So the opening night of The Song Room has passed. It went great, there was a lovely atmosphere and the night was a success. Myself and Brian Brody, who I run The Song Room with, agreed that we would take turns going first each week. I decided to be the first act. Always a little tougher than going on later in the night but I was proud to be the The Song Room's first artist!


The room has a great old pub style atmoshpere and we laid things out quite differently to how it's normally done for live music in O'Sullivans. It looked and felt right. Sleepy Rise played melodic rocky indie style stuff on 2 acoustic guitars, Max Greenwood played some beautiful songs on piano and guitar and Brian played a great set with Junshi Murakami accompanying him on harp. A pretty diverse mix! All musicians signed their names on a banner we have in the background. It'll be nice to have that fill up over time!


I'm looking forward to the playing more Song Room nights. They're a great oppurtunity to get material routined. And having been away from gigging for so long they're perfect for getting used to being in front of an audience again. Something which I love and is a bit of an art in itself aside from writing and playing music.
Drop down to one of the nights, hear great music and say hello. More info at www.myspace.com/thesongroom
See you there.
Hamlet

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The Song Room is the name of a night that myself and a good friend Brian Brody will be presenting and performing at each Monday in O'Sullivans pub, Westmoreland st, Dublin 2. I've known Brian for many years, we both used to work in the Temple Bar Music Centre about 8 or 9 years ago. He's done a remarkable amount of different things with music and is a musician I have a huge amount of respect for. These days Brian makes a living performing ballads and covers and there's very good reason he gets asked to do it round the world. In a city of of singers and balladeers Brian's got huge popularity for a very good reason. Anyone who has been to his shows will tell you the same. He's also a really good songwriter so check him out. www.BrianBrody.net

Each week we will both play a set of our songs and introduce 2 other songwriters or bands to perform their material too. It's a perfect chance for us to have a residency for our own material with enough weekly variety for listeners. Once a month we will be doing a themed evening. The first one will on Monday 5th of May and the theme is David Bowie so each artist will perform their own and some Bowie material. Should be fun!

O'Sullivans is an intimate room and a great little pub. There will be a upright piano too which makes us the only night of its type in Dublin to have a real piano. Drop down, have a listen and say hi!






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It's a big professional grown up studio. It's been a while since I've been in one.I used to live in them, the last long while has been all about my own small studio at home. Although modesty won't get in the way of me saying that it's pretty posh too! :-)

I'm going to The Nutshed studio in Clara, Co Offaly. I'm really looking forward to the train journey. I LOVE train journeys. One of my fantasy trips is London to Vietnam through Russia by train. Today won't be of quite the same scale but I know I'll slip into that mild sense of elation I get on trains. On trips is also when I'm at my more creative for lyrics. It's like my mind is busy enough to be distracted but not stressed so it relaxes and the thoughts and ideas just bubble to the surface. Hopefully I'll get a nice windo seat facing the sun.
I'll come back and let you know of course!
Hamlet
Sat. 12th April 2008

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I woke up before the alarm clock this morning. Nothing strange about that. What was a little different was that I woke up in the middle of writing a new song lyric in my mind. I don't mean just a snippet of text, I mean full blown constructing and re-arranging of lyrics in a structured rhythmic format. I do it all the time when I'm out walking and don't have a notebook but I never realised I've also been doing it in my sleep.

I've always had a blurring of the line between sleep and being compus mentis. It took me 10 years to work out a recurring dream was actually a dream as I was dreaming that I was awake. I've had that regularly for 18 years. It's horrible as I can't move and feel like I'm being electrocuted but I'm 100% aware of myself. I've also had recurring dreams were someone else appears but can't escape so I've told them to stick by me as I've had this dream before so I know where everything is. Another regular is a dream about someone touching a power cable and I can see their skeleton just like in an old Tom & Jerry cartoon. When I have this dream it's usually best if no-one is a round me as I go into absolute convulsions of laughter. Even thinking of how it looks now makes me laugh!

