meanwhile

...some music.

I cant let a week go by without making up or recording a song.

The Teachers Pet

I cogged most of these words from the poem “Where children keep their pets” by the great Irish children’s poet, Paul Cookson.

Bursting on the Ground

I found this song on an album by and/or called The Shrimp Attack Collective. A lovely album with a pressing of a couple of hundred that came in an army surplus canteen holder along with some personalization such as a couple of polaroids and a vial of what I think were juniper berries. I assume each copy was different. I loved this and I loved the album, too.

Like a human

I actually wrote this back in the 80s sometime. I was just thinking about it today and wanted to see what it would sound like if I recorded it now.

The Lowdown

I wrote this one 20 years ago and its theme is probably not acceptable to some people anymore. I stand by it though. It’s a true story.

All My Life

I wrote this one 15 years ago while I was driving around in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. In the beginning, driving was the only way to get my baby to sleep. Lots of time to think so I found myself imagining giant robots and selling coffee to cavemen.

Its remarkably coherent considering.

I'm a Little Dinosaur

This is an odd version of the old Jonathan Richman song.

I paid my son 2 euro to sing on the one section.

If you don’t know Jonathan Richman, look him up. In the seventies he had a group called the Modern Lovers. I believe they briefly tried to sell them in the UK as something they weren’t and they didn’t catch on. Basically he was a big kid who would write songs about little dinosaurs and monsters in the supermarket and sang them with a stuffed up nose like a little kid. This was so endearing that, surprisingly, he  caught on with lots of punks in the US. I’d say his biggest hit was “Roadrunner”. 

 

Home

The song is about a recent trip to the Santa Cruz mountains in California, where I lived for a year or two as a little boy. I hadnt been back there in 20 years and I was searching for memories but could find almost none. ​

I Bought a guitar on the very same day and, when I got back to Ireland, this is the first song I recorded with it.

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Cry baby cry

I got inspired to record this Beatles cover when I was doing an image for the Illustrated Beatles show. Cry baby cry, was one of my favourite Beatles songs when I was a kid. Perhaps it was the children under the table pretending to be ghosts. 

Everything

​Inspired by a dream that I had. This song has one of those eerie beats that would allow you to sing the Oscar Mayer song lyric and still sound deep.