Damien Rice reappeared the way he tends to do everything: quietly, cautiously, like someone checking whether the room has changed while he was gone. By the time we sat down for this interview, the myth had already grown around his absence. Where is Damien Rice? had become both fan mantra and punchline.
“Nowhere really,” he says. “I needed to take a shower and scrub.” It’s such a simple image, and such an accurate one. His rise from O through the touring cycle of 9 may have looked like steady ascent from the outside, but Rice describes it like he’d been rolling downhill, picking up mud, debris, obligations, and stray expectations he never asked for until the wheels couldn’t turn.
The innocence — that first-record spark — got buried under the machinery.
So he stopped. Just stopped.
It wasn’t difficult, he insists. “Things had gotten so uncomfortable that stopping was the only thing to do.” The harder part was the morning after: waking up with no plans, no obligations, no screaming kids, no time clock, no urgent need to be anywhere. What sounds like freedom on paper turned into something existentially sticky. “I thought being free was great,” he says. “But actually, it was bizarre. I had no responsibilities. I didn’t have to get out of bed. So I didn’t.”
The abyss wasn’t dramatic. It was slow. A non-motivated sink into stillness. He had to “drag” himself back into movement. It took years.
And the scariest realization? Achievement — the very thing he’d been chasing as a young artist — did absolutely nothing to fix that internal quiet. “None of those things make you happy,” he says. “Money, record sales… whatever society says is success. You’re always left with yourself. If what’s going on inside isn’t good, nothing else feels right.”
So Rice reversed the polarity. Instead of running from discomfort, he turned and charged straight at it. “Anything I was afraid of — swimming with sharks, talking to strangers, saying sorry — I forced myself to do it.” Eventually, he says, it became hard to find fears. “Life started to bubble. Everything became colorful. Creativity started to flow.” The universe, as he describes it, responded in kind — with inspiring people, renewed momentum, and an inner lightness.
It’s no wonder he doesn’t feel pressure about coming back. When an interviewer in Iceland asked if the expectations were overwhelming, he shrugged it off. “It’s none of my business what other people think,” he says. Not in a snide way — more like someone who’s already paid that toll and refuses to do it again. Audience size, sales, anticipation… none of it feeds him. “If I relied on that, I’d end up empty.”
This is where the fan-artist relationship gets tangled. We — the listeners — hear pain, heartbreak, unraveling, and think: great record incoming. Rice laughs softly when I bring this up. He used to believe pain was the conduit too, but now sees it differently. “I didn’t know how to be vitally alive unless I made a mess,” he says. Emotional chaos is clarifying because you stop caring about how you’re perceived. That urgency can produce great art, sure — but so can choosing authenticity without burning your life down first.
And then there’s the album itself.
My Favourite Faded Fantasy begins with falsetto — unfamiliar, intimate, almost un-Rice-like. “It just happened,” he says. “Late at night in the studio. It came out that way.” No grand strategy. No reinvention agenda. Just instinct. The voice knew what it was doing better than he did.
That goes for the lyrics too. Fans famously zoomed in on the word “manger,” partly because you don’t hear it unless someone’s singing carols. Rice doesn’t overthink it. “These things pop,” he says. “They come from the place that knows what it’s doing. Better than I know.” He jokes that if you stop him mid-song and ask what his third finger is doing on the guitar, he’d have no clue until he physically looks. “The fingers know so much better what to do than I do.”
Even the album’s final moment — the repeated phrase not enough — is a deliberate glance into humanity’s hungriest corner: the addiction to more. “Thinking when I get more love, more money, more beauty, then I’ll be okay. It’s endless. And it’s not true. You already have everything right now.”
Two extra songs — “Camarillas” and “Mustard Seeds” — live off to the side, where he likes to tuck things. “Mustard Seeds will do its thing when it’s time,” he says. Time is something Rice has learned not to bully.
As we wrap, he thanks me — sincerely — and disappears again, in that Damien Rice way that feels less like vanishing and more like dissolving into whatever quiet he’s earned. Not dramatically. Not mysteriously. Just someone who has learned that if he can sit with himself and feel okay, everything else is optional.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
