Tag: inspiration

It’s wet. Avoid the day and watch these instead:

On wet days like this, I mostly hide away with a pot of coffee and play piano for the day, before lighting a fire, cooking dinner, and getting lost in excellent tv and random youtube videos.

Here’s a video clip from the Off Beaten Path dance show that used one of my songs this summer:

My face crops up in the most random places sometimes. I’d forgotten I did a bit of extras work for this production, and there’s my face in the trailer for it.

Spotify finally comes to Ireland, so if you’ve not yet picked up my record and want to throw it into a playlist on Spotify to see what you make of it, then you’ll be glad to know that my record is indeed already on there: mister ebby – wires [spotify].

If you do like it and you want to have it slightly more permanently, then you can pay what you like for the digital download through my Bandcamp store, or pick up the CD there. And there’s a bunch of other shoplinks linked through the website here too if you have a preference for something else.

Last night I went to see a screening of a documentary about Philip Glass, which I’ve just discovered is on youtube too. But there’s nothing quite as nice as seeing it on a big screen with a gang of music fans and film fans all gathered in the Huston Film School.

The opening quote sticks with you even after the film ends. Words to work by for sure:

I never was a captive of other people’s ideas about me. Whatever they thought, it didn’t matter to me. I do what I wanted to, and I didn’t care. I’ve been like that my whole life and it’s saved me a lot of trouble. Even when it came to writing music, I didn’t care what people thought. You know, there’s a lot of music in the world you don’t have to listen to mine. There’s Mozart, there’s The Beatles, listen to something else – you don’t have to listen to this. You have my blessing – go listen to something else, I don’t care.

Seeing how he works, and how he makes pizza, and just random little bits of gems was really interesting to me. I’d previously read this book on him: Glass: a portrait, which was fascinating in a very different way. This documentary works as a great contrast piece to the book, which focuses more on the work and the development of his music – a bit more of a musicology piece than a biography. Whereas the film gives you more of the context of his life and how he created his own opportunities and existed outside the classical world long before his works started getting premiered in concert halls and opera houses.

This piano piece was what really captivated my interest initially – my gateway drug to his musical language I guess.

If you’re a Google+ fan, like myself, then I’m playing some Hangouts soon, kicking off with an open mic on Thursday night/Friday morning run by Musician and Band Public Database. I’ll be playing a few songs along with a bunch of other musicians who use Hangouts. Check it out. MBPD Open Mic HOA #5

Inspiration: Sarah Slean

Sarah Slean is a musician I’d heard friends talking about online a lot before I finally checked her music out. I think one of those friends may have given me a copy of two of her albums to start me on my path of discovery, but they were certainly right in their guess that her music would be right up my street. Piano? Check. Classical background? Check. Musical theatre influence? Check. Literate, clever, witty, and wry? Check.

Although Lucky Me was the song that grabbed me and pulled me in, it was the album Night Bugs that I took hold of and fell for utterly. Before long two of her songs started appearing as covers in my sets – the wonderful Sweet Ones, and the more dramatic The Score.

The latter was one of the songs that I did with the girl group trio I played with for a while. Their three part harmonies in that song really were something else, and playing around with harmonies with those singers was one of the big influences on the vocal layering on my debut record. We

Her most recent album, Land & Sea, is an absolute treat – particularly the second disc, which centers around voice, piano and strings, which is one of my favourite combinations of instruments. Despite the fact that it was her more pop leaning songs that I initally was drawn in by, it’s this disc that I find myself turning to.

I mean, check out this live performance of “Napoleon” performed with a string ensemble.

The album was finished off in a hut in Newfoundland, which features in the video for the song The Devil And The Dove:

It was here, in a little shack by the sea with a grand piano, a bed, a table, chair and kettle (little else), Sarah completed composing the songs and four orchestral scores for this incredible collection. “…one of the most inspiring places on Earth…. It’s impossible to be distracted from the powerful presence of Life itself here – the rugged land, the ever-changing weather, the magnificent, powerful ocean…it’s a place to ponder the vast expanse of time before and beyond us, to ponder the wondrous marvel of being.”

One of the songs from that latest record is one of those little inspiration touchstones you turn to at times. I’m always a music first, lyrics later, kinda listener when it comes to songs, and indeed sometimes it’ll be months before I realise exactly what the words of a song I love actually are. However, with The Right Words, it was the words that grabbed me along with that beautiful vocal melody in the chorus.

“throw your heart into the ocean, throw your heart into the sea
you will find that all the right words
will come out naturally”

Feedback makes it worth it.

