Understood

Needle Mythology is thrilled to announce Understood – the first ever reissue of Understand – the acclaimed 1992 debut album by Brian. Brian was the ‘band’ name chosen by Dublin singer-songwriter Ken Sweeney after his songs attracted the interest of fellow Dubliner and head of Setanta Records Keith Cullen. The first sessions for Understand dated back to the summer of 1989. Propelled by work to the suburbs of West London, Ken found himself far from his comfort zone and raw from a particularly painful break-up. “I hardly knew anyone,” he recalls, “and the only way of making sense of things seemed to be writing songs.” Inevitably, the musical lodestones of Ken’s teenage years – The Go-Betweens, R.E.M., Miracle Legion, Trashcan Sinatras – started to percolate into his own musical language. In the space between estranged lovers, all the things that are too painful to say in words seemed to find their purest expression on a fretboard. It was in this space that the songs on Understand took shape. Why Understand? Well, that was the name of the title track. A programmed rhythm bears impassive witness to the emotional disclosure being played out over it: “The word 'understand' came up a lot, recalls Ken, “The wishing that somehow we could talk; that there could be a last conversation that would make things okay.” 

On its release, Understand was greeted with unanimous acclaim. Select Magazine talked about “the devastating effectiveness of early Smiths”; Melody Maker praised its giddy, mesmeric pop songs; Hot Press called it “an astonishing achievement”. Over the ensuing decades, the album has become increasingly sought-after among music fans whose collections sit in the centre of the Venn diagram where melody and melancholy overlap. 

Now retitled to acknowledge the closure that comes with the passage of time, Understood has been expanded to include the four songs that comprised 1993’s Planes EP – as well as a previously unheard track If You Knew, which was intended for the original album. In later years, as an acclaimed broadcaster, Ken went on to make documentaries about several of his musical heroes, among them R.E.M., The Go-Betweens and The Blue Nile. His Trashcan Sinatras documentary earned him a prestigious Irish National Radio Award in 2024. The newly expanded Understood has been remastered at Electric Mastering by Guy Davie.