summer's end
Saturday 27th September
Summer was a tornado in slow motion, for good and for bad. In June, I started working for *redacted* as a delivery driver (the first time something other than music has paid my rent). I’m not sure why that’s hard to come clean about but it is. On my first day, the advice I received from a well-intentioned colleague was to “toughen up and take no shit”, and while I did chisel a strong back lifting crates and multipacks of water (what’s with people forgetting they have a tap?) I started to notice myself becoming inpatient and mean with exhaustion and I knew then I wouldn’t last long. “I’ll save up enough to get me through winter”, was my thinking and the thinking paid off when I quit this afternoon.
It wasn’t all bad. I made great use of the trucks heavy-duty speakers and the days I rushed from shift to soundcheck were honestly kind of exhilarating (at least until the the next day when I would find myself feeling incredibly lost again).
But the big days were still dream days. In July I joined my friend Lucy Dacus at Ivy Gardens to sing on Bullseye (apologies to all that were anticipating Hozier and got, well, exactly the opposite) and I got to open for Father John Misty in August at Collins Barracks, where the general atmosphere was ‘really-large-picnic’ and where I asked the crowd if wearing sunglasses onstage made me an asshole (general consensus was forgiving). I managed to sneak in a hometown show at a secret cinema I didn’t even know existed. The adrenaline and enthusiasm from that show carried me for weeks and thanks to a very generous audience, we were able to donate to Fund A Food Drop (essential aid for Palestine).
My last summer rodeo was Sounds From A Safe Harbour in Cork, a week-long artist residency and festival where fifty or so musicians from around the world came together to collaborate on various projects (imagine School of Rock without the uniforms). It was a trust fall; every day was another beautiful little mystery. I’d wake up, go to breakfast, panic order, end up choosing with the self-restraint of a five-year-old (so many sugar waffles) then spent the afternoon making new sounds and new friends. Come the night, I’d find myself in another completely unpredictable and entirely surreal situation. One of those nights, I ended up in River Lee hotel lobby ‘song-share’ circle, playing new songs in front of some of my musical heroes. Another, in the pissing rain at a pagan rave (hard to explain but true) none other than Angie McMahan appeared next to me, wrapped in bear skin (complete with claws and head). And I’ll never forget singing my (and everyone’s) all-time favourite, Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl with a handful of legends (including Broken Social Scene’s very own Charles Spearin on Banjo) in Coughlans, a small, perfectly-lit bar, full to the rafters, at almost midnight.
On Sunday, the last day of the festival, myself and Sophie (otherwise known as Gordi) joined forces to play a one-off, sweaty and hilarious mega-show. We took turns trading songs and stories, opening the show with an instrumental that eventually led into a rendition of The Years by Alex Dimitrov. Sophie gave me permission to rip my first ever public guitar solo (6/10 - room for improvement) on her song Cutting Room Floor and we somehow recruited Charlotte Cornfield and Sean Carey to help us cover (absolutely destroy) Sufjan’s Chicago (in our defence, we only had time to run it once in rehearsal). Man, we had so much fun. It was such a week that I didn’t know what to do with myself for days after it was over.
B
