I'm looking forward to it. It's my first gig where I'm not the support act or on someone elses bill. I've been working on my songs and but every time I start I end up wanting to write new songs! So much so that it's been hard to really work on the ones I need for the gig.

In reality I think the only true way to work on songs is to play them live. Rehearsal rooms will only bring you so far until you need to see the whites of people's eyes to really bring the songs further. You just have to get them to a certain point then let them go. And once you do that and start gigging enough the songs start to organically develop without you even realising.

A good example is my song Street Lights that I just did a video for. I had to play along to a version of the songs I recorded last year. But I've gigged it alot since and was amazed to see how much I'd changed things along the way. I'd completely re-written the bridge and didn't even think about it!

Back to tomorrow's gig.... I'll be playing with Jay Wilson who is a great guy that I met when we were playing on the same night at The Purty Sessions. He'll be playing the Cajon and possibly one or two other bits and bobs too. It'll be the first time I'll have someone onstage with me since I've returned to music properly. So if anything goes wrong I can blame him :-)
See you at the gig!
Bewley's Theatre Bar
Grafton st, Dublin 2.
March 27th, 2008
8.30, €7
Support: Simon Dowling.


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So it seems to be one thing after the other at the moment, after many chats I'm starting a video shoot for Street Lights tonight with director Mark Doherty. He went out last night to get evening shots of the unique atmosphere of Dublin city centre on Good Friday because it's one of the few times that the pubs of the city are shut. It's a great idea as anyone who knows the city will tell you that that's a whole lot of closed doors.

I won't give too much away as you'll have to come back and see it for yourself when it's done. But I think it will be great.

I've been working on other video ideas too so with me starting to record alot now they will all be filmed over the next while to accompany the new songs. Should be fun!
Hamlet

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When I returned to music 10 months I go alot of things felt different. The music you make should reflect the person you are. But it wasn't doing that. Not enough to keep me satisfied anyway. The music still felt like much of it was coming from the person I had been 4 or 5 years previously. It's one thing feeling yourself to be stuck spinning circles on a creative round about, it's quite another knowing where the exit is.

The answer came from an unexpected place. I thought I would needle my way to a new sound and feel either through writing or through experimenting in the studio. Instead it happened in that place where music is probably at it's purest; in front of an audience. So I gigged around Dublin for a few months playing any support slot, party or open mic night I could find (the pic is of me doing that very thing at Sunday Roast in Thomas Reads. Thanks to Franziska Blum for taking and posting the pic). As a result my songs and what I wanted to get out of them started to make sense.

The answer is very different to how I used to do things where I've been a perfectionist down to the last detail controlling everything. Someone once descibed being in one of my bands as like being in a democracy run by a dictator. Sorry guys (but don't relax just yet, I still have the whip:-). So now it's all about taking a looser approach. Pretty simple really. I still 100% stand by all my old songs and all the stuff I recorded last summer but I'm looking forward to breathing life into the songs with people in a room together having fun through playing music. Watch this space for new tunes over the coming weeks, months, years and decades :-)
See ya's rafter.
Hamlet

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So after months of writing and purposefully avoiding the lure of the studio the time has come for me to start putting my new music down onto tape. I've re-jigged my studio space and am putting into place the new gear I've bought. I've thankfully picked up some nice bits of equipment and toys but have taken a bit of a different approach to what seems to be the norm these days. There are no fancy names, no flashing lights, no new keyboards that will bend time and make coffee. Just simple but solid equipment that will make instruments sound like......instruments! Organic all the way baby. Truth be told I love an old analogue tape machine to record to rather than a PC but I certainly ain't complaining.


The recording process is one I love. Alot. It's very different to the writing process though I'm sure there will of course be an overlap. I can't wait to get my teeth into it all and will be blogging my way through it all. Highs and lows. In the meantime here are some basic pics of my home studio as it stands right now. I expect a few re-jigs though so like everything else in my life it's a work in process :-)

Check out the wall paper! :-)
Over and blog-out.
Hamlet Sweeney

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I wrote some lyrics today that I'm really happy with. They came from a one line idea I wrote in my notebook a few days ago. Lots of interesting and colourful imagery. A real pleasure to write. Today was one of the very few times when I didn't have my notebook with me so I grabbed an A4 sheet of paper. Within a few minutes it was completely filled. It's a great feeling when lyrics flow stream of conscious like that.

