinterest' powers in like a post- punk Libertines song, with similar sentiments to the previous track, with that well known feeling of lingering heartbreak and cycle of lament where "the sickest thing of all is I can't get you out of my mind/Tou used me up and walked away and never looked behind." A punk unbearable lightness of being perhaps. 'A Time Will Come" is full of audio surprises. From a false start of drums and piano leading into what is almost a New Orleans funeral march meets complete withhloosely arranged trumpets and trombones, reaching a crescendo like a brass plaque saying "There's no point waiting for someone out of sight." 'Mesopotamia' is a long, Swell Maps-like punk thrash of disillusionment with both life’s trivia and wars, seeing the political and personal entwined. "I'm off to New York City, maybe Paris or Madrid/ Oh I think I'm a man of the world/I'm just some poor misguided kid." ‘Where Wraiths Pass Through’ has that late sleepless night feel, a mostly acoustic lament of imperfect love lost building up a to a musical balm to longing. The acoustic ‘A Song For Absolutely Nobody’ is another that wouldn't have been out of place on Vic Chesnutt's 'Salesman and Bernadette’ album made with Lambchop. This song wraps up an album with almost whispered memories to the lost love that closes an album that seems like a purging of a soul and heading for the last page of a diary, that is ripped out abruptly, as there is no more more to be said. It takes a braver man than I to write such truths for public consumption, yet as all such albums are, they are a one-sided account of the affair where the poet has the upper hand. Women in particular, might wonder how it looks to the subject of many of the song. This is a crafted collection tugging on the heartstrings and feelings that I suspect many men could relate to.

Track Listing:-

1 The Tissue That Driesn Your Tears
2 Daniel & Matilda
3 Cinder in the Sky
4 My Sweet Mavourneen
5 Jingoism & the Pacifist
6 Bit by the Gadfly
7 Times are Hard for Dreamers
8 The Dust of your Disinterest
9 A Time Will Come, (Out of Sight)
10 Mesopotamia
11 Where Wraiths Pass Through
12 A Song for Absolutely Nobody

Band Links:-

https://peterdoolan.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/p.doolanmusic
https://www.instagram.com/p__doolan

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