A new recurring dream I've been having is one where I wake up in my bed but dreams from other people nearby are floating around me and almost getting mixed up in my dreams which are still lingering. But then I wake up and realise that I was dreaming and that my own dreams are safe and sound and so am I.

The lyric I wrote while dreaming this morning was a little dark. I'm not sure it will become a full song. There's no way I could write a full song for every lyric idea. I wouldn't have time to eat.

A few hours after I woke up I had a lyric come to me that was about as far away from what I dreamt as possible. It's set on an historic sea journey. I like reading about them so the influence came from that. This will definitely become a song, in fact it's half way there already as it arrived carrying it's own melody. Always nice when that happens.

I better go, I can smell that my fish in the oven is nearly done and I've got to get back to recording.
Bye for now.
Hamlet

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It's 10.30pm and I'm pretty wrecked. I've spent the day recording. Although my brother coming to cut the grass with a lawnmower caused a brief diversion. It wouldn't work properly. He thinks it might be the spark plug. Whatever it is, half of the garden is shorter than the other. It kind of looks good actually.

So my aim was to put down the rough guide tracks to a good handful of new songs. It's funny to see the various stages in a songs life that have on impact on it. Over the last months I've purposefully honed all my songs live, avoiding the studio at all costs. I thought they were as written as anything could be. But then as soon as the little red light of the record button goes on things change a little. I get new ideas for bridges, rhymes and choruses. But then that's the fun of the studio. It's an clean palette and you've got a delivery of fresh paints waiting to be opened.

So I ploughed on resisting the urge to start layering on individual instruments. Click track/basic rhythm guitar/guide vocal. That was the mantra for the day. But after 4 or 5 hours of that I decided I needed a bit of fun so I let myself loose on a song. I knew it would happen. I also knew the song would pick itself. It was a tune called, "Buy this Song," which is a piss take on people wanting to be famous through music. I've tried breaking my own mould a little lately, and this is one of the songs that I did that with. It's actually pretty funny and has a kind of twisted hip hop meets singer/songwriter thing going on. I've gone with that feel and laid down some harmonised slap bass. Which is definitely a first for me! I can honestly say that it felt really, really amazing to be recording again. It's one of the best things I know. Aside from playing concerts of course. Oh, and then there's writing songs too.... I guess it's all good.

Okay, as I wrote this I watched Sex And The City. The one were a gay guy marries a girl but the only thing wrong with the wedding was that the top of the creme brulee wasn't hard enough. Great line that...
Good night y'all.
Hamlet Sweeney

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So the launch night gig has now passed. It went great and I really enjoyed it. In hindsight I should have picked a larger venue as it sold out and some people couldn't get in, which is a pity.

I was joined on the night by Jay Wilson lending his talent on a variety of instruments. It was great to have another musician on stage with me. Something I'll definitely be doing more of.

I have several shows coming up over the next while with the next biggie in Whelans on May 13th. It will be a with a full band and I'm already looking forward to working with the sounds and dynamics that you can only get playing with other musicians. It's the way forward! I'd like to also say thanks to Simon Dowling for playing support on the night.

Here's a video clip of Voices In My Head from the gig. The sound isn't perfect but it captures the mood a bit. Enjoy!


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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,
www.hamletsweeney.com
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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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The weather is really lovely. The back door is open and I'm sitting on one of the old white chairs playing my acoustic guitar. It's warm enough to not think about it but fresh enough to need a long sleeve shirt and even a scarf. I'm working on a new song and sometimes a gust of chilled air lifts the pages of my notebook and my knuckles get a tiny bit cold around the neck of the guitar. So I drink some hot tea with my hands greedily wrapping themselves around the heat of the mug (milk, no sugar). It feels nice.

My housemate threw some old bread down the back of the garden this morning and the birds devoured it. There must be some sort of avian food grapevine because other birds have been checking by all day looking for any left over scraps. Sorry lads, all gone. One of the birds was so tiny it looked like a toy that kids put on the tops of their pencils.

