Category: Updates

Collaborating #1: Anna Lee

I had a visitor for a few days: Anna Lee, who I used to play piano with is back in Ireland for a few weeks, and spent some time here in Galway. Had a little mini session playing songs for each other in Java’s Café, where there’s a beautiful grand piano upstairs. But we’ve not yet managed to get around to having a good music session together.

I spent about two years in total playing with her, gigging around Ireland and a little bit around the UK too, before she headed off to Spain. I’ve known her since university, and we both used to play the singer-songwriter night in uni. She’s got a fantastic voice, and has released one EP so far, but I’m hoping she’ll release a full album. Here’s one of the tracks from that EP:

The video was shot and edited really badly by myself, and I helped her put together the EP for release, including working on the cover design and getting it available for sale. It was definitely a learning experience for me.

We had some great gigs playing together as “Husband | Wife” and just with me accompanying her as a session pianist. We shared a house together for about a year, and would practice and mess around with music at home. Here’s a cover of Portishead’s “Glory Box” that was recorded in our living room one afternoon back in 2006. Just ignore us messing around at the start ;) Read More

Inspiration: Gabriela Kulka

Gaba Kulka
Gabriela Kulka is a fantastic songwriter from Poland, who I describe to people as the lovechild of Kate Bush and Danny Elfman who grew up listening to jazz. She has released three albums, and has always managed to blow me away with each release. Check out the lead single from her most recent album, as well as an amazing cover she does of London Calling, which she turns into a waltz. Obviously.

Niejasności

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Found a song

Yesterday I was working on some arrangements for one of my songs, and was searching through a notebook to find some of the notes I had written about how I wanted the arrangement to sound. In doing so I came across the lyrics and some ideas for another song I’d been writing that I’d pretty much forgotten about.

I guess it happens. I feel I should be a bit more organised, but when I started demoing songs I put the ones I’d been writing on the back-burner for a bit while I tried to catch up with getting the other songs down on tape.

Silly Stories, Part 2: a story for no-one: Frank the Caterpillar.

Another in the series of random silly stories about animals.

I know I owe Meadhbh a story, after she asked specifically when commenting on the last one, but that’ll have to wait. This also means that Amanda is wrong – not all my stories are about giraffes! Awesome! I’m a DIVERSE author.

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There once was a caterpillar called Frank who hated the world.
But that was ok, because the world not-so-secretly hated him too.

One day, Frank was walking along, very slowly as caterpillars are wont to do, when it suddenly started to rain.
It rained, and it rained, and it rained some more.

“Fuck this”, thought Frank, as he got very, very wet, “I’m going to hide away from the world. Fuck yis all.”

The world wondered if perhaps it was being too mean to Frank, but then remembered that caterpillars grow up into being beautiful butterflies that are like the popular kids at school, and thought that balanced it out.

So Frank made a cocoon, and hid away from the world.

Time passed.

A little more time passed.

Then, the cocoon opened, and out came Frank version 2.0.
Was he now a beautiful butterfly?
No, unfortunately he was a shit ugly moth and flew straight for the first lightsource he could find.
Which was a UV light insect killer, and Frank got fried.

The End.
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Plz don’t sue me if you cry loads at the sad, sad ending.

Part 2 of an irregular series

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