Often, Lately

A Title That Describes a Feeling

There is something precise about the phrase ‘often, lately.’ The two words together do more than describe frequency; they describe a change in frequency. Not always, not constantly, but with new and growing insistence. The title of this song by Dermot Kennedy names exactly the feeling it explores: the creeping return of someone who once occupied the center of your life, resurfacing in thought with an intensity that feels fresh even when the memory is old.

It is a quietly unusual way to begin a song. Many love songs claim permanence: I always think of you, I never stopped loving you. ‘Often, Lately’ claims something more provisional and, in its provisionality, more honest. The change in frequency is the point. The ‘lately’ does real work.

The Making of a Return

“Often, Lately” appears as the seventh track on “The Weight of the Woods,” Kennedy’s third studio album, released April 3, 2026, on Interscope Records.^[1] The album marks a significant shift in Kennedy’s artistic approach, shaped by both a decision and a crisis.

The crisis came first. After years of intensive touring and recording, Kennedy developed a vocal health problem stemming from improper technique accumulated over years of performing. It required him to spend two full weeks in complete silence.^[2] He has described the experience as frightening. When he emerged, he found himself asking different questions about what he actually wanted to make, freed from the compulsion to simply continue the commercial trajectory.

The album was produced by Gabe Simon, whose previous credits include collaborations with Noah Kahan and Lana Del Rey.^[3] The production process was deliberately unconventional. Simon relocated his family from Nashville to Rathcoole, the town on the southwestern edge of County Dublin where Kennedy grew up, and spent six weeks there embedded in Kennedy’s world.^[3] They collected traditional Irish instruments from Galway and Cork, worked with a university choir, and made a conscious decision to preserve the imperfections: the scrape of a fingernail on guitar strings, the breath behind a vocal take, the texture of proximity.^[4]

Kennedy has described feeling liberated by the project, freed from commercial pressure and returning to the source: “I think when you try and have a career in music, you’re like, ‘Oh, I need to look outside of home because that’s too small and that couldn’t be this inspirational thing.’ And then over time I’m just like, ‘It is. It’s my life. It’s the only thing I have.’”^[5]

The album’s title refers to what Kennedy carries with him: the weight of the people and places that formed him. Its central imagery comes from the forest behind his house near the Dublin-Kildare border.^[3][5] “Often, Lately” draws from the same emotional territory, even if its subject is an absent person rather than a landscape.

Longing Without Resolution

The emotional core of “Often, Lately” is a specific and recognizable kind of longing. Not the acute grief of a fresh wound, but something that arrives later, when a connection has receded far enough to seem settled and then quietly reasserts itself. The narrator has been thinking about someone. More than before. More than expected.

What makes the song psychologically precise is its refusal to dramatize this longing. Kennedy does not present it as overwhelming or triumphant. The narrator wonders about a road back, about whether the other person shares the same preoccupation, about what a return might look like. These remain questions. The song does not supply answers.

The recurring motif of homecoming and roads runs through the album as a whole, but in “Often, Lately” it takes on an interpersonal charge. The journey imagined is not just geographical but relational. The road leads toward someone, and the uncertainty is not whether the narrator wants to take it but whether anyone will be waiting at the end.

This restraint is characteristic of Kennedy’s best work. His formative influences, Ray LaMontagne, David Gray, Damien Rice, and Glen Hansard, are writers for whom vulnerability is a craft tool rather than a spectacle.^[6] Kennedy absorbed that lesson early. The emotional directness in “Often, Lately” lands precisely because it does not oversell itself.

Hot Press, reviewing the album, awarded it eight out of ten and called it “a magnificent third album from Ireland’s stadium bard,” praising Kennedy’s return to his balladeer roots.^[1] The phrase fits “Often, Lately” especially well. The Irish ballad tradition has long made room for this kind of suspended longing: the beloved who has gone, the return that cannot quite be completed, the love that outlasts the circumstances that produced it.

The production choices Kennedy and Simon made serve the emotional texture of the song. Music and Gigs noted that Kennedy appeared to have “finally found a way to let those two worlds coexist without the heavy-handed pop polish that occasionally clouded his previous efforts.”^[7] The sparseness, the audible human details, the decision to leave things imperfect, creates the feeling of overhearing a private thought rather than consuming a finished product.

The Cultural Weight

Kennedy grew up in Rathcoole, County Dublin, a town on the fringe of the city, and he has spoken frequently about how Irish identity and landscape shaped his songwriting in ways he did not fully understand until he tried to look away from them.^[5][6] Years of touring internationally produced a kind of clarifying distance. The more he moved away, the clearer the pull back became.

The period of making “The Weight of the Woods” brought that reckoning to the surface. In March 2025, Kennedy founded “Misneach” (the Irish word for courage), a festival held in Sydney and Boston designed to celebrate Irish heritage on St. Patrick’s Day. He debuted new material at sold-out shows. By April 2026, that material had become a full album, and “Often, Lately” stood as one of its quieter and more inward-looking entries.

The song resonates beyond its Irish context because the structural experience it describes is universally available. Most people who have loved and lost someone know this: not the first loss, but the secondary one, when the grief was supposed to be over and something starts again. The phrase “often, lately” names the exact moment when a feeling you thought you had filed away begins moving.

The Irish Times, in a mixed review, compared elements of Kennedy’s album to Noah Kahan-style folk-influenced work.^[8] Whether or not that reading is fair, it situates Kennedy within a broader conversation about contemporary artists reclaiming regional identity against the homogenizing pressures of global pop. “Often, Lately” occupies its own space within that conversation: a song about the very human experience of being pulled back to something you thought you had left behind.

Other Ways of Hearing It

The most obvious reading of “Often, Lately” is romantic, but the song’s language and emotional logic support a broader interpretation. The album as a whole is saturated with the feeling of returning to Ireland after years away, and the longing expressed in this song could apply to a place, a community, or a way of life as readily as to a person.

Kennedy has spoken about feeling that Ireland was something he once overlooked as a source, something he thought was “too small” before coming to see it as his central subject.^[5] The idea of a road back to something you once underestimated, wondering if it will still be there and whether you will be welcomed, translates directly into the song’s emotional territory even if the literal subject is a person.

There is also a more open-ended reading in which the “often, lately” of the title reflects not just romantic longing but something like existential reckoning. The song arrives at the midpoint of an album about memory and accumulation. By the time the listener reaches track seven, the cumulative weight of what has been described creates a context in which any kind of return, to love, to home, to an earlier version of yourself, carries its full meaning.

What It Leaves Behind

The most enduring songs in this tradition do not resolve what they set in motion. They leave the listener with the feeling in its full complexity, without the false comfort of a tidy ending. “Often, Lately” does this honestly. The questions are still questions when the song ends.

Kennedy has found his way back to the core of what made his early work compelling: the willingness to sit with something unresolved. His vocal health crisis, his enforced silence, his return to the place that formed him, these were the actual conditions under which this music was made, and they appear in the texture of the songs.^[2][4]

“Often, Lately” is not a grand statement. It does not announce itself. But in its quiet insistence on describing a feeling that most people have felt and few songs have named so precisely, it does something that justifies the album it lives on. The weight of the woods, in Kennedy’s telling, is not just the weight of trees. It is the weight of everyone you carry, the weight of everything you cannot stop thinking about, lately, and often.