It's just started raining. Like a power shower on a gentle setting. There's a rainbow too. As another songwriter once said, 4 seasons in one day.

I've decided to capture part of the moment on video. Here you go:


So I'll get back to writing my song now. It's about glamour. Which goes to show that your body and your mind can be in two very different places at the same time and be quite happy in each.
Bye bye.
Hamlet
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Is it just me or has myspace become full of spammers? I've come to expect every second mail to be spam. And I'm often right! As a musician there's a natural reluctance to decline if someone sends you an add request because you have to presume that like many others they're actually doing it for the right reasons; the music. But I've gotten choosy these days and say no to a lot of people who look like they could turn into spammers. Which is kinda crap!

I hope the spammers don't take myspace' value away. Since getting back to playing music full time over the last months and uploading onto myspace I've received loads of mails from fans of the music and it has directly lead to the songs being played on radio in parts of the world I haven't even thought of visiting. And after every gig someone always asks, "what's your myspace?" It's a really, really great tool but it would be a shame to see it swamped under the weight of crap spammers.

I'll definitely still be hanging round there but I think every musician would be wise to have their own website under their own name. Otherwise anything can happen. I've heard of lots of artists that have had their myspace accounts deleted without any warning. That's pretty damn rough. And they weren't even selling viagra! The best thing is to combine the network sites with your own, otherwise your music on the web is in the hands of big businesses that don't really care about your music or fans. And as musician that idea is not very appealing.

If you've found your way to this website and blog through myspace, hit bookmark now! Who knows where myspace will end up, this page however will always be here. If you came across this website elsewhere and have a myspace, last.fm or facebook account; well add me and say hi!
Hamlet Sweeney  2 Comments

For years I played and wrote music full time. Then the chicken decided it would rather be doing other things than laying eggs. So I went from omelette's every day to maybe the odd boiled egg. It's strange when something you love so much drifts out of your life. But it's pretty amazing when it comes back. Life is a mad yolk. Ok, I really need to stop mentioning eggs.

So 2007 was all about no longer just peeking over the edge and was all about throwing open the gates and letting the music flood back. I'm pretty much writing everyday, gigging every week and have got a new set of songs now that I'm looking forward to floating into earlobes, heads and hearts. I'm busier with music than I have been in ages. This is a good thing. To paraphrase that great American thinker Forest Gump, "Music is as music does. Now, do you want to invest in a shrimp boat?" Or something like that.

Despite the quiet period during the last year it was great to see my songs getting picked up by various media and radio stations in very different parts of the world. But better than that were all the emails I received from people who downloaded my music. It's really blown me away. The world of the modern independent musician is interesting one. One day you record and put a song on myspace/last.fm etc, the next thing you're getting messages from people on 4 different continents listening to the music telling how it has touched them. Pretty damn cool.

The traditional routes that bands and musicians have used for the last 100 years (record labels etc) are really changing and it's very exciting to be able to connect with listeners so quickly, directly and so honestly. That's what I hope this website and this blog will be all about.

So a big beautiful thanks to everyone who listened, wrote about and played my music in 2007. Check back for more music through 2008 because the chicken is laying fresh eggs.
Cheers!
Hamlet Sweeney

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I'm really looking forward to this ongoing blog and hope it will be a space where I can connect with people, talk about music and share other related stuff that floats into my mind. This page is defintely the one to bookmark. Go, do it now! So now you can read what's going on in my head as well hear it and comment along with each blog.

First things first though. Big thanks, small puppies and other happy things to http://www.purrpaganda.com/ and Naoimh Ingram, an amazing designer and the talent behind creating this website. Naoimh designs for big and small fish from individual artists to whole cities. Yes, whole cities. She was brilliant to work with, had great ideas and was totally professional. I can't recommend her highly enough.....

Thanks Purrpaganda & Naoimh! Contact: purrpaganda@gmail.com

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