His musical beginnings are closely connected to Australia, where he spent part of his youth and began playing guitar and writing songs. Returning to Ireland as a young adult, he became part of a busy songwriting community and started developing the audience that would follow him through the years. That connection between Ireland and Australia runs through his life and provides important background to his later work. For a writer interested in home and memory, having lived on opposite sides of the world offers more than a change of scenery; it brings questions about where a person belongs and what they carry with them.

His debut album, Since Kyabram, arrived in 2004 and introduced songs that remain central to his reputation. Among them was “Galileo (Someone Like You),” which became his best-known composition and went on to be recorded by singers including Eddi Reader and Josh Groban. Its appeal lies in the way it places an intimate romantic feeling beside a much larger sense of wonder. It is an example of the balance that makes his songwriting distinctive: an idea can be ambitious while the emotion at its centre stays immediately understandable.

O’Rourke continued to develop his sound with Big Bad Beautiful World in 2007 and Mag Pai Zai in 2011. These records helped establish that his musical interests extended beyond a single acoustic style. His songs could accommodate fuller backing and stronger rock influences while retaining their focus on melody and storytelling. That flexibility matters to his career: the arrangements can change considerably, but the writing provides continuity. Whether the setting is restrained or more expansive, there is still a recognisable concern with how people think, remember and relate to one another.

Collaboration has also brought different dimensions to his music. Gold Bars in the Sun, released in 2015, included “Let’s Make Big Love,” a duet with John Prine. The following year, In Full Colour placed his work alongside the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, bringing orchestral arrangements to both existing songs and new material. These projects show how a song can support more than one kind of performance. A lyric first encountered through a voice and guitar can take on a different emotional scale when strings and a larger ensemble surround it.

One of his most substantial undertakings is Chronicles of the Great Irish Famine, released in 2017. The album grew from almost seventeen years of research and writing, sparked partly by a family discovery that his grandfather had been born in the workhouse in Gort. O’Rourke followed that discovery into a much wider investigation of Irish history, developing songs from the lives and experiences of people caught in the Famine.

The importance of that project lies in its attention to individuals. Historical suffering can become difficult to comprehend when it is expressed mainly through dates and numbers. A song can bring the listener closer to a particular family, a difficult journey or a moment of separation. O’Rourke’s approach gives human experiences a central place in the telling of history. It also reveals the seriousness with which he treats songwriting: music becomes a way of remembering people and encouraging listeners to consider how the past continues to affect the present.

His interest in those stories extended into fiction with The Pawnbroker’s Reward, published in 2021. Set around Macroom in County Cork during the Famine, the novel continued an exploration that had already occupied him for years through music. Writing a book gave him the space to develop characters and circumstances beyond the limits of an individual song. It is a natural extension of a career in which narrative has always carried considerable weight.

Also released in 2021, Arrivals brought his voice and acoustic guitar into particularly close focus. Produced by Paul Weller, the album explored family, movement and belonging through relatively spare arrangements. That smaller musical setting suited material concerned with personal experience. It allowed the phrasing, guitar playing and individual lines to hold the listener’s attention, reinforcing how much expression O’Rourke can find within a restrained performance.

His eighth studio album, Oceanic, released on 16 October 2026, adds another chapter to that story. Recorded in Sydney with Midnight Oil’s Jim Moginie as co-producer, it reconnects O’Rourke with the country where his early songwriting developed. Its background brings together his experiences in Ireland and Australia, with memory, distance and the passage of time helping to shape the project. Returning to Australia to make the record gives it a personal significance: an experienced songwriter revisiting a place closely associated with his beginnings.

Across these different projects, O’Rourke’s defining quality is his commitment to telling a story with care. He has made room for romance, historical research, orchestral collaboration and personal reflection without losing the direct relationship between singer and listener. His catalogue offers several ways into his work, from the accessibility of “Galileo” to the historical scope of Chronicles of the Great Irish Famine. What connects them is a belief that people’s lives, whether familiar or long forgotten, deserve time and attention.