Arrow

My brother Kevin and I had been planning a video for a song I recorded last year. But as we worked we realised the various scenes we had were relucant to sit beside each other, they wouldn’t gel. 

But not to worry.

We found that one scene we had shot with my friend Eoghan Burke (Fia Rua) and his daughter worked really well. We’d been planning a different approach but ended up taking an alternative route which was simpler and more beautiful.  

Thanks a lot to Eoghan and his daughter for taking part.

The music is called ‘Arrow’. 

Pearse

Notes from the Mississippi

Hi! So earlier this week we put out the new video for 'On The Mississippi'. When we've played this live we've often invited a poet up to see out the end of the song with a spoken word piece. Amongst our glittering alumni have been: Stephen Murphy, Stephen James Smith, Sweeney Lee, Erin Fornoff, Catherine Anne Cullen, VJ Jackson and Patrick Curley. This has been a highlight of the set in recent months and a great opportunity to share the stage with the sparkling talent of our poet folk. There's a short clip of Patrick Curley performing with us below for the Beneath The Air series in The Model, Sligo last October.

Enda Roche and myself recorded the song with Darragh Nolan, and we were lucky to have harmonica player supreme Christian Volkmann track some lovely playing a few weeks later. Here's a short clip of Christian recording at my place in July 2015. 

Originally, the song was a little lullaby. I liked the melody and for me it conjured up a story of adventure and redemption. 

If you like it you can support us by:

Buying from Bandcamp

Buying from iTunes

or by adding and saving to your playlists on Spotify 

Many thanks,

Pearse

New Video for 'On The Mississippi'

 Hi there,

Thanks for dropping by. Here is a video I made for 'On The Mississippi' taken from our recent album 'The Soft Animal'. The track was originally a sort of lullaby I sang with my daughter. Then I started thinking about the lyrics a little and it became a song about beginning afresh, a song about redemption. I shot the video in Louisiana. 

If you like it you can support us by buying the track directly from:

Bandcamp

iTunes

Alternatively, if you are a Spotify user, you can help us out by saving 'On The Mississippi' and adding it to your playlists. 

Thanks a million,

Pearse 

Playlists

Remember blogs? I used to post blogs on MySpace quite frequently but the instant-hit of posts on social media seems to have replaced such missives. 

So, I'm going to write about playlists which, with the growth of streaming services like Spotify, seem to be on the increase. There are downsides to this. Recording artists love to produce albums. Every year the Choice Music Prize in Ireland highlights the great number of albums produced in Ireland alone. The album occupies a similar mileu to the feature length movie from a filmmaker or to the exhibition from the visual artist. And similarly to these mediums the album allows its creator room and space to explore a particular mood, theme or notion. It's a spacious form and in its best incarnation, carefully constructed. So is it sacrilege to pull these works apart, to cherrypick the best tracks? I don't think that it is. I like playlists.

Playlisting, to me, allows tracks to exist within a new context which can breathe fresh life into a  song. I used to work on Raidió na Life in Dublin where I had a show called 'An Uair Dhraiochta'. I produced the programme for years in a voluntary capacity. As the show aired on a Sunday evening, I tended to play mellow, atmospheric tracks and I grew a bit of a knack for playlisting. I enjoyed finding new music and meeting new bands who, like myself, wanted to connect with people who loved music, and who hopefully appreciated their music too. So, putting together a playlist for my Spotify profile, which I entitled 'Nocturnal Listening: Ambience & Atmosphere'. I started off with artists like Massive Attack, Max Richter, Lisa Hannigan and Chihei Hatakeyma, artists who in some way touched off or inspired my own work. And when I placed my own songs from Idiot Songs & Nocturnes in the playlist I was really pleased to find that they sat alongside these pieces really nicely, it was a playlist I myself would enjoy! So, I felt pretty proud about that, proud of the songs me and Enda Roche in Nocturnes and my collaborator Justin Grounds in Idiot Songs have produced over the last number of years.

You can keep an eye on the playlist below. I'll keep changing it and adding to it. 

P