Foy Vance told David Hennessy about his new album which closes the chapter on a seven year, 26- year arc that goes back to his father’s death.
Emmy Award-winning Bangor singer-songwriter Foy Vance has just released his latest album The Wake.
It is not just an album but the final chapter in his 26-year and seven year odyssey of discovery.
The path began in 1999, after the unexpected passing of his father, a traveling preacher who moved their family to the American South. In the midst of grief, he committed to make seven albums, each one shaped by the impact of that loss.
Since his 2007 debut Hope, Vance has earned admiration from artists including Ed Sheeran, Bonnie Raitt, Kacey Musgraves, and Sir Elton John.
To celebrate the release of The Wake, Foy is about to kick off a world tour that does not come to a close until April next year.
This will kick into gear with a special hometown show – A Celebration of Life with Foy Vance – coming to Custom House Square in Belfast, Northern Ireland on August 15, 2026.
Foy Vance took time to chat to the Irish World.
How does it feel to be getting the album out?
“It feels good.
“When I set out on this journey, it was to make seven albums and the fact that I saw it through is incredible to me because it’s the only thing I ever saw through.
“I was that kid that did gymnastics for a month, swimming for a month, diving for a month, golf for a month, football for a month.
“Never stuck at a job.
“This is the one thing that I stuck to so I’m pretty proud of myself that I saw through to the end.”
It was all one big concept from your very first album to this, wasn’t it?
“Yes, it was.
“My dad always called that Jesuit adage, ‘Give me the boy until he is 7, and I will show you the man’.
“I think something about that just bled into me that day when I was writing that first song that really mattered.
“I thought, ‘I need to make seven albums that have songs that have impacted me or helped me in the way that this one has and by then, I’ll have figured out what I am as an artist’.
“But I kept it to myself.
“No one knew about it until the sixth record was out.
“It was a private kind of thing.”
Now that you have made seven albums how do you reflect on your journey along the way?
“All the growth that I’ve had over the years has been worth it irrespective of what it did commercially or any of that, how many it sold or whatever.
“That was never the purpose of this.
“The purpose was to grow and learn and dig and excavate and stay interested.
“Everyone says it’s the journey and not the destination.
“There’s truth in that because soon as you hit the goal, that’s a box ticked but all the lessons, all the gleaning, all the growth was done getting there.
“As soon as you got there, you realise every end is actually just a new beginning.
“It’s not the end of anything as much as it is the beginning of something else.
“It felt really good to close it out in that way and it feels very freeing now.
“I don’t feel tied to any process particularly now other than just continuing to write and continuing to work and to create and whatever comes of it now, it’s just all about enjoying it and celebrating the fact that we’re here.”
How does it feel to have finished the seven, your seven album odyssey? How different from just finishing a record?
“Do you know what? As chance would have it I finished that record 26 years to the day from setting out on the journey.
“I was driving up from Bath, where the studio was, up to my home in Scotland, a 10 hour drive and on that 10 hour drive, I went through a variety of lifetimes.
“I felt at once kind of so pleased.
“The OCD nature that I have was so pleased the fact that the seven albums lined up 26 years to the day.
“And then, ‘It’s done. I finished it. I completed it. Wow, I finally did something that I set out to do and I completed it. I got to the end of it’.
“That felt great and then it was sort of replaced with a little bit of fear like, ‘What do I do now?’
“But then I think in that moment, that was quickly replaced also by that realisation that, ‘Whatever you want, Foy.’
“I thought maybe that was me for a while, ‘Am I going to stop making records? Is this it? Why did I set seven? Is that it now?’
“I wasn’t sure myself and now I realise I think what I’d done was just set a training ground for myself like a university course, a 26 year university course in songwriting.”
If that is the case, have you just graduated with honours?
“I got a 2.2 but it’s okay, I got my diploma.”
Did you feel your father’s presence on the journey?
“That’s the thing I have felt the most along this journey.
