Music Albums I Have Listened to in the Past Few Months, part 1: O by Damien Rice

Written on March 31, 2026. (cue timecard in SpongeBob’s French narrator voice: “One month later….”)

One album I recently listened to was O by Damien Rice. I first found out about this artist because I was looking at celebrities’ playlists on iTunes. This was back around 2007 or 2008, and one of the playlists was of Joss Stone, a soul singer from England whose music I enjoy listening to. One of the artists on her playlist was Damien Rice. I didn’t know who Damien Rice was, but when I listened to the song on Stone’s playlist it really moved me. Then later on, in my senior year of college, a girl in my dorm invited me to play a little informal gig in our dorm’s living room. She played acoustic guitar while I accompanied her on the cello. I cannot remember what song we played, but all I remember is that it was beautiful. A few weeks ago, when telling alumni about our upcoming college reunion, I emailed this girl telling her I remembered us playing that Damien Rice song in the dorm room. She never replied, and so I figured she forgot me, which is ok. It did spark a desire to revisit Rice’s music, though. Damien Rice is an Irish folk musician and singer whose songs are very sad but also beautiful. They don’t have a ton of bombastic melodies and harmonies. They are very slow and dialed down, but the lyrics, if you listen to them closely, are pretty sad and mature. For some reason I love sad music, so I gravitated towards Rice’s music. I went on vacation this weekend and could not sleep because I had a lot going on in my mind, so I turned on Spotify and listened to the album O by Damien Rice. Listening to the music was very healing, and I also love it because one of the main instruments he uses to accompany him is the cello. As someone who loves to play the cello, I got pretty pumped when I heard the cellist playing alongside Rice’s guitar and beautiful vocals. It was like an intimate dialogue between the cellist and Rice. A few of my favorite songs on the album are “Cannonball” and “Delicate.” Before listening to the full album, I am pretty sure I heard “Cannonball” many times on the radio or on the soundtrack of some movie or television show. The chorus of the song sounded very familiar as I listened to it (“Stones taught me to fly/ Love, it taught me to lie/ Life, it taught me to die…”) After I listened to the album O, I started to listen to the album 9. The album O came out in 2002 and his second album 9 came out in 2006. As a kid, when I first found out about these albums, I was curious about why the album 9 had the black and white “Parental Advisory: Explicit Content” sticker on the CD cover. Looking at the front cover of the CD as a kid, the cartoon illustrations somehow made me think that it was going to be an age-appropriate kid’s album. What’s so explicit about this? I thought. And then as I was sleeping this past weekend in my nice breezy hotel room in Florida, with my headphones in, playing Damien Rice’s “Rootless Tree” on his album 9—

“FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU and all we’ve been through…”

I sort of jolted in my sleep. It sounded like he was yelling at me instead of at whichever anonymous ex-girlfriend he was cussing out in the song. And then, for some reason, in my dream I was taking care of a fictional long-lost baby cousin who suddenly appeared in my house out of nowhere, and as I was taking care of him I was listening to “Rootless Tree” and kept repeating the chorus “FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU” as loud as I could when I had a moment to listen to the song in private, away (thankfully) from my baby cousin. After listening to the song, I realized, Ohhhhhh, that’s why the album has that Parental Advisory label. Because otherwise the songs didn’t strike me as inappropriate in any way, but then again, I think I got so distracted by the beautiful cello melodies on the album (and Damien Rice’s beautiful voice) that I ended up not focusing much on the lyrics or the deeper meaning of the lyrics. Also, I was sleeping so I was more focused on REM sleep than I was trying to do a lyric-by-lyric analysis of the song “9 Crimes.”

Author: The Arts Are Life

I am a writer and musician. Lover of music, movies, books, art, and nature. View all posts by The Arts Are Life