A man has to know his limitations, and that's doubly true for Dermot Kennedy, whose career has taken him to dizzying heights in the most modern of ways. When you’ve gone from being a busker from small-town Ireland to a Spotify sensation to a major-label singer-songwriter packing 4,000-seat venues across North America in a few short years, you can’t afford to screw things up in your downtime.

That explains why, a couple of weeks ago on a West Coast recharging stop, Kennedy decided that—as beautiful as the mountains of Whistler and Blackcomb looked—the last thing he wanted to do was learn to master runs like Raptor’s Ride or the Burnt Stew Trail.

“It was incredible up there, but I didn’t ski because I was afraid of breaking my arm,” the 28-year-old says with a laugh, reached on his cell in Los Angeles. “It was weird, because you’re down in the village, you see everyone getting on the chair lift, and you think, ‘Oh man, I would love to do that.’ But, as an alternative, I did go bobsledding on the track there, and that was just mental. It was unbelievable—literally the maddest thing that I’ve even experienced.”

That’s saying a lot, considering how things have unfolded since Kennedy was playing covers on Dublin’s fabled Grafton Street. His rise started on Spotify; thanks to the magic of algorithms, his song “After Rain” ended up on a featured Spotify playlist, leading to a tsunami of interest. Add an endorsement from Taylor Swift, and suddenly Kennedy was getting four million plays and royalty cheques amost as impressive.
After sending out hundreds of often unreturned emails to record companies, the troubadour—who’s inspired as much by Travis Scott and Kanye West as he is by Glen Hansard and Bon Iver—suddenly found himself self-financing tours in North America and playing sold-out houses back home. And when it came time to consider signing with a major label (Universal won), he was already self-made to where no one could tell him what to do.

In conversation, Kennedy comes across as a man with a tireless work ethic and a crystal-clear vision of the path he wants to take. Last year’s debut album, Without Fear, smartly pushed the boundaries of the singer-songwriter genre.

“An Evening I Will Not Forget” starts with plaintive piano and Kennedy’s whisky-smoked vocals after which the strings and 808s-indebted beats give things a decidedly modern sheen. “The Corner” gradually morphs from a quiet break-of-dawn reverie to a wide-screen, sun-flooded celebration, and “Outnumbered” straddles a winning line between urban folk and downtempo hip-hop.

“Let’s take ‘An Evening I Will Not Forget’—that’s probably my favourite song on the album,” Kennedy says. “It ticks off all my own personal boxes. I love it lyrically, I love the way that it builds and crescendoes, and I love that it has everything from mad layered vocals underneath to a beat that really draws on different genres. It’s a song that doesn’t pop me into the singer-songwriter box. That’s really exciting.”

When Kennedy goes on to talk about getting one-on-one advice from Bono and playing Jimmy Kimmel Live!, he seems legitimately grateful for the inspiration, rather than out to impress.

Given a strike-while-the-iron’s-hot schedule that’s been packed for the better part of two years, he plans to be around for a while, partly because his success hasn’t come on the back of a single smash that he’ll have to play each show until he dies.

For Kennedy, a big part of coping is knowing when it’s time to push himself in places like Los Angeles (where he’s been busy writing to keep himself sharp) and when it’s time to kick back.

“Professionally, I’m very thankful that there’s a real push towards everyone being very cognizant of each other’s health, mentally and physically,” Kennedy says. “Last year was so full-on crazy and busy that I had a lot of people around me going, ‘Are you good? Do you need to grab some time off?’ So it’s really all about balancing downtime with that sense of do-everything-you-can ambition that you feel inside of you. So come Christmastime, I was definitely glad to get a couple of weeks. I went to an island on the west coast of Ireland, unplugged my phone, and didn’t exist for a few days. I can’t tell you how good that felt.” 

Dermot Kennedy plays UBC’s Doug Mitchell Thunderbird Sports Centre on Friday (January 24).