So I was at the Grand Social getting ready to play with the Louisiana 6 when I saw a lady getting plugged in and as I was by the stage dropping off the upright I asked her ‘do you want a bass player?’. She said ‘yeah sure, come on up’.
With nothing other than that she ‘played the blues’ we did an impromptu show together and Louisiana 6 guitarist Morgan Baker filmed a minute or two of it.
Johnny Cash did a nice version of the Tom Petty tune ‘I won’t back down’, here’s a version of it and at the end I go through how to play it as well.
This is a song that we recorded in Sonic in Dublin in October 2016. It’s a tune about how life sometimes works out differently than you thought it would. Lyrics are below, some are alternative lyrics I toyed with and haven’t taken out, as with all my songs, the actual lyrics in it might not match what’s written down!
Open eyes to another day
turn beside me wanna see your face
to know I’m not dreaming
and it’s you
the angel that I wake up to
Hold this hand, and look my way
please understand that in this place
we are free,
as we can be
the world flows on past you and me
[Then] it all turned out a little different
than I thought it would.
Things turned out a little different
than I thought they would.
Life is good but luck can change
change it does every passing day
a thing once bright now
is only a glow
a once big river
no longer flows
Mountains fall, time passes by
a love runs out
and it doesn’t revive (alt lyr: like a river run dry)
Making sense,
is hard to
And it’s hard to make much of anything when I’m around you
[making a future
is kinda hard around you…]
CHORUS
Bridge: Passing time… goes on by….
Time is cruel, cruel and unfair
dark gives way to more grey hair
it’s a life of work
a life of toil
half the time I wonderin’
what I’m doin’ it for
And I’m still here, like a fool I stay
When the better part of me is saying
’up and away’
[when the better part of sense
is tellin’ me walk away]
but it’s a tricky thing
to try and figure out
when it isn’t just me I gotta worry about
This was probably never meant to be, but that is why I do it 🙂
I have been writing songs since I was 17, I reckon there are about 300 of them penned at this stage. They are in different levels of completion, many are just on chorus one verse and need a lot more work. There are others that are completed.
I recorded an album in 2007 with Mark Reddy in Malahide, that is collecting dust, my 2014 album is doing the same and I’m hoping that my 2016 one breaks the mold by at least getting heard by more than three people.
Apart from this I still write for a few newspapers, keep a day job in a company I founded and help to manage since 2004, I have three children, a great wife, a mortgage and all the other usual things that keep people busy. I have written a few chapters in different published books, co-wrote a finance book in 2015 and am working on three other projects at the moment too.
The bands I play in at the moment are the Tin Box Company which is a bluegrass act, The Louisiana 6 which is a skiffle group, I sub in for either guitar or bass with the Sarah May Rogers band (I am the fourth member of a trio) and then whoever needs whatever, I’ll do that too!
I am hoping that 2016 and 2017 are the years I finally get the finger out. I have been putting off doing something with my songs for too long, part out of fear, part out of being too busy with other things. So let me know what you think be it good or bad feedback as I post the tunes up.
thanks
@karldeeter