This track was never intended to be a popular one, but it is nonetheless a sincere statement of my standpoint on war, and the way people’s feelings can be whipped up to a jingoistic frenzy by politicians and the popular…
Mar 25 2017
Mar 24 2017
7. Caught in the Glare
The song's genesis came about from a number of different directions. Firstly, I read an article about the then Secretary of State for Education, Nicky Morgan, where she was described as "looking stunned like some fluffy bunny caught in the…
Mar 23 2017
6. I Wish I Was
This track, which dates back to late 2015, blends the styles of two of my favourite musicians: James Taylor and Mark Knopfler. Of course, the two of them got together for real in the neglected masterpiece “Sailing to Philadelphia” and…
Mar 22 2017
5. Call Me a Stranger
I wrote this track at 4:00am in late August 2016. About 90% of the words and the guitar riff in its entirety came to me as a trade-off for my lack of sleep that night. So, unusually, I didn’t write…
Mar 21 2017
4. Butterfly’s Wing
Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird” has long been one of my favourite party pieces, although I have never quite mastered the rhythm of the repeated open G-string which runs throughout the song. Apart from that little difficulty though, it’s a deceptively easy…
Mar 20 2017
3. Fallen on my Feet
This is the only song I have ever written on a ukulele. It was a borrowed instrument, from Cavan, and I was using it to practise a song for our 2016 Phoenix Theatre show – “Raindrops Keep Falling on my…
Mar 19 2017
2. Tell Them I’m Gone
This was one of those songs which I wrote by playing a pair of guitar chords over and over again with my eyes closed, almost in a trance-like state, until gradually a tune began to emerge along with the words…
Mar 18 2017
1. Better Late
Back in July 2015 I upgraded my bog-standard PC to a super gaming machine with 48Gb of internal memory. Previously, I had been used to machines running 4GB, at the most 8Gb of memory, so this was like driving a…
Feb 25 2017
"One Day"
The video for "One Day" is, at last, finished.
The themes of the song are sudden, and unexpected, tragedy and the emotional paralysis and anger that come about as part of the grief process. The treatment of the song…
Sep 23 2016
Anatomy of a song – "Call Me a Stranger"
This is the track which I wrote at 4:00am a few weeks back. About 90% of the words and the guitar riff in its entirety came to me as a trade-off for my lack of sleep that night. Unusually, I…
Aug 30 2016
The Anatomy of a Song - "If You Give Your Love"
The first in an occasional series of posts where I detail how a song was, or is being, written:
I was thinking of R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts”. I’d always admired its stark simplicity, both musically and lyrically, because I tend…
Aug 24 2016
Songwriter quotes
Here are some quotes by songwriters on the process of songwriting. I've selected these particular quotes because my experiences seem to be very similar.
Songwriting is sometimes a painful process, as John Lennon said, but also an exhilarating one…