Where Something About the Sun Came From, and Why Noel Herrity Writes Characters

A Dublin Songwriter Whose Lyrics Come First and Whose Subjects Are Real People

The recording is titled Something about the Sun, and the description Noel Herrity attached to it is four words long: a celebration of summer in Ireland. That is the whole brief. It is worth taking at face value, because almost nothing else in this writer’s catalogue is a celebration of anything.

Noel Herrity’s writing is in the playlist below, and Something about the Sun is the track that brought him to this desk; the wider catalogue is indexed on the Noel Herrity profile. It came through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news sites. Play it once, then read on.

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Where the Song Sits in a Catalogue of Character Studies

Noel Herrity is a Dublin writer who came to songwriting late, and he is precise about what he is.

“Noel has been a writer all his life but has come to songwriting only recently,” his Breaking Tunes profile says, and it draws the distinction he keeps drawing himself: “He sees himself as a writer of songs rather than a singer-songwriter.” The same page states the working principle in five words. “The song lyrics are the key.”

As a result, that ordering explains the catalogue. “The songs are mainly stories about real life characters,” the profile notes, and the list bears it out. Who will be my Voice is about a reformed addict. Dance in high heels follows a Paralympic equestrian who came back from a major spinal accident. Make them Sing is about a pub singer in Spain. On broken wings is an old married couple.

Those are not moods. They are people, with circumstances, and a writer who begins there builds songs the way a short story writer builds a page.

Why a Soft Arrangement Is the Harder Option

The arrangement arrives afterwards to carry the words, which is why the band sound behind him stays soft. Anything busier would compete with the lyric.

However, that is a real constraint rather than a preference. Country and alt-country both give a writer room to put a story at the front, and the tradition is full of players who understood their job as accompaniment. A soft band arrangement is harder to hold together than a loud one, because there is nowhere for a weak line to hide. If the lyric carries the song, the lyric has to be finished.

Consequently, set against that run, Something about the Sun is the outlier, and deliberately so. There is no character to follow and no circumstance to resolve. It is a summer song about a country where summer is not guaranteed, and the four-word description is the point: a writer who normally hands you somebody’s life has written something that just wants to be warm.

Anyone who has spent an Irish August knows how much that costs to mean sincerely. The restraint that serves a story about a spinal injury also serves a song about good weather, because in both cases the writing refuses to oversell.

What Noel Herrity Is Drawing On

Herrity names his reference points plainly. His artist profile describes him as inspired by a range running from Leonard Cohen to Jason Isbell, and adds a detail worth keeping: the songs “took years to find their voice.”

In fact, both names make sense as bearings rather than models. Cohen is the writer’s writer whose melodies exist to deliver text. Isbell is the contemporary case for narrative country where the story governs the arrangement. A songwriter citing both is telling you the lyric comes first.

Herrity’s own description of his work agrees. The songs “are led by the lyrics and are a mix of folk, country and blues.”

From the MusicRoots.News curator team: “Something about the Sun is the least typical thing in this catalogue and the best argument for it. A writer who spends most of his time on other people’s hard years has written four minutes of plain warmth, and the same discipline carries it. Nothing is oversold.”

His stated subjects go where that sentence suggests: “the struggles, celebrations and tensions of everyday life,” including cancer, homelessness, addiction, love and loss. A summer song sits inside that list rather than outside it. Celebration is on the list.

Where to Hear Something About the Sun and Follow Noel Herrity

The track went up in August 2025 and runs just under four minutes. The catalogue has kept moving since: Green Hazel Eyes followed in March 2026 and Sunflower in August 2026, a steady pace for a writer who says the songs took years to find their voice.

That sequence is worth noting for anyone deciding where to start. A listener arriving through the summer song will find the rest of the catalogue is a different proposition, and a listener arriving through the character studies will find this is the one that lets up. Both routes work.

Stream it on Spotify, Apple Music or SoundCloud.

Follow Noel Herrity on his YouTube channel and on Facebook.

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