Two-times Eurovision Song Contest winner Brendan Graham has recently released his debut album. Earlier in 2025, he celebrated a milestone birthday and he tells Ireland’s Own readers what inspired him to record … THE ARROW OF TIME

He is an internationally acclaimed songwriter and bestselling novelist, but mention the name Brendan Graham at any Irish kitchen table and more often than not the first thing that they will say is, “Ah, the fella that won the Eurovision … twice!”

He is the songwriter behind our 1994 and 1996-winning entries Rock ‘n’ Roll Kids and The Voice. Other internationally recognised hits that he has written include You Raise Me Up and Isle of Hope Isle of Tears. Many different artistes have recorded his work, Johnny McEvoy, Daniel O’Donnell, Seán Keane, Josh Groban, The Chieftains with Liam Neeson, The Gipsy Kings, Johnny Mathis, Dervish, Westlife … the list is endless, and now Brendan has given us the opportunity to hear the songs ‘in the raw’, as they sounded in his head when penning them all those years ago.

“All of my life other people have been singing my songs,” he says as he chats to Ireland’s Own from his home on the Mayo/Galway border.
“Artists have been taking risks in performing my songs, and all this time I’ve had the luxury of hiding down the back of the hall and sneaking away if the song was not working. So, I decided it was time to put myself on the line with my own songs.

“Along the way people have said to me that I should record my own songs, and it had been mentioned to me that I had a nice speaking voice, to which I replied, ‘That doesn’t mean I have a good singing voice!’
“So I thought it would be nice to record the songs in my own voice, and revisit the thoughts that I had in my head when I was writing them.
“I was 80 earlier this year and I thought recording my debut album would be a good way to mark the occasion!”

Brendan wrote his first song, called Fr. Dickens, back in 1968. It was based on the character of Fr. McKenzie who featured in the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby, and he thought that the priest deserved a song of his own. “I wrote the lyrics on a red serviette while I was sitting in a Chinese restaurant in London,” he recalls. “I posted them to Tommy Swarbrigg and heard nothing until later on, when we were living in Australia.

“A package arrived with the new Johnny McEvoy album in it, and on it was Johnny’s recording of Fr. Dickens.

“I became a full-time songwriter when I was made redundant in 1993, and had written a few hundred songs down the years.
“When it came to choosing songs for my own album I had to think hard about the keys that would suit my voice, and also choose songs that would fit in with the theme of the album which is ‘time’.

“As I am at the age where I have more time behind me than ahead of me, I got to thinking of how we are all caught up in time … the notion of present time, future time, and past time. I have always had a feeling of
pre-existence, of places that I have visited before, but not in this life. I especially feel it whenever I go to Italy. I also wonder about what happens us when we die.

“That whole concept of time features strongly in Brian Cox’s documentaries on The Universe, and how the arrow of time is moving, moving out of chaos and leading us towards chaos again. And that’s where I got the title for my album, The Arrow of Time.”

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