“I think that’s the thing that I realised the day that he passed.
“The moment that he passed, I was writing a song that when I heard he passed, I finished.
“I was making up this song at 1.30 in the morning 30 January 1999 little did I know as that was happening to me and I was feeling deeply emotional with these chords that I was playing, this melody that I was singing, I didn’t know at the time but he was dying at that moment.
“When I woke up the next day and heard from the family who had been trying to contact me all night obviously but- I’m still not good with phones.
“I woke up and I got the call from them and I went out the back and sat and for the first time in my life, wrote a song that didn’t come from a formula.
“It came from a spirit.
“It just fell out in a way that I was not used to at that point and I think what I realised was that every time I picked my guitar up, it was like my dad was my co- writer.
“All those quotes and parables and philosophies that he would bombard me with that I would get annoyed at suddenly were precious, were gold dust.
“I wanted to distil them.
“I wanted to meditate in such a way that I could try and figure out everything he ever said to me, so my father’s been a huge part of this journey.
“Grief is something that we don’t talk about a lot, certainly not good grief, the upside of it but it took 26 years for me to properly process that whole situation of losing him at that age to figure out what this means.”
Out of interest what was that song that you say you finished after his passing? Is it something that has featured on an album?
“No, no, it’s a song called Crying in the Night.
“No, I think I realised in that moment too, ‘Oh, I’ve been looking at music the wrong way’.
“Every song I wrote had to be something that could be played, could be heard, could maybe get on radio, could maybe be good at a gig or whatever.
“I think in that moment I realised, ‘Forget all that bullshit. Engage with the song. The song’s meant to help you and if it does anything outside of that, then that’s fine’.
“So that was one of the songs that was good for me and helped me and was useful for me but I don’t know that anyone else should have to hear it.”
Hi, I’m the Preacher’s Son is a very autobiographical song..
“Yeah, it was the last song to be written for that record.
“I think as much as we try to not be our parents in a lot of ways, we end up them one way or another and although I don’t have any kind of definable faith in anything other than a mystery, other than the question, I think there is a lot of similarity in what we do.
“He was interested in finding stuff out and then exposing it to other people, revealing it to other people and I guess essentially that’s what I am doing too.”
The album starts with the track A.I. It’s something that people are talking about more and more, has it been on your mind also?
“Well I think, soon as I heard about the advances as they were, that it can now think for itself, we’re creating sentient AI, that’s terrifying.
“Even Geoffrey Hinton (known as the ‘Godfather of AI’), the guy that won the Nobel Prize.
“When he was given a speech he said, ‘Listen, this comes with a caveat. Be careful because we’ve produced this thing now but one thing we can be sure of is if this is in the hands of corporations, our safety will not be the first concern’.
“I guess it was born out of a bit of concern for what’s happening with AI.
“It’s inevitable.
“Whatever’s going to happen is going to happen.
“What I say is not going to change much.
“I guess that song is not about fear of AI as much as the joy of human limitation: Joy of failure, the beauty of failure, the beauty of mistakes which is a very human thing.
“I guess one day it might be able to replicate that but it will be replicated with an algorithm and a formula.
“That’s what I like about humans: That we fail, we strive for this perfection and then we don’t reach it and then we get upset with ourselves but in that moment, that’s where there’s gold. That’s where all the gold is.”
Your aim with the sound of the track was not to create something perfect but something very human..
“You go back to all those old records that we all know and love from seventies rock and roll or whatever.
“If you listen to them, they’re riddled with mistakes and little moments that now you would take that out and you would clean that up and put it through a compressor so that it’s broadcast ready and all this nonsense.
“These guys were just absolutely pouring out their internal world onto wax.
“So yeah, it was important that this last one was just five people in a room, roll the tape and let’s go.”
Call Me Anytime is about fatherhood, isn’t it?
“And again failure.
“Failure and acceptance of failure is probably a theme throughout the record.
