Songs & Music
I’ve been singing for as long as I can remember and started playing guitar when I was around eleven or twelve years old. Wherever I’ve lived or travelled over the last fifteen years I’ve looked for opportunities to perform in pubs, bars and cafés, at parties and open mic nights, or busking in the street. I’ve got a fairly wide repertoire of songs covering everything from sixties rock’n'roll to classic acoustic rock, britpop and indie, Irish folk, singer-songwriters, etc… I try to keep up to date with new stuff as much as possible, but that takes a fair bit of time and effort.
I mostly perform alone but I really enjoy playing and singing with others too. With my good buddies Nigel Hughes and David Graham I performed as part of Hipster, an acoustic trio that entertained the good people of Limerick for a few years back at the start of the century. We still play together now and then, although the setlist is starting to age a bit by now. Living in Geneva I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to sing with Mark Lawrence a few times. He’s a brilliant musician: lovely guitar player and fantastic singer. I hope I’ll have many more opportunities to perform with Mark in future.
I try to make time to play and sing as much as possible. These days I do covers gigs about once a month, usually in an Irish bar, and otherwise I play at open mic nights, singer-songwriter nights and the like whenever I have the chance. Here I’ve put together a list of all the places I’ve performed down through the years.
If you’d like to talk to me about playing at an event mail me at: eoghan1[at]ireland.com.
Songwriting
I started writing songs in July 2002 in a flat above The Dubliner in Oslo – I remember it well because I had long given up hope on ever writing anything. It’s not something I do all the time and I often wonder why I do it at all when there are more great songs in the world than I’ll ever have the chance to hear or sing. But I do get a kick out of “giving birth” to a song that wasn’t there before. And singing my songs for people that want to hear them can be very fulfilling.
I try to take inspiration from contemporary songwriters like Neil Finn, Badly Drawn Boy, Ben Folds, Josh Ritter and Elliott Smith, as well as those classic writers like the Beatles, James Taylor, Cat Stevens, Paul Simon, etc… Ultimately I aim to write songs that people will want to listen to, maybe sing along with, and to hear again.
Recordings
The six tracks below are ‘full band demos’ that were recorded in August 2008 at Silverwood Studios in Co. Wicklow, Ireland. Gavin Ralston engineered, mixed and mastered them, also playing lead guitar and keyboards. Aonghus Ralston played bass and Tom Domican was on drums. The wonderful Maeve Sweeney can be heard as Liza on Dear Liza and added lovely harmonies elsewhere.
Was I supposed to read your mind
Download all of the above recordings in a zipped folder here.
Any other recordings I have were done at home using basic equipment and not much patience on my part. But I think there are some nice moments still, particularly on the first rough recordings of the songs above. This folder contains a bunch of rough recordings from around 2007. Compare, for example, the following with the version above:
Was I supposed to read your mind (home recording)
Or this earlier version of Dear Liza recorded with Maeve in a classroom in Listowel in summer 2008, with the little guitar line added later:
Post-2009
I haven’t really done much recording in the last year or so, what with the move to Amsterdam, the wedding, the new job, etc… But I do have a few rough recordings of songs written since I did the studio recordings above:
Countryside_(Performed live on Azimut FM, Geneva)
Hipster
Hipster is an acoustic trio consisting of myself, David Graham and Nigel Hughes…three guitars, three voices. We’ve taken a few trips to a house in the middle of the French countryside to try to write hits that would make us rich. We’ve failed so far, although I’m pretty sure our Christmas song will do the job some day. It’s David on lead vocals on this recording:
A Perfect Christmas (2007) – Hipster
Video
Here’s a video of me singing I’ll Be Around at an Amsterdam Songwriters Guild open mic night. It was shot by Max van Remmerden at the much missed Café Sappho in Amsterdam in 2009.
