Sounds
Singing
Songs, sung in rooms
Singing has accompanied me for as long as I can remember.
I grew up in a family of music lovers and performers, where music was woven naturally into gatherings, celebrations and moments of grief. On my mother’s Irish side in particular, singing and storytelling formed part of family life, traditions in which stories are carried not only through words, but through melody.
I sang in church and at school, and later found a particular love for jazz. Over the years I have sung at family occasions both joyful and sad, and performed the music of many other writers.
Performance has always been less about spectacle for me than atmosphere: the extraordinary ability of a song, spontaneously sung in the right room at the right moment, to completely change the feeling of a space.
An unofficial singing teacher
Joni Mitchell, Blue
I grew up listening to Blue. In many ways, it became an unofficial singing teacher, teaching me about phrasing, vulnerability, storytelling and the extraordinary intimacy that can exist between a voice and a listener.
What stayed with me was not simply the beauty of the songs, but the permission they seemed to give: that a song could be deeply personal, imperfect, poetic and still universal.
Live
A small performance archive
Selected recordings of songs sung live, in rooms of one kind or another.
Performance archive, awaiting recordings
Recordings will be added here individually.
From interpretation to songwriting
For much of my life I performed other people’s music. Gradually, that experience led me towards the need to write my own.
I have always kept expansive, half-finished journals, pages of thoughts, fragments, poems, images, phrases and ideas. Songwriting has become another way of drawing from that archive.
Sometimes a melody arrives first. Sometimes a sentence. Sometimes an image, memory, room or person becomes the beginning of a song.
Like painting, songwriting allows fragments to be assembled until they begin to reveal something that could not quite be expressed in ordinary conversation.
For me, the storytelling tradition of songwriting is particularly important. A song can preