Hello Lisbon! I'm here to go on a little musical adventure and do a week long songwriting workshop with Tillery in the Centro Cultural de Belém. Tillery is the collective noun for a gaggle of songwriters (namely Becca Stevens, Gretchen Parlato and Rebecca Martin) and if you haven't heard of them well have a listen to this little chunk of beauty right here:  

So there I am last night in my room after a long day of being a tourist (the workshop doesn't start till tomorrow morning so plenty of time for sightseeing!) and I kept getting interrupted by cockroaches. Now listen here, I know cockroaches aren't that big a deal, that they're a fact of life in lots of warm countries but I don't care...we don't have them in Ireland and as far as I'm concerned they're the grossest thing on the planet! So I decided to get out of there and go sing a new song I've written in the warm night air. 

Anyone want to recommend places I should check out while I'm here? On my list so far is Hot Club and Fábrica Braco de Prata. I'm open to suggestions! Answers on a postcard...or on Facebook, twitter, instagram or the comments below. 

Click clack throw your head back when you laugh
Tiny teeth white secrets in your mouth
Yours to keep like sweets you'll suck them dry
Dreams like secrets shatter in the light.

Tic tac little toes on little feet
Snip snap lacey fingers tracing me
Truth, a toy it's just beyond your grasp
Fumbled, crumpled chins and grazed palms.

Fairytales, make believe, stories on a shelf
Our fantasies I made them real and stole them while you slept.
*Treasure, magic, love and blame I kept them for myself
Guilt like breadcrumbs left a trail
You found me.
You found me.
You found me.
You found me. 

You'l grow up and I won't hold your hand
You won't struggle with those demons I have
Skip, trip lightly, don't step on the cracks
Eyes wide open brilliant as a lamp.
You found me.
You found me.
You found me.
You found me. 

*I flubbed this lyric a little in the video, a freudian slip I think because I'm not completely sold on it. I'll probably change it down the line. 

You might have seen on my Facebook page or Instagram that I've been awarded an Emerging Artist Bursary for the creation and development of new work by Dún Laighaire - Rathdown County Council and I couldn't be more excited! Over the next six months I'll be composing a song cycle to accompany, and inspired by, the experience of walking the west pier Dún Laoghaire, Dublin. 

Some songs you grow tired of. You listen to them for a while and sing along and when you find them in your CD collection a few years later (yes I still have a CD collection!) you can't really remember what made you love them. You start hearing flaws you didn't hear before or it just doesn't connect. But some songs just hold up forever! Every time you hear them you hear something new that you hadn't noticed before and you fall in love all over again. May You Never by John Martyn is one of those songs for me. 

Sometimes you can tell when you're listening to a song that the lyrics were written based on phonetics rather than crafted to tell a story or convey emotion or meaning. The songwriter will start by singing whatever sounds or feels good, regardless of the meaning of the words, and gradually build the semblance of coherency around that. Songwriting this way can have it's advantages: it’s a visceral, instinctual way of writing so you can wind up writing something very deep and emotional without engaging you analytical ‘left side’ brain and the results are often really memorable and singable. But of course it has it’s drawbacks, like it's easy to wind up falling back on habit and you can wind up with deep sounding lyrics that are actually kind of meaningless ("there's a fire starting in my heart / Reaching a fever pitch, it's bringing me out the dark”! I'm not saying it's a bad song, just that some of the lyrics make no sense or are plain grammatically incorrect!)

One thing I love about a lot of John Martyn songs, this one in particular, is that they sound like one of these songs. The lyrics are so easy to remember, phonetically pleasing and singable that it isn’t till you’re singing it through for the millionth time, not realising you knew all the words, that you actually pay attention to the lyrics and see how beautiful they are. Perfectly constructed and logical. 

I also love his phrasing. He’s got a lovely rolling, continuous drone like way of phrasing his lyrics that lends his songs a sense of perpetual motion. 

I was fortunate enough to get to see him live twice and even though time, and possibly addiction, had definitely taken it's toll, he still had the power to completely transfix an audience. 

Posts before 2013, inncluding this one, are re-posted from my original blog. Some links may no longer work.

Lots of people never listen to lyrics! Especially boys! I like to begin blog posts with wide sweeping, un-researched generalisations about large portions of the population and end the sentences with exclamation marks!

Listening to lyrics can be a bit of hindrance because it can stop you liking otherwise perfectly good music.

Posts before 2013, including this one, are archived from my now defunct blogger account. Some links may not work and some info may no longer be true, for example it turns out Fiona Apple is no dressage pony!

Well now that title might be a little misleading because todays blog isn't strictly about 'songs about songs', it's about lyrics that arise from a frustration with song writing...but that's just not quite as catchy.

First a disclaimer and an explanation. Not all songs are about relationships (duh) and certainly a lot of my songs are about other things but this post is all about songs about relationships because those are the lyrics people react to. At gigs I'll get up and sing 'Kamikaze' with lyrics that stop a hair breath short of concluding that suicide is the only sane life choice and no one will bat an eye, then I get up and sing broken woman and everyone's full of 'ooh who's it about? aren't you embarrassed singing that in front of people? how controversial'...people are mad! So those two questions are what I'm going to try to answer here: 'Who are the songs about?" and "Amn't I embarrassed singing such personal lyrics in front of people?"

I’ve had this blog for a while without really knowing what to do with it so I’ve come to the well worn conclusion: ‘write what you know’. What I know is lyrics, more specifically my own lyrics (I should, I wrote them after all).

So I’m gonna start with Seasnail. Here it goes.