Declan O'Rourke was a latecomer to the Dublin singer-songwriter scene. A native of Dublin, when he was ten years old his family upped sticks to Australia for a few years before returning to Dublin, where O'Rourke spent the remainder of his adolescence. Despite having a keen interest in music and singing from an early age, it was during his teenage years spent in Melbourne that he first got hold of a guitar. O’Rourke was exposed to a different cultural aesthetic at this point which, coupled with his own well-formed cultural identity, may account for his unique style of melody and melancholia.