“I think if you stand back and you zoom out a little bit, having kids is a little bit solipsistic, don’t you think? ‘Let there be children that are just like me. More mes. Let there be more me’.
“It’s kind of a wild thing to do.
“And then they’re here and they’re looking to you as a guide.
“I guess in that song I’m acknowledging that I wasn’t a great guide at times in their lives.
“And again, the song was for me.
“The fact that I’ve made a record is great and the fact that it’s resonating with people is great but it’s reason to be is because it was me engaging with the fact that I needed to step up.
“I was dropping the ball, not focused in the way that I should be and these young beings are here and they’re looking to me.
“For good, better or worse, they’re looking to me as the guide and I need to be in a position to do that and I need to be able to respond, not just react.”
Acknowledging shortcomings is a big theme of the record. There is also love, faith, hope..
“Yeah, grief, religion, frameworks.
“It’s all in there.
“It’s all in there.
“Well it had to be kind of all-encompassing to close out the chapter.
“There’s a song on there called I’m Not Celebrating which, when I wrote it, was written as a breakup sort of song type thing.
“I had to change some lyrics and I think that it went from being a song about breaking up to about ending this journey, this thing with my dad.
“It felt like putting the last nail in the coffin.
“I feel like I spent 26 years, in a way, commiserating his death and now I feel like I’m ready to celebrate his life and the life he gave me, celebrate life in general, you know?
“I think we’re born every day and we die every night so get going. Get up, get going.”
It is all about celebrating life for you now. You have named your Belfast date in August as a celebration of life. Are you looking forward to getting back close to home?
“I’m very much looking forward to that night.
“It’s going to be a hoedown and it’s kicking off the world tour out of Belfast.
“Then we go round the rest of the UK and then down into Ireland, and then we’re over to Europe.
“Then we do the East Coast of America, then the West Coast of America, into ‘27 I think finish up in Australia, New Zealand in April next year.
“But it starts in Belfast.
“We get sent out from there.
“Kind of like the Titanic.”
You have had incredible moments touring with Ed Sheeran for example. What jumps out as a highlight? Is it stages you have played?
“As soon as you said the stages, the first thing that came to mind was playing Wembley.
“That’s just a wild thing that I never in a million years dreamed that I would say ‘Goodnight Wembley’, which I did, just to say I did it.
“That was pretty profound.
“And getting to open up for Bonnie Raitt.
“I opened up for her twice actually, on two of her tours but the first time was back in 2005 and it marked me indelibly just watching her.
“She was a class act everywhere, on and off stage, an absolute class act and I just left so inspired.
“I was like, ‘Wow, that woman has got it down. She’s got it down. Her career is built on a direct relationship between her and her audience via music’.
“There wasn’t much infrastructure around her, she just didn’t suck and didn’t die as Willie Nelson said.
“She kept going and built up her audience and I thought, ‘Well, that seems like a sure fire way rather than trying to jump through hoops of industry to meet criteria for this, that or the other, just keep going, do what you want and be authentic in it and don’t give up. Keep going out there’.
“That’s probably one of the most profoundly impacting artists that I’ve experienced.
“I think it was something about that moment in time.
“I was trying to figure out how I was going to cultivate a career in this being that no one wanted to play the type of stuff I wanted to write,” Foy laughs.
“I saw her and just felt incredibly inspired.
“In fact I wrote a song called You and I right after that tour.
“It was like, ‘That’s what I want. What you’ve got, that direct relationship between your audience and you. That’s beautiful because you can stand on that, anything that industry puts together is a house of cards’.”
So what’s next? As you said before you are free to do whatever you want to do now..
“Yeah, I am free to do whatever.
“As of April 2027, who knows?”
The Wake is out on Friday 13 March.
Foy Vance plays Rough Trade East on 22 March, Custom House Square, Belfast on 15 August and tours the UK and Ireland in October.
For more information, click here.
