Page 9 of If Not for My Baby
“How’d you get your father’s cynicism when he wasn’t even here to raise you? Here,” she says, pointing the phone in my direction. “Watch this one.”
The video she shows me is a fifteen-second clip playing on a loop of Halloran jamming at some music festival. It’s golden hour, and he’s awash in soft summer light. His eyes are obscured by round John Lennon–style sunglasses, and his long, curly brown hair falls across his face as he plays. He’s wearing a pair of sensible navy slacks, white high-tops, and a casualbutton-down. No man jewelry. No dumb tattoos. He looks more like a classics professor than a rock star.
He plays the guitar deftly, and I know from my school’s theater band that those chords are no joke. He’s so caught up, he bares his teeth and thrashes his head, overcome by the gravity of the sound. Right when the climax of the song crests, the loop begins again.
The caption reads,Halloran last summer at Carolina Fest. Been waiting since then for a new album from our woodland dreamboat andKingfisherdid not disappoint! Counting down the minutes until he comes back to Charlotte.
And below, the comments are as follows:
Jess_2672:Ok and he’s 6’6 bye
Halloranmylove22:I just bit my phone in half.
Paigexyx213:I’m fine everything’s fine *walks off a cliff*
IfNotForMyBabyTom:I NEED HIM BIBLICALLY
Halcyon_Eyes:Halloran is not only the Shakespeare of our generation (srsly go listen to the lyrics of under a silver sun) but he’s THAT gorgeous and lives in a castle in Ireland how is he real????
TXmom007:What a cool guy!
I narrow my gaze at my mom. “Was that one you?”
My mom only shrugs, mischief in her eyes.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “I don’t really see it.” That whole Irish Jim-Morrison-meets-Jesus-if-he-lived-in-the-forest thing isn’t really for me. I like a clean-cut, American boy. Like Aaron Tveit or Jonathan Groff, or Mike. “But I’m excited tomeet him and the rest of the band,” I add, to brighten my mom’s spirits. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, like you said. I’m getting excited.”
That last bit gets her. I can see it in her hopeful smile. She doesn’t want me doing this for her, and I don’t want her thinking I am even when…I am.
Sitting back down at my desk, I suck in a deep breath and sign my name on the dotted line. I send a picture back to Jen and Lionel and release a shaky exhale.
No going back now.
Four
All right, so my mom—andthe entire internet, I guess—was not entirely wrong.
The guy is, at minimum, a poet.
And a spectacular vocalist.
And perhaps a musical genius.
I’m only three hours into the eight-hour bus ride to Memphis and I’ve already listened to his entire discography. The snoring older woman with the trucker hat over her face to my left doesn’t seem to mind my finger-tapping and occasional humming, but the teenage boy and his dad across the aisle have given me a few well-deserved glares.
When I catch myself singing along with one song’s grandiose backing gospel choir, I turn two shades of pink and pull my ratty Cherry Grove High hoodie over my head.
I’ve also completed my Google research, and here’s what I’ve discerned: Thomas Patrick Halloran—Thomas Patrick Flynn O’Halloran by birth, per Wikipedia—is pretty private. He doesn’t do many interviews. He still lives in some smalltown called Killarney. He’s released two albums—a critically acclaimed debut,To the End, and the new release he’ll be singing on this tour,Kingfisher.
The first one is a little rougher around the edges. It’s got a lot of thrilling, runaway power ballads like “If Not for My Baby.” Soaring reveries that overflow with Irish mysticism and stirring orchestrations. But then there are also indie acoustic melodies, some with bucolic hand-clapping and folksy instrumentals, as well as a few bluesy tracks. Everything is very Irish—sometimes he even sings in the native tongue, and I’m forced to look up words likebuinneán(sapling).
He sings of solitude and ennui, the climate apocalypse, worshipping a woman’s mind and body and the “exquisite rhapsody” of falling in love. But mostly, he sings of heartbreak. Yearning. Begging on his knees. Someone clearly trampled this man’s heart into the ground. And then threw it into a wood chipper. Repeatedly.And judging by all the references to earth and soil, trees and wood, sunlight and bogs…she broke his heart in a forest? I haven’t quite figured it out. But whatever it’s about, the whole thing is very soulful and very raw.
This second album, though,Kingfisher, is more ambitious. It’s replete with classical imagery and literary allusions. There’s more rich, low drama. More gnarled bass line and wailing notes on his electric guitar. He’s polished his sound and tipped into a few late-night funk and swirling disco stompers. If the first album he released five years ago was about the anguish of heartbreak, this one is about returning to theland of the living with that heartbreak in tow. Sometimes it’s an aching lonesomeness, but other times it’s rebound sex and too much whiskey. It’s somehow brutal and buoyant. Devastating and fun.
And the lyrics…the writing is out of this world. He doesn’t sing about flimsy, top-forty love; he sings about soul-deepdevotion. I’ve never heard anything like it. I’ve neverfeltanything like it.
“I’d slice out my own tongue, offer it to my baby in hands cupped, just to taste the perfect crookedness of her smile when she swallows me up.”
