John McGlynn

Apologies for the lack of blogging.

The album is coming along nicely. I now have 18 songs which I am paring down to their absolute basics. I'm unsure whether to make this a purely acoustic album or to incorporate strings (courtesy of the brother). Methinks the latter is the best option. Songs about death, love and nature are tough to make decisions on. No gimmicks on this one. It's going to be truthful, honest and more than faintly bizarre. I have a song called Epic that I wrote watching a film, two pieces about a waterfall tied together by the simple tuning of the guitar, one about an extremely moving and hilarious wake I attended, another that attempts to capture 5 years in London on a Saturday morning, a piece which is ridiculously complex that I wrote on the beach in Fahamore in West Kerry called Heavenward and the unrecorded Soon to be forgotten, The Cherry Tree and Fragments. Over a decade of songs that should have been recorded and released years ago. Guess I wasn't ready.

Ian King and myself are going to do the unthinkable and record an entire album at the beginning of June in a single session. He has moved from East Finchley in London to a Tuscan farmhouse. Life has changed for him immeasurably and we are hoping to tap into it.

I'm also launching my friend Derek O'Gorman's new album in June. Heading off to the South of France to perform and add new ideas to the mix. He's a gifted songwriter and has chosen this wonderful country as his temporary home. Looks like it's going to be a very busy summer.

Can't wait.

Back from the Tyrone Guthrie Center for a few days now. I've enclosed some photos of the cottage I was staying in on the grounds. Most of the organising of the songs took place with the stove blazing beside me. I have no idea what's wrong with the weather this year. I'm a snowman by nature and I can't find anywhere cold to work! Having a blazing fire is only wonderful when there is a contrast between inside and outside and I was wandering around the house in a tee-shirt.

I'm recording in the Dance Studio which has a huge acoustic [completely unsuitable for final recordings but who cares?]. The object it to produce the whole album in it's roughest form as a single concept, moving on to a finer chop with added ideas - at this juncture I may take some advice from certain people if I feel it's needed. Final stage is to go into the studio. Ideally that would be a week for all guitars and vocals, maybe away in the bogs somewhere or even in Scandinavia where there might be some bloody snow!!

Not a lot more to say at this stage. I'm throwing formally great ideas out the window daily. When I get back from Annaghmakerrig next time I should pretty much know what the final structure will be. Somewhere at the back of my mind I can hear the finished work. I had a dream a couple of nights ago in which I was sitting listening to the whole album with my friends and family, the whole thing! It was over an hour long and one track flowed into another. Clear as crystal!!! Don't remember any of it.
One thing I'm sure of is that when this is finished I'm cleaning house. This is going to be the last time I look at these songs. Anything after this will be a new beginning. I think I deserve it.

When I was recording in the very late early hours of the morning alone in the middle of a field in Monaghan, I heard tapping at the window several times. Every time I tried to locate the source I failed. I never heard it at any other time except after 3am. Normally I see ghosts everywhere and find it unsettling, but this time I felt that whatever visitor I was receiving at the extreme end of the night was benign and that the tapping was to tell me to get on with it.

A final lovely thing was discovering a little drawer under the table in the cottage I was working in. Someone had left it there years ago and it had been read and put back by each new resident, something like "Hello! I was here trying to pluck words out of thin air and I understand how hard it is" It really helped.

Well quite a lot as it happens. I'm on the way to The Tyrone Guthrie Center soon to finish the final compilation files [looks like 24 viable songs, some over 7 minutes long....don't ask!] for the new album. I must say that after waiting so long to finish this I'm annoyed at myself that it wasn't done sooner. It's difficult to go back and re-energize work that you didn't bother to finish. The upside is that now I'm forced to see the songs as part of a much bigger and significant concept, well significant to me that is.

Having lived in the center of Dublin for over a decade puts you in a position of being knowledgeable whether you like it or not. The economic situation is playing havoc with the middle-classes. They don't know what to do with themselves or what to plan for. They have produced a generation of serial university students, too many of whom can't read, spell or show any interest in anything other than the culture of "gimme it now,  I want it on 4 separate devices and I want to share it with a virtual community of people who are too damned lazy to pick up the phone!" The rich are still rich and the poor never heard the Celtic Tiger roar anyway. You can't borrow money to streamline your business or develop your product but the banks will give you money to do up your bathroom. It's a very uncertain time in Dublin and the natural optimism of the people here [immigrants and Dubs] is taking a hammering from a government who are out of touch with the people and completely in thrall to Europe.
There's an enterprising artist in Smithfield living in a brand new empty office space made out of bricks of shredded money - around €1.4 billion. He gave me a brick of €50,000 little bits wrapped in cellophane "for the mantelpiece!".

