There’s a song called ‘Clockwork’ on Peter Doran’s exceptional new album, All the world is running on a Mystic Code, that vividly maps his hometown of Mullingar. Taking place on a day like no other in Peter’s life, as he waits on word from his wife, Therese, regarding her prenatal ultrasound. To get to this point had not been easy and the couple were apprehensive, but due to Covid restrictions, Peter could not attend the appointment. So, after leaving Therese at the hospital, he drifts around the ghostly streets, on a blazing afternoon, trying to keep his rollercoaster of emotions on track. It is a wonderfully expressive song, an artist at the peak of his powers, perfectly depicting the streets of the midland town from which so much great music has flowed – Niall Horan, Joe Dolan, Foster & Allen, The Blizzards. Peter climbs Jail Hill, crosses the River Brosna and whilst browsing the stacks at 33/45 Records, is informed by the scholarly proprietor to “check out some jazz quintet from Japan.”

It is a superb song, in the chorus Peter sings - “you're nervous at the other side of town, but our fortunes are changing”. They certainly were changing. Throughout the 200-year-old farmhouse, which Peter and Therese call home, are sweet traces – toys, colouring books, crayons, tiny wellies – of their two little daughters, Francesca and Hayley. Snugly shoehorned between the townlands of Skeaghmore and Milltown in the county Westmeath, Therese’s family have lived in Oldtown House since the early 1800s. Later in Peter’s in-house studio, he reveals ancient graffiti scribbled on the antique shutters, and there amongst signatures and dates of long gone Fallons – M. Fallon, September 16, 1896, and existing Fallons - Therese, 18 February 1997 - is etched - ‘God Bless The Now and Evermore’. It is a sentiment that certainly resonates.

Peter is an ancient soul, who for over two decades, has plaited words and melodies with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the psychogeography of his surrounds. All the world is running on a Mystic Code, the pinnacle of Peter’s six albums unveiled to the public with lead single Never Say Goodbye, accompanied by a fine maritime themed Josh Wagner directed video. The song’s final line - ‘God Bless The Now And Evermore’, plucked from those ancient shutters, completes a spellcasting liturgical hymn doused in sea shanty alchemy, peppered with the superstitions of timeworn mariners – “don’t point at the ships boy when you’re standing on a shoreline”, “dump all the pennies from your pockets”, “don’t throw stones into the ocean”. Knotted around such sailor lore are feverish hallucinations of “four lions on a leash, too strong to hold, too wild to keep,” and heady dreams of “waves crashing over the beast.”

Welcome to the captivating world of Peter Doran.

Pink Floyd, Genesis and Queen were regularly spun on the record player, in the house Peter grew up in. His father noodled on the guitar, even scribbled the odd song, the teenage Peter once discovering a battered demo tape, that contained a track called ‘Shotgun Wedding’, which grooved. An uncle, Sean, still plays regularly around the town while another uncle, Anthony, was bassist in The Blizzards. A cousin, Tanya, is in David Coverdale’s Whitesnake.

Peter first caught the music bug, on a stud farm on the shores of Lough Ennell, outside Mullingar, when he started messing around on a guitar that came complete with a Marshall stack belonging to another cousin, a Metallica-loving one. Peter fast became hooked, obsessed even.

A series of mentors fanned the craze. Vinny Baker, a local guitar wizard and frontman of blues outfit, Undercover, crashed into Peter’s life. Literally. Peter’s father was riding a motorcycle, when a bandwagon containing Undercover knocked him down. Feeling a tad guilty, Vinny visited the convalescing motorcyclist, quickly bonding over a shared love of fishing, they became friends for life.

The young teenage Peter started jumping on the Undercover bus, tagging along to gigs all over the country, Vinny turning him onto a cast of axe maestros - Stevie Ray Vaughan, Joe Satriani, Robben Ford and Eric Johnson – who became the whole world to the young apprentice guitarist. Years clicked by, with Peter relentlessly practicing in his bedroom, getting better, ending up in a local band with the botanical handle, Catalpa Blooms. A photograph of his first gig, a Mullingar Rocks promotion in Dublin, shows a baby-faced Doran clutching a green Fender Stratocaster, bought from savings banked whilst working in a stable yard, mucking out horses. Later, they opened for Picturehouse.

As now, the Mullingar of that time was full of young hopeful bands – Arrow In The Sky, Crimson, Autofly, Triega – all dedicated disciples of the weekly pilgrimage to The Stables, the best local gig venue, to watch bands on national tours. The place was hot - The Frames, The Coronas, Duke Special, Mic Christopher, Damien Rice, The Stunning, Fionn Regan, Lisa Hannigan, Hothouse Flowers, Damien Dempsey – all strutted their stuff on The Stables stage, with Peter usually in the packed audience.

Whilst attending a gig of a pre-O Damien Rice, Peter experienced his Damascene moment. - “I first came across the artist known as Hally sometime around the end of the 90s. I saw him play at The Stables venue in Mullingar, which was at that time, a kind of musical church, with a different preacher passing through every weekend. A friend of mine had invited me along to the show, he was keen to see the opening act… some guy that had once been the lead singer with a band called Juniper. That was the first time I ever heard the name Damien Rice. It was also the first time I heard songs of that power, suddenly, it was – ‘Oh, you can do all that and more with just a song.’ My attention shifted to the power of just the song.” Damien Rice passed through The Stables several more times and on one occasion Peter leapt up onstage with his hero and played guitar on ‘The Blowers Daughter’.

