User:JSFarman/sandbox/Dermot Kennedy

Kennedy first took off stateside on Spotify when he released his single “After Rain” in 2016 very old folk sound deep into the future, and you could hear an unmistakable conversation happening between two musical genres born of deprivation and strife on separate sides of the Atlantic. He was a busker 2017 EP “Doves & Ravens,” very old folk sound deep into the future, and you could hear an unmistakable conversation happening between two musical genres born of deprivation and strife on separate sides of the Atlantic.

DERMOT KENNEDY Angels, demons, ghosts, memories and all the dimensions of love haunt the Irish songwriter Dermot Kennedy. He has a grainy, melancholy voice that can crest with a howling rasp; he’s an acknowledged fan of David Gray. Onstage at SXSW, his songs revealed their folky structures, built on guitar or piano. But they also harnessed the dynamics of electronic dance music, with drumbeats sputtering into double time and choruses that exploded into his howl. The valley-and-peak production makes his songs more suitable to current radio, though it may be a Faustian bargain: W ill the tracks sound dated in a few years? Pareles NY Times

Spotify success stories of 2018, Dermot Kennedy, who has gone from busking in Dublin to sold-out shows across the world, more than 300 millions streams and gaining fans in Travis Scott and Taylor Swift

Dermot Kennedy was 16, he would travel from his rural hometown to Dublin to busk on Grafton Street, the storied busking hotspot where Damien Rice and Glen Hansard sang to shoppers more than a decade before him.

Soon after distributing his first songs to Spotify, one got picked up by Discover Weekly – the playlist of songs that automatically appears on every users account each Monday – and soon it was doing so well that the heads of Spotify were notified.

Rathcoole, with a population of fewer than 4,500

I was obsessed with was singer-songwriters like Glen Hansard and David Gray, so music was the world I always wanted to exist in. I played in open mics in Dublin—there was one event that was comedy, poetry and music, and I always played the music shows but I was always kind of jealous of the poets.

ripped-down acoustic before you began incorporating electronic music and hip-hop, and you even have an EP executive-produced by Mike Dean.

And the progress has been of breakneck speed over the past 24 months. Kennedy attributes Spotify to his rise from just another young man with a guitar to one who has spent most of this month on tour in the US.

ennedy says he wrote his first song at 15 and got to perform it at a singer-songwriter night at Bruxelles bar in Dublin city centre. It gave him the bug to really go for it and after his Leaving Cert he studied for a degree in music at NUI Maynooth.