Tag: personal

Glue, dancers, strings, and radio.

The week has been spent folding album covers whenever I’m not at work or away from the house. My desk is slowly becoming a graveyard of empty tubes of glue sticks. It’s quite sad really – perhaps I’ll make them into a little mini graveyard and use it for something or other. Which reminds me, I need to buy some more glue. The full funders’ edition is nearly done. When it is, I’ll be emailing those people who’ve still not sent in a postal address to get the CD sent to. If you’re not sure if you’ve sent me your address, you can always send it a second time just to be sure. But all things going to plan, the first lot will be getting posted quite soon.

I’ve been told the dancers are ready with their piece, which is quite exciting, and we’ve been talking about doing live performances of it somewhere too, but there’ll be more updates on that one when get to scheduling the video shoot. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this turns out, as it’s something completely new for me.

Coming up next for me though is an in-studio session with Flirt FM, and a concert with the string orchestra I play with too. The orchestra concert is free, so if you’re around Galway on Friday evening, drop into St. Mary’s school for a 7pm concert. It’s a very social event and the orchestra members are all bringing food, and doors open at 6pm for people looking for some pre-concert food, coffee, and chat. There’s some fierce baking competition amongst the orchestra members, so I’m confident that the food on offer will be as wonderful as the music. Although it’s something I do purely for leisure, I somehow have ended up with some little solo bits, though I’m a terrible violin player.

I’ll have more details about the in-studio session for Flirt FM after this Tuesday, but it should be available as a podcast or download after it airs, so I’ll update with a link to that as soon as it goes live. It’ll be just myself and piano in the studio, so it’ll be quite stripped down and intimate.

Wires album liner notes

I’ve been busying myself making the special funders edition version of the cd covers, but also putting together an online version of extended album liner notes here on the website. It’s one thing I’ve always loved about CDs and Vinyl records – being able to pore over the pages of lyrics while listening, or look at the photographs, see who the musicians are on each song, and read the little thank you notes. It’s something that’s less easy to do when you’re buying music digitally.

But with this online version I’ve put together, you can listen to the album in full, investigate songs individually and see the lyrics, musician credits, and read about the recording experience, or what inspired the song in some cases. There’s some photos from behind the scenes in the recording studio, in the printmaking studio, and now in the dancers studio too. Each page will be updated as more of the videos get shot and made available online, and I’m toying with the idea of putting up some music score parts for some of the songs in future as well. So, the liner notes are something that will hopefully continue to grow and develop over the next few months as I keep realising the “Wires” project fully and will then be a wonderful document of the record when it’s time to move on to the next project.

So, why not grab a cuppa, and Check out the liner notes as they are right now.

Happy Birthday to me.

There are now actual CDs for sale through the bandcamp store, and some people have already noticed this and have been buying! Which has really made me smile. Those initial orders have been posted, and it’s all gone swimmingly. So, yeah, Bandcamp is pretty damn handy to use. It’s also the best way to make sure most of the money you choose to spend on music goes directly to the artist in question. To top it off, there’s a plethora of audio formats to choose from if you’re getting a download – one person got in touch to say it was great to be able to get the record in FLAC format. So, for audio nerds, that’s definitely the store to go to if you want the highest quality audio version of the album.

Today is my birthday! It’s been about a year since I decided to record an album, and it’s nice to be able to say that in that time I found a studio I could work in, raised the extra cash I needed, and put out an album of my own music for the first time. Birthdays are always more about setting new goals for me than any other time of year, and I’m busy working away at ideas for how to promote the album more, finding more places to gig, and looking at all the other songs I have written that I want to record. I’ve another album of music sitting waiting for its time to get recorded.

But, for now, it’s still the time to focus on Wires, and helping the project unfold and develop more. I’m working on some videos and trying to get the music heard by more and more people. I have been toying away with ideas for re-working this website completely to give a different sort of focus to it, and realising that I’m utterly rubbish at web design (any volunteers?) but I’ve a load of content nearly ready to go up as supporting material for the record.

Honestly, the best birthday present I could imagine would be more people being introduced to my music and enjoying it. Nothing makes me smile more than seeing one of my tracks posted as someone’s jam, or getting a message on twitter or on the forums about the album from people I don’t know well at all, or that email from Bandcamp telling me someone else decided it was worth spending their money on my music. There honestly is no better feeling in the world.

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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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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