The city is very old and you get the sense that no matter how many drunken kids populate it at the weekends or how many homeless and drug addicts litter the tourist areas, there's a wise old lady who comes out on a Sunday morning ignoring the detritus and wanders her green spaces and the Georgian squares. It's a beautiful place despite the “craic” messing it up. Not an Irish word by the way, rather an Englishism based on “cracking up” or “to crack a smile”…the words to Danny Boy were written by an English Barrister…St. Patrick was actually born in the North of England. All available on Wiki!

The concept of the new album is based on the city and how it lives and breathes despite us and our ridiculous worries. It further contrasts and acknowledges my own desire to celebrate the pastoral part of my life, probably because I was brought up in the countryside. I would like to use the word juxtaposes here but my Architectural background won’t allow it. Many of my former colleagues in college used it to justify all sorts of nonsense. One very prominent contemporary of mine famously used it to cover the fact that he had no storage facilities in his restaurant and several of his doors didn’t lead to anything, except for the one that merrily allowed you to walk through and plummet to your death. He got an A.

So in a roundabout way that sort of vaguely explains where I’m going with these recordings. Or possibly not.

Other news is that the project with Ian has had to go on hold for the moment. He’s moving to Italy in a few months and as soon as he’s settled we’ll start looking at it again.

That’s it for now. I’ll probably have something less long-winded to say about my progress next week.

Or possibly not.


I'm on the way over to my beloved London to play, record and plan with Ian King tomorrow [actually today would be more accurate]. This has been a lengthy and in many ways frustrating process for both of us. The two albums are still on the cards and it looks like we have a state-of-the-art recording studio in Eastbourne to create the magic [ha ha ha!]. This reminds me that I have to go and see Beachy Head mainly due to the propensity of the locals for chucking themselves off the edge. Guess I'm lucky. When my love affairs go bad I write a miserable song that makes me look like the hero. 


So the main issue is completing lyrics that have some relevance to us both. Might seem simple but to be blunt, writing lyrics has become a hackneyed and dishonest occupation. In the 50's and 60's teams of songwriters were employed to put their words in other people's mouths. Nothing has really changed. Writers produce audience friendly pap and we lend them to our lives in the hope that they'll improve us in some meaningful way. Ian and myself are banging our heads against bits of random furniture, desperately trying to find structure in all of our experiences. You spend a day looking at bits of paper and the eureka moment comes, only to be scuppered the next morning when you look at the unadulterated muck that you've written. I wrote the entire lyric for Fallen Angel on a bicycle in 10 minutes. Probably should have ended up in ditch. Self-indulgent doesn't begin to describe the smugness of hitting the nail on the head as a 46A bus tries to drive you into the waiting area of the police station in Donnybrook.
 So this whole process with Ian is either going to kill us or save us. Either way it's great to still be doing this. Ian works his ass off in a day job and squeezes his creativity into structured bursts. I'm lazy as sin. What binds us together is the desire to get the job done. We won't be posting snippets of progress or updates on songs. When the two albums are finished they'll be released and criticized on the basis that they're ongoing commentary of our lives as we are living them right now. A lot has happened and is happening to us, as it is to everyone else. I just hope that we manage to be honest and truthful.



That said I had a great experience on November the 8th. I got to open for Madeleine Peyroux in the esteemed National Concert Hall in Dublin in front of around 700 people, the vast majority of whom had no idea who I was. Madeleine did. She knew my stuff and was incredibly charming. I have to say that in all of the years of performing with Anúna it was wonderful to open for a real star and to have her audience accept and enjoy my songs. 



So off to London. I'll post some thoughts after the weekend. Ian has lost his phone so I see myself standing in the rain outside East Finchley tube station tomorrow composing another world-changing ballad and planning ways of making him pay. Guess I'll write him into a song with a badly trimmed beard and a limp....that is unless he does it to me first.