A Heartfelt Tribute to Love, Loss and Friendship - A Review of Colm Warren’s New Single ‘Good Morning’
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
There are songs that you approach as a critic and songs that make the critical apparatus feel beside the point entirely, and ‘Good Morning’ by Colm Warren falls unambiguously into the second category. It was written for his friend and long-time collaborator John Byrne after Byrne lost his wife Christine O’Gorman in June 2025.
Byrne, one of Ireland’s best-known musicians and arrangers who regularly performs with country star Nathan Carter, has collaborated on every single one of Warren’s solo releases. The piano performance he contributes to ‘Good Morning’ forms the emotional heart of the recording. Warren says he does not really want to say much more, because he would rather let the song speak for itself. He is right to feel that way. The song does.
What you need to know about Colm Warren is that he is one of the most emotionally fearless and creatively unpredictable artists currently working in Irish music. He was the frontman of acclaimed Belfast punk band The Twenty. He stepped away from music for almost a decade. He came back with orchestral-backed songwriting that has earned him BBC and RTÉ radio airplay, a performance with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra at Dublin’s National Concert Hall, widespread praise from Hot Press and Clash, and a moving piano-led rendition of Shane MacGowan’s ‘A Rainy Night in Soho’ that stopped the room. His single ‘Without You’, released on World Down Syndrome Day in collaboration with members and families from Down Syndrome Cork, was featured as a reason to be happy on Newstalk. He does not follow trends. He does not follow industry expectations. He writes to confront life’s hardest moments and somehow makes music that quietly resonates with everyone who finds it.
‘Good Morning’ is his most moving release yet. Not because it is technically superior to what came before, though it is beautifully made, produced by Joe Egan and mixed and mastered by Aidan Cunningham with Byrne’s piano at its centre. But because it is the most purely generous thing an artist can do with their gift: make something not to advance their career or express their own feelings, but to tell a friend they are seen in their grief.
I’m so sorry for their unimaginable loss, Warren says of Byrne and his children. I am so sorry. That is what the song says too.
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