Tag: songs

post-launch gigs roundup

Firstly, thanks so much to everyone who turned out on the wet, windy night in Galway last Wednesday, and everyone who showed up in Dublin on Thursday for the gig in the gorgeous, intimate venue upstairs in Twisted Pepper. It brought a smile to my face to see so many familiar and unfamiliar faces coming out to help celebrate the album getting out into the world.

Secondly, thank you to “The Meadhbhs” and “The Sullivans” for adding their voices to the shows. I named the two little groups after Meadhbh Sullivan, who provides most of the additional vocals on the album, but unfortunately wasn’t able to be a part of the launch gigs due to a show she is acting in this week in Cork. (It’s in The Granary in Cork all this week. Go see it.)

The Meadhbhs (Galway choir): Deirbhile Ni Bhrolchain, Elise Karlsson, Fionnuala Connolly, Kevin Brett.

The Sullivans (Dublin choir): Jo McNamarra, Dearbhla Kelly, Sally O’Dunlaigh.

That idea worked out pretty well. I had one rehearsal with each group before the show, and I’d emailed them the parts and the tracks they were singing, and I was just hoping that it would come together pretty easily. But it really did, and they added so much to the songs they were singing on.

The album got a little mention in The Ticket section of The Irish Times today, and yesterday on Jim Carroll’s “On The Record” blog too, which was rather lovely to see, to be honest. I nicked a copy of The Ticket from a café today after I spotted it.

Little mention in the Irish Times.

Today my album went live on iTunes

I’m not gonna lie – that brought a big smile to my face. It’s about €1 more expensive than it is to buy it direct from Bandcamp, but iPhone users can download it direct to their phones through the iTunes store, if that’s something that you wanna do, whereas with Bandcamp, you do really need to be at your computer, and not on your phone, to download it.

If you are enjoying the record, and use iTunes, then please consider rating the album and writing a little review that people can read on the iTunes store page. That would make me very happy indeed.

There are delays with the physical CD, and it’s looking more and more like it won’t be ready for the actual launch days. But sure, I’ll still play the gigs and celebrate this album going out into the world. If you’re around Galway or Dublin next week, drop in and listen to me playing songs from this record live.

At each of the gigs, there’ll be a small little choir group singing with me for a few of the songs. It’s different people in each city, and they’re basically friends and acquaintances, and strangers and twitter followers, who all said yes when I asked if they’d like to sing with me. I’m really looking forward to getting them up on stage with me. It should be a lot of fun.

I’ll also be playing some songs that aren’t on the new album, which I held over for the next one, or which have been written since this summer. And I’ve reworked some of my favourite covers too.

Stream my album, and buy it if you like.

The digital version of my album went out to my fundit funders yesterday, and about half of them have already downloaded it at this stage. But you can now stream the album on Bandcamp or Soundcloud, and if you like, you can buy it from Bandcamp. It will shortly be available through iTunes and other digital stores over time.

Bandcamp is my own preferred digital retailer, as quite honestly, I get to charge you less for the album, and I make more money directly as it’s not going through a middle man of any kind.

The CD itself has had another little setback – I’m starting to take it as a hint that CDs maybe aren’t the way forward. The designer’s computer had a hard drive failure yesterday, and I’m not sure if he’s been able to retrieve any of the work that has been lost. Here’s hoping that he can.

The Bliss Returns – live at Charlie Byrne’s

This is a video that was shot before I even found the studio that I ended up recording the album in. The morning of this shoot the camera assist, Yvonne Ryan, mentioned Charthouse Studios to me, and gave me the contact info of Ian McNulty, who ended up engineering and mixing the record. The band Yvonne is in, Ambience Affair, had recorded at that studio, and she knew that they had recently put a piano in.

The video was shot by Mark Willis of Bluestack Records, who also very kindly did my promo video for my fundit campaign, and my brother Phil Brett was taking care of the sound. The video was intended for a larger project the two guys had in mind, but I’m told there’s been problems with the external hard drive Mark had stored the footage on. I hope they didn’t lose all that work. Hard drive failures are annoying as hell, as I recently was reminded myself.

However, this one long shot take survives, and the guys put it together for me, for which I’m very grateful.

This song is on the album, in a more fleshed out version with drums, bass and cello, but in this video it’s just me and a piano in Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop in Galway.

Mastering, gigging and a free download

Mastering is an interesting art. I was able to attend the mastering session for my record at Wav Mastering in Limerick, and experienced the recordings gaining more definition and going from being a bunch of tracks that I’d recorded to being an album that made sense to listen to. I find it hard to explain exactly what it’s like without resorting to a bread analogy – so imagine you’ve made 12 loaves but baked them just as a round of dough on a tray. Now, imagine all those 12 loaves were baked in the same loaf tin instead. They still will taste the same, but they’ll look more uniform as a result. I guess that’s how I see mastering. I don’t know if that even makes sense – but it works in my head and I hope in yours too.

I was due to play at Song Cycle in Whelan’s last monday, as a sort of prep for myself to road-test some of the really new songs I’ve never played to an audience before. However, the mental floods in Dublin that evening meant that the evening didn’t go ahead at all, so apologies to anyone who may have braved the weather to make it in.

I wanted to play those songs live before playing them at the Jazz Festival gig tomorrow, but alas, they’ll just get their first outing at that gig instead. So, if you’re around Cork for the weekend, drop into the Festival Club on Sunday evening, and I’m playing in the Legends Suite.

I’d been hoping to have the record ready and out there before the Jazz gig, but various things always seem to crop up to add to the delay. But that’s really helped and added to the whole learning process. These last 6 months have been one big learning curve for me, and comparing the demos I was doing at home before going into the studio with the finished album I have now is mindblowing to me at times. But I wanted to be able to start sharing some of it with people, so here’s a track called “Helen” which you can listen to and download for free via Bandcamp. I hope you enjoy it, and spread it around. The full album will be available in November, all things going to my now re-adjusted plan:

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