The Blower’s Daughter

The Story Behind The Song

Damien Rice, from Celbridge in Co. Kildare, first paid his dues as frontman with the immensely talented Juniper – a rock band he formed in secondary school in Kildare. The band were seen as potential winners. They signed a six-album deal with Polygram in 1997, but it was not to be. Disagreements about their musical direction led to Rice quitting at the end of 1998. Not long afterwards, Juniper morphed into Bell X1, another powerhouse group, who went on to enjoy a very successful career on their own steam.

Meanwhile, Damien Rice retreated to the Tuscan Hills, where he apparently thought about becoming a farmer, before returning to Ireland – and to music-making on his own terms. He started slowly, gigging the songs he’d written in Tuscany around Dublin. During that period, he met fellow singer and writer Lisa Hannigan in Whelan’s – the legendary home of Ireland’s singer-songwriter scene at the time. They shared a similar whimsical sense of humour and taste in music and they bonded when Hannigan joined Rice for recording sessions. “She quickly became my favourite person,” Rice later admitted. 

Hannigan’s ethereal voice provided the perfect foil for Rice’s dark lyrics. They hooked up on an ongoing basis. When Rice’s debut album O was recorded, it was without the backing of a major label. Instead, he dragged his makeshift recording studio from a friend’s apartment in Paris to his kitchen in Dublin, via Killarney and London. The resulting production was gritty and authentic: on the finished recording, guitar scrapes and vocal scratches were left in, capturing a perfectly imperfect magic.

Released on Rice’s own independent label DRM, O immediately debuted at No.7 in the Irish charts. Momentum gathered. Outside Ireland, his word-of-mouth appeal made international headlines when Britney Spears and Colin Farrell were reportedly overcome by the heartfelt songs at an LA show. Glowing reviews poured in, with many praising Rice for the emotional heft of his material. The confessional aspect of the work was hugely appealing. It was at a moment when at least some areas of radio were open to raw material that came from the heart.

Rice and his management team secured international distribution with indie label Vector Records. O came out in the UK four months later, and in the US the following year. It has since sold well over two million copies worldwide and won an audience of fiercely devoted fans for the singer. The peaks on the album came when Rice’s melancholic vulnerability was soothed by Hannigan’s fragile vocals, particularly in the haunting ode to unrequited longing ‘The Blower’s Daughter’.

The arrangement on the track has a touch of genius, with the listener in-effect being invited to hear the private thoughts of the song’s love-wrecked narrator. The use of cello works beautifully to heighten the emotional depth of the track. And the hesitations in Damien Rice’s delivery are a masterclass in the reading of a song: it feels like a living statement, perfectly in the moment and as a result, all the more revealing of the singer’s inner torment. 

When you consider that it was recorded on an eight-track cassette recorder that his second cousin, the film composer David Arnold, gave him, the commercial success of O is astounding. Rice had hoped that they might make enough for his band, including co-vocalist Hannigan, cellist Vyvienne Long, bassist Shane Fitzsimons and drummer Tomo, to give up the session circuit. In fact, the band’s own aspirations for the record were so humble, that Fitzsimmons chose a flat payment of around €100 a song rather than royalties (though he was later offered the latter as a goodwill gesture).

The end result is heart-wrenching and yet sweepingly romantic. With its intimate confessional declaration – “I can’t take my mind off of you” – it became a huge fan favourite on both sides of the Atlantic, even before its exalted position was secured by its inclusion in the hit 2004 film Closer. There are two official videos for ‘The Blower’s Daughter’. One features just Damien Rice, with Lisa Hannigan looking magnificently sorrowful on the beach, most likely on the Northside of Dublin, standing at the water’s edge and facing tearfully out at the sea. The frequent tight framing of Rice’s face as he sings – mixed with images of him looking like the slightly down at heel boy next door – heightens the sense of intimacy and the flash-cuts to Lisa Hannigan are also beautifully effective. The second video – viewed over 76 million times – includes scenes from Closer, with Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman and Clive Owen all appearing, as well as additional close-ups of Lisa Hannigan that add further to its impact. 

More chart success followed with ‘Volcano’ and ‘Cannonball’; In the UK,O won the Shortlist Music Prize; worldwide tours beckoned; Rice performed with the likes of Christy Moore and Leonard Cohen. His follow-up 9, released in 2006 was another hit. There followed a difficult split with Lisa Hannigan, with Rice confessing to his devastation in a lengthy interview in Hot Press. He subsequently retreated from the frontline, returning in 2014 with the Rick Ruben-produced My Favourite Faded Fantasy.

‘The Blower’s Daughter’ continues to wield its very special spell. It has been covered many times – most notably by Sarah-Jane Morris, Bárbara Martínez and, in 2021, by Ronan Keating and Storm Keating; sung in TV talent competitions; recorded as an instrumental; translated into Italian (for Italian X-Factor winner Mateo Becucci) and Brazilian-Portuguese. Titled ‘É Isso Aí’, it was the first single and key track on the hugely successful triple platinum album Ana & Jorge: Ao Vivo, topping the Brazilian singles chart in 2006. A beautiful duet, sung with gorgeous sensitivity by Ana Carolina & Seu Jorge, it taps into the innate majesty of what is an essentially humble song. The live video for this track has been viewed 119 million times. It is, perhaps, as fine an example as can be found, of the unique power of music to transcend geographical and linguistic boundaries and to light people's lives in the most elemental way.