Kieran Daly is a second year Linguistics student at Pembroke College. His single ‘In The Open’ from his debut EP Dear Dandelion was released this month.

How long have you been playing guitar, singing and writing your own songs?

My family tell me that the first sound I ever made was the chiming of Big Ben at six months old! So I guess that was the start. I went through a phase of hating playing guitar when I started to learn at 10, but then I really got into it and started writing my own stuff. The first songs I wrote were at 12 and I released an album at 14, but my friends at uni will vouch for the fact that they’re rough and very naïve! Hopefully I’ve improved since then!

Is it more about the performance, the process or the result for you? Do you get different things out of performing versus recording or writing a track?

They’re all really important in their own right. The performance element is great fun, and I get to expand my sound by playing with my band, which is great! The writing process is a good way to transfer negative emotions into something else, instead of them clogging up my mind.

When I released my first single, ‘In The Open’, a couple of weeks ago, I felt like the whole recording process and experience was worth it. Recording can be frustrating at times, you can sit there for hours and it still may not sound right. But when the end result is achieved, and the single is uploaded to iTunes, Spotify etc, it’s all worth it. I felt a real sense of pride. I think we all did.

How do the other band members Tommy and Charlie fit into the mix?

They’re integral to performance. They’re great musicians, and who doesn’t enjoy playing live with their best mates! It’s a great feeling. With regards to writing the EP and our songs, I usually write them and present them to the band. Although Chaz wrote a mean bass line for one of the songs on the EP!

Can you talk a bit about your lyrics?

Lyrics are the most important part of the song to me and I spend the most time on them in the song-writing process. Usually I shroud songs in metaphor because I find it hard to express personal feelings and emotion plainly speaking.

You released a demo called ‘Unakwenda Wapi?’ that has a part in Swahili. That’s quite unusual, is there a story behind it?

I spent six months living in Tanzania and travelling through East Africa a couple of years ago. I love languages and I loved Tanzania. In that particular song, the lyric is about another person who I travelled with and who also learnt Swahili and Nyanja, the languages featured in the lyrics. It made the song more intimate and more personal for me. But of course millions around the world can also understand it! ‘Fairytales’, which is on YouTube, is also about my experiences in Tanzania and Zambia.

Most of the artists we’ve previously featured were English students, you study Linguistics. Do you think your degree subject adds anything to your music or are music and academia as quite separate?

Cambridge is a tough place to be, and I’ve written some songs about Cambridge and the academic hardship that I’ve faced! To be honest, my music is a release from academia, so I try to keep them separate.

Is being at Cambridge a help or a hindrance to you as an artist?

It’s a hindrance unfortunately! Despite providing some lyrical content and allowing me to vent some emotion through my music, it significantly limits my time. Recently I haven’t played guitar anywhere near as much I would’ve liked to, and that’s a shame. It’s very hard to be balanced here.

Do you see yourself continuing music after university? Would you like to be signed?

That’s the dream! Being signed and playing literally any stage at Glastonbury! We’ll see how it goes, but that’s the dream!

Kieran Daly spoke to Naomi Obeng.

If you are an artist, band, musician, poet or any other type of Cambridge student creative and would like to be featured in this series, please email interviews@varsity.co.uk