Galileo (Someone Like You)

The Story Behind The Song

Though he initially wanted to be a painter, like his grandfather, it was while living in Australia with his family as a young teenager, that Declan O’Rourke had his head turned. A priest in Kyabram in north central Victoria presented him with the gift of a guitar and taught him a chord or two, in what O’Rourke has since called a life-changing moment, one that inspired the title of his 2004 debut album, Since Kyabram.

After the O’Rourke family returned home to Ireland from Australia, the young Declan O'Rourke applied himself with great determination to his new instrument. “I just wanted to be the best guitar player in the world,” he explained to Hot Press, "and for three or four years that was all I focused on. I ate and slept it and I progressed very fast in the first year or two.” Writing was something that he fell into accidentally. “This fellow joined a band I was in and said ‘Why don’t we try one of my songs?’ I was about 15 and that was an absolutely mind-blowing experience. I went home that evening and started trying to write and never stopped since, but for years I just thought somebody else would sing them, when I found a singer. I just accidentally ended up singing them myself.”

All three facets of O’Rourke’s talent – his guitar playing, his singing, and his songwriting – flourished over time, although it would be 2004 before his debut album, Since Kyabram, was released. Amongst its many charms, irrefutably the crowning glory is ‘Galileo (Someone Like You)’, a love song floating on a gorgeous melody that could have been written anytime over the past few hundred years. It might, you conjecture, be about O’Rourke’s own parents – but he has described it slightly differently. “Sometimes a song is a kind of collage of your own experiences, as well as being good old-fashioned escapism,” he said. “‘Galileo’ is a love song only in that it expresses how tough love can be sometimes – but how it’s always worth it in the end.”

In the original version, on a bed of delicate strings and O’Rourke’s guitar arpeggios, the writer employs the figure of Galileo Galilei, the father of modern astronomy, who asks the big questions of the universe – meanwhile, however, he’s really wondering where the wonder of love came from, which in the end is the question that none of us can ever truly answer: it just is. Not that you’d need to even consider any of this to be swept along in the song’s gorgeous wake, or to admire the lovely falsetto high notes that O’Rourke employed at the end of a chorus that draws beautifully on Galileo’s fascination with astronomy:

“Who puts the rainbow in the sky?
Who lights the stars at night?
Who dreamt up someone so divine?
Someone like you and made them mine?”

‘Galileo’ was a live favourite with audiences in Ireland before its parent album was even released. The first confirmation that it had extra legs arrived with the release of a cover by former Fairground Attraction singer Eddi Reader, on her Peacetime (2007) album. Reader called O’Rourke “one of the finest songwriters on the planet” – a huge compliment from such a great interpreter. Further light was shone its way when Paul Weller confessed to Q Magazine that ‘Galileo’ was the song he most wished he had written in the last twenty years. As O’Rourke himself recalled, someone in A&R on their shared label had passed the album on to Weller, who got in touch – and their friendship blossomed. Weller subsequently brought O’Rourke on-stage in Dublin’s Olympia Theatre to duet on the song, and years later when it came time to record O’Rourke’s Arrivals (2021) album, Weller said he was honoured to be asked to produce it.

On the other side of the Atlantic, O’Rourke’s song came to the attention of a very different singer. Another world-renowned Irish songwriter, Brendan Graham, the man behind ‘You Raise Me Up’, played the song for Josh Groban. Groban fell hard for it and included it on his 2010 album, Illuminations . Groban has always been a canny selector of songs – this album also included work penned by both Nick Cave and Stevie Wonder – and the album was a world-wide success, eventually being certified platinum – for sales in excess of one million – in the United States alone. 

O’Rourke came close to another profile-swelling coup when the multi-million selling Susan Boyle considered recording the song. This, sadly, never came to pass – or not yet anyway – but there was some consolation when X-Factor contestant and fellow Ballyfermot native, Mary Byrne, included the song on her debut album, Mine & Yours, a top ten record in the UK and a No.1 seller in Ireland in 2011.

A fiercely independent artist, after some earlier major label experiences, O’Rourke – who published his debut novel, The Pawnbroker’s Reward in 2021 – has gratefully reinvested the revenue generated by his most famous song into several albums and tours since then, including 2021’s Arrivals, a record full of future standards just waiting to be discovered by recording artists across the world. The master songwriter describes his artistic process in what might seem like simple terms, but which get to the heart of the challenge that every songwriter faces. “You take a feeling that you had and you try and translate it to someone else through music,” he reflected. “You feel the urge first – ‘I’ve got to put that in a song’ – and, if you can get to the other end of the song, hopefully you’ve managed to stay focused on that thing. You want them to feel what you felt. Paint a picture for them. Music is the emotional landscape.”

Nowhere is that dictum better expressed than on the marvellous 'Galileo (Someone Like You)'.