As I walked away I had the urge to turn around. I almost resisted it but looked just as I left the room. The page was on my chair. I had almost left them behind. Ouch. 2 minutes I was walking down East Wall road and I passed by a girl I know and said hi, but in my mind I was starting to put the words to melody. My head was in the clouds. Just as I walked by, the girl called me and asked if that was mine pointing at a sheet on the road. Guess what it was? Yup, the lyrics.

I sat on the 29A bus thinking that I'd probably remember the bulk of the lyrics even if I had lost them. I opened them up. I wouldn't have remembered even half of it. I sat the rest of the bus journey singing melodies under my breath as the people beside me looked at me funnily.

When I got home I went straight to my notebook to transfer them in. It's not something I normally do but always like because I make little changes that are always fun to do so the words unfold on the page in good shape. After I wrote the first line a whole new page of words poured out. I had to go back and start again. No complaints.

So I pulled out my guitar to see what shape they would take in music. I've no idea how that part of it will work out yet. Who knows, it might now click. I'm certainly looking forward to finding out.
Cheers,
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I know I've already written about returning to music right from the point where I thought I'd given it up. But I'm still quietly astounded by it. It just feels so natural to be making so much music again that I wonder how I ever even conceived of an other way.

Even when I thought I'd left music behind as a full time pursuit I still wrote nearly everyday. But the last few weeks have been exceptional. I've felt a difference in how I write now so decided to push it to see what I could get out of it and set myself the goal of writing an album's worth of material in February. And it worked. I won't pretend it was easy, it was a lot of work and involved lots of tricks to really get the most out of every bit of free time I had. But it was a real eye opener to how much you can get done when you try. And when it's doing something you deeply love doing it's a real pleasure.

I purposefully kept the songs rough and just ploughed on from one to the other resisting the urge to slow down and polish. I think writing songs has two stages; the first bloom, then the pruning (please forgive the ropey gardening metaphors!). Well my songs having been blossoming everywhere and it's not stopping so the pruning will have to wait.

This week is the start of me working full time on music. So now I'll have time to start recording and fine tuning my new material while still working on more new stuff. Sometimes you have to make time for yourself to do the things you really want. Things that are worth doing are nearly always things that take time, right?
Cheers,
Hamlet
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Technology is wonderful thing. As you read this you may be sitting having a coffee in USA, in an internet café in Morocco, avoiding work in an office cubicle in Madrid or in a boring history class in Australia. As I write this it is midnight and I am in the back of taxi in rainy Dublin

I’ve had an interesting night. It started on bad note but ended on a great one. I went to see an early evening film and picked something I knew nothing about. It was called Vantage Point. It was about as entertaining as a hangnail dipped in salt. Don’t go and see it. In fact, don’t even think about it anymore.

The high note of the evening was a gig in the new upstairs room in Whelan’s of Wexford St. It’s a lovely space with a nice sound. The band I went to see were The Harvest Ministers. I first saw them years ago when, as a teenage under age drinker, I sneaked into Whelan’s and watched them. They blew me away and I have remembered one of their songs all this time without ever seeing or hearing them since.

I came across them again recently through myspace and I strongly suggest you check them out. Their songs are very intimate and poetic. Singer and songwriter Will Merriman has a kind of tender stage presence and despite more than a touch of worldliness in his lyrics there’s great warmth in what he’s doing. Kind of like Woody Allen meets Leonard Cohen but without the Jewish jokes. :-)
There were several highlights but the song that is still hanging on my ear was called Railroading. Great stuff.
Have a listen to them for yourself on myspace:
http://www.myspace.com/theharvestministers
Enjoy!
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