I started a post doing a “2011 in review” sort of post, but quickly realised that my entire focus for all of last year was in getting the album recorded and released. So, in lieu of a rather repetitive reflection on the past year, instead I’m going to look at the effect that all that work has had on other people by posting some of the rather lovely things folks have said to me about my record.

Gathered together like this, it really makes me smile when I get worked up about trying to make a living from music work. Getting these unsolicited little messages really makes my day, and they come from the various corners of the internet that I hang out in. Some are friends, some are long time internet acquaintances, some are newer connections struck up on twitter, others are complete strangers. These are just some of the ones that I saved and stuck in a little document that I open up and peek at when things are stressful. I didn’t put all the messages in this, just a few random ones that made me smile tonight.

So, thank you for listening and for supporting my music last year, and thank you so much any of you who took the time to send me a message like this. <3

Some of the Feedback from friends, strangers, unfers and others:
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I’m a sucker for songs with choirs.

Seriously, it’s like crack to me. I think I can probably blame my parents for this one quite successfully: my dad has always sung in the local church choir, and my mother introduced us all to the wonderful songwriter Melanie, and this song in particular:

It can seem cliché to throw in a choir for some extra emotion, but there’s something really rousing about a group of different voices coming together as one. The combination of all those different vocal timbres creates something very special indeed. Even if they’re just singing in unison, there’s so much power in a group of voices.

I’ve been in choirs since I was really young, and have a major soft spot for choral music as a result. Last year I was conducting a choir for the first time properly – previously I’d set up a mini choir for an amateur production of Sister Act that I arranged all the music for. That’s a long story for another time. But, it was my first experience of properly arranging music for a group of other people to sing, and I was completely hooked. I think I arranged about half of the material I got the NUIG choir to sing last year – stuff that varied from Elvis songs to Swedish folksongs.

Speaking of Swedish music, one of my favourite guilty pleasure songs with choirs is by the Swedish band The Ark, who some people probably remember mostly for their Eurovision entry in 2007. However, I remember them mostly for a Swedish friend of mine who was rather obsessed with them and introduced me to their music. This particular song is one that has stayed with me since, mostly for the choir entry in it. The song itself is pretty straight forward and quite emo lyrically, but the interplay between the choir and the lead singer in the last section of the song is absolutely stellar.

And I must take a moment to thank @donalmulligan, who reminded me of this great track that I first heard on the Pet Shop Boys “Back To Mine” compilation. Incidentally, you may also have heard it recently on the Channel 4 show “Sirens”, which I recommend watching btw. I lost that PSB compilation in the Great Hard Drive Crash of 2011, but I’m glad that youtube is there so I can still find these tracks to listen to. Try not to dance in your seat as you listen to it.

I had a playlist on my old iTunes that was dedicated to “Choral Awesomeness”, as I put it, but alas it’s something I’ll have to rebuild from scratch again now. Not all the selections had such bombastic choirs – some were more serene, like Kate Bush’s “Hello Earth” which quotes the Georgian folk song “Tsintsharo”, featured in the Werner Herzog film “Nosferatu”. Or Thea Gilmore’s amazing “Sol Invictus”, which quickly became one of my favourite midwinter songs ever. I’ve also previously posted about one of my favourite choirs, Scala, who do gorgeous choral versions of popular music.

But it seems pretty obvious that the love of choral music, and the years spent either singing in or conducting choirs, would have some effect on the kind of music that I write. That certainly does seem to be the case, listening back to the mixes. I realised that I have 10-part harmony at one point in one of the songs, and there’s a definite choral feel to that particular song. However, it’s definitely a different thing to be layering up different vocal lines with your own voice, and working with a choir. Maybe I’ll put together a little choral group to sing live with me so I can really get those vocal textures live that are on the record.

Inspiration: Joni Mitchell

This is one of my favourite Joni Mitchell songs, and I stumbled across this live version from 1970 on youtube today while searching out more performances from this BBC In Concert series.

The entire concert is collected here, if you fancy losing yourself to some wonderful live solo performances from a talented songwriter on the cusp of the greatest period of her career. This would have been in the period just after Ladies Of The Canyon, while writing songs that would appear on Blue.

There’s a great early version of “All I Want” in that show too, while it was still being written, which I recommend checking out, if only to compare it to the version that is so well known and loved on the album. In fact, that song was the reason for a spur of the moment road trip across the country one year for me. My ex was visiting, and we went for a hangover breakfast with a friend, and afterwards, this song came on in my CD player in the car, and we decided that my ex wouldn’t get a bus back to Cork, but that we’d all just keep on driving and listening to my Joni CDs and sing along. Now, every time I hear that riff starting on the dulcimer, I think of the road to Cork, and it makes me smile a lot.

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