They were golden days – working in a local record store, starting to do solo gigs, beginning to write songs, taking the train to Dublin to perform at open mics including the Ruby Sessions. Peter’s plan was always to do an album, and he got his hands on a 24 track Roland, but he ended up recording the album at Vinny Baker’s Vee Bee Studios. The result, his debut album Wood was released in 2006, and Peter was up and running.

It's follow-up, 2010’s Sleepless Street, Peter’s first collaboration with producer Filippo Gaetani, was recorded in Tuscany and Westmeath’s famous Grouse Lodge Recording Studios. Overhead the Stars, released in 2012, featured Colm Lynch on ‘Every Little Thing’, a track that has surpassed 2 million streams and resulted in a Stateside tour. A stripped-down record, Outlines, followed in 2014, RTE Radio 1’s John Creedon remarking, “this guy is bound for glory if he’s not careful”. It featured multi-instrumentalist Brian Murphy and the two would go on to collaborate in The Great Trade project. The duo regularly trekking across Europe playing little theatres, pubs and loft spaces. In addition to Peter headlining shows across Ireland, Britain and the Continent and opening concerts for Mick Flannery, The Lone Bellow, Declan O’Rourke, Fionn Regan and Duke Special.

2021’s Voices included the Sam Amidon-inspired ‘Blue Mountains’, a duet with Oregon songwriter Haley Heynderickx, the pair initially meeting after Haley borrowed Peter’s guitar for a Dublin gig at The Bleeding Horse, the track has subsequently amassed over 1 million streams.

A posse of regular Doran collaborators assembled to create All the world is running on a Mystic Code, Peter’s best and most commercial album to date. They include Picture This guitarist Nicky Brennan, Hozier drummer Fiachra Kinder, cellist Gerard Toal, pianist Filippo Gaetani and another great Peter Doran mentor - Jimmy Broder.

For over two decades, Peter has been mainlining the wisdom, erudition, incongruence and brilliance of Jimmy Broder, a maverick songwriter and legendary Mullingar performer. Broder penned The Magic Man, a tale of an obsessive conjurer who is usurped by his attractive assistant, which Peter made his own, even featuring flashes of electric guitar from his younger days. Peter repaid the favour, offering Jimmy to sing on The Lover’s Wheel, resulting in a track that sounds like nothing else in the extensive Doran canon. Broder also contributes two co-writes – the incredibly bizarre Steamboat Captain and the gut-wrenching but beautiful Marguerite.

Steamboat Captain, sparked by a word association process suggested by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, swiftly snowballed into an ode featuring rolling rivers, stoic seafarers and Christian monogamy, crazily juxtaposed with sad0-masochist cosplay and freaky basement frolics; all wrapped in an addictive melody that lovingly storms your headspace, assisted by a star turn from Dublin singer songwriter Colm Lynch.

Less than a half mile west of Peter’s second storey studio, is the unmarked grave of the child Florence-Marguerite McGrane, the eponymous character remembered in Peter’s second single. Through the cold, cold Winter of 1899, Marguerite, little more than an infant, suffering fatal burns, lay dying in her home in Killucan, Co. Westmeath. Her Father, a Doctor, could find no remedy, could not save her. In the song, a healer holds a bedside vigil singing - “Frère Jacques Dormez-vous? Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. I sang every song that I knew to try and bring some peace to you.” It is accompanied by a powerful Myles O’Reilly directed video and was released in December to mark the 125th anniversary of the little girl’s passing.

All the world is running on a Mystic Code was recorded in entirety at Peter’s home studio in Oldtown House, the musicians decamping there for extended creative sojourns. Liberated from the usual pressure of time constraints associated when booking a studio, the Oldtown sessions possessed a freedom and indeed, a playful and experimental nature. Peter recalls writing pure folk ballad Out in the Wild, in the far from finished studio when “there was no door, no walls, it was really cold. And I remember coming in for half an hour, with a little blanket, it’s a subconscious song, it just kind of fell out.” Local filmmaker, Conor English, perfectly captures the feral nature of that track on an eponymous 16-minute film that will accompany the album, that was shot in the lands surrounding Oldtown House, as well as in the nearby Bog Lane Theatre; the movie also includes the tracks Mystic Code and The Lover’s Wheel.    

Since moving into Oldtown House some six years ago, Peter has sown vegetables, planted fruit trees, constructed stone walls, chopped timber and indeed, the entire album is doused in the soil of the rolling Westmeath countryside. Title track Mystic Code charts the surrounds of meandering rivers, rambling roads, swooping birds, tolling church-bells – the natural order of things alloyed with monstrous acts perpetrated by barbaric beings. “It’s a feeling,” Peter explains, “that there is some sense of order in the world amongst people and their motivations within nature. I wrote it whilst training for a marathon, getting into these meditative spaces. A lot of the time I was running along the canal and around that same time, a woman was tragically murdered whilst running on the canal. There's such incredible beauty in the world, and then there's this horror, the sense that this killer betrayed the natural code.”

Such contrasting associations are distinctive to Peter’s art, that typically runs parallel but conversely subterranean to the main drag. In All the world is running on a Mystic Code, Doran has produced a meditative and contemplative work, a cosmic album with deep roots in nature. Mastered by Grammy-winning Kim Rosen (Bonnie Raitt, Aimee Mann, The Milk Carton Kids), it is a record that will most definitely be featuring on Best of 2025 lists.

                                                                              Will Russell, November 2024.