Meet Aaron Rowe, the Irish singer-songwriter who has toured arenas with Lewis Capaldi and is heading to America and Australia with his ‘mentor’ Ed Sheeran
Despite a decade-long love of guitars and songwriting, breakout star Aaron Rowe has twice almost given up on his music dreams – first as a teenager, and more recently in his twenties.
As a youngster growing up in a working-class pocket of South Dublin (Monkstown Farm, Dun Laoghaire), he feared being bullied if he were to admit that he liked to sing. “I put it on the back burner for a long time,” he remembers, having instead made boxing and kickboxing his childhood hobbies.
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However, that all changed when, aged 15, he saw a friend busking in Dublin town. “My mates and I were getting into smoking weed whereas he was making £20 in an hour,” he recalls of watching him play guitar. An epiphany-like moment followed: “I thought ‘this is class! I could do this’.”
After sharing his newfound passion with his mum, she rushed out and bought Rowe his first guitar. “I think she had been waiting for me to say that I wanted to get into music, because when I was a kid I hid it from everyone,” he remembers, having returned home to find a cheapo guitar (“it’s the ones you can get for around €100”) on his bed, as well as a CD with instructions for how to tune chords. “From that moment, I pretty much just started playing.”
Though Rowe found it easy to pick up and learn, he admits “I probably thought I was better than it was”, adding that he began to write his own songs almost instantly. “I knew that was eventually what I wanted to do,” he says, citing Paul Brady (“I think he’s an amazing guitar player and very underrated”), Derek Trucks (“although I can’t play like him, I’m a big admirer of his work”), Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler, Rory Gallagher, and David Gilmour (“my dad was a big Pink Floyd fan”) among his guitar heroes.
Thanks to knowing some older lads who were in bands, support slots at pubs followed for Rowe. “They would say ‘here, do you want to do half an hour?’” he recalls, adding that “they used to throw me a few bob”. Soon after, he started getting booked to play gigs of his own. Within a year-and-a-half, it was his job.
“I wasn’t really making much money out of it, but it was income that I never really had,” he says of taking every gig he could. This resulted in him playing up to three times a day, which was equivalent to six or seven hours performing “cover after cover”. “They pretty much took over my whole life,” he considers.
Though Rowe enjoyed the experience, he would have preferred to be able to test out his own songs. “I lost sight of what I initially intended to do,” he reflects on his regular Temple Bar slots. “I didn’t want to sing Sweet Caroline [by Neil Diamond] and Take Me Home, Country Roads [by John Denver] for the rest of my fucking life,” he says candidly. “It’s a trap because those songs are basically all people want to hear.
“It’s a rotation of people because you’ll have a hen or stag party and, as soon as you finish, they’ll see the other guy coming on, or you could be the other guy, and they’ll be like ‘fuck this guy, we like the last guy’.” Because of this, he suggests that “everyone’s just doing the exact same set… it gets a bit soul-destroying, to be honest”.
Perhaps understandably, all this resulted in him losing his love of music for some time — so much so that Rowe neglected practicing his guitar at home. In fact, his “one size fits all” acoustic never really left the case that would sit in the corner of his room.
Instead, he “learned things on the fly from other people” while he was on stage. “I never really seemed to have the chops to be able to play the blues,” he considers, “or maybe it was because I didn’t have the opportunity to get stuck into the electric guitar, because I was constantly gigging”.
With this in mind, he describes playing the pub circuit as a double-edged sword. “It definitely taught me everything I know,” he says; “it was very beneficial in some ways and, in other ways, it kind of stopped me from songwriting, which was a shame…”
Through The Motions
By his early 20s, Rowe started to feel “burnt out” from going through the motions day in and day out for so many years. “I was on the verge of giving up,” he recalls, now aged 24. “I didn’t really know what to do anymore.”
Thankfully, his moment finally came last year — just as he was about to “pack it in”. He was singing covers at his regular Saturday gig in The Dame Tavern when one of his future managers walked in and discovered him playing. A few weeks later, one of the biggest artists in the world – Lewis Capaldi – was on a stag-do when he stumbled into Cassidy’s where Rowe was performing. “I just said hello and didn’t think I would see him again,” he laughs of that particularly memorable Sunday set.
In what felt like an act of fate, he bumped into the Scottish chart-topper again a few weeks later while on a writing trip to Nashville. “Lewis was standing beside me at the bar, we had a few pints and became very good friends,” Rowe remembers, adding that Capaldi also introduced him to his best mate (who would go on to become his manager). “It all happened really fast,” he reflects. “It was really nice the way it worked out and, since then, Lewis has helped me a lot.”
With such a huge name backing him, Rowe’s star has been in ascendance from that point. In late May, he released his emotional debut single Hey Ma and, a month later, made his Glastonbury debut (at the same weekend as Capaldi’s return to the festival). However, as the booking was very last minute, he brushed it off as a “consolation so I can have my name on the poster”.
Initially, when Rowe walked up to the Wishing Well tent and there was no one there, he feared he was right. However, that all changed when he walked on stage to a packed crowd that included Emily Eavis, Fred again.., and Taron Egerton. “It was one of my favourite and most surreal moments so far,” he recalls, adding that the show almost didn’t happen due to a broken guitar string; thankfully, someone backstage gave him a new one and all was well.
That hasn’t been the only bucket list moment of the year for Rowe, however, as he released his first EP, Exodus, in September and went on a UK arena tour with his pal Lewis [Capaldi] in the same month. “I don’t know how to put it into words,” he says humbly of those support slots — “I just feel lucky. I know there are probably better musicians out there than me that don’t get the same opportunities,” he suggests, “so I’m really grateful.”
Aaron Rowe and Lewis Capaldi. Image: Press
Ed Boy
Next year is set to be even bigger for Rowe: he’ll tour Australia and America with one of his heroes and now mentor, Ed Sheeran, who he says has “been like a brother to me over the last few months”. The global star has even given him a guitar. “It’s the nicest thing I’ve ever seen,” he gushes of the ‘Wee Lowden’ acoustic. “I still look at it sometimes and think ‘what is this doing in my house?’ Beyond the gift, Rowe describes Sheeran as “an absolute gent”.
Amid finding international fame, Rowe is keen to keep putting Ireland on the global music map. “There is a wave of Irish artists coming through at the moment that previously might not have existed,” he says, suggesting that Irish people “took a little bit longer than the UK to start believing in their own identity”.
He expands on this point: “it’s confidence that the UK would have found maybe 20 years ago, and that America always seemed to have thanks to using their own accent and identity in music. Whereas, I feel like Ireland is only coming into that now,” he adds, highlighting the gap since “amazing artists” Sinéad O’Connor, The Cranberries and Shane MacGowan. “But, now, it seems like a whole generation of people, especially with the way they use their accents.”
Rowe – who recently sang the Irish national anthem before the World Cup qualifiers – hopes to inspire the next generation to pick up a guitar or start writing songs. “That’s the most important thing,” he says. “It kept me out of trouble as a kid, and gave me a path that a lot of people around me might not have”.
True to his reflective nature, Rowe is taking things one song at a time. “I just enjoy making good tunes, and that’s all I really look forward to,” he says. As for big goals, he’s refreshingly down to earth: “I already feel like I’ve won, so I just want to keep doing what I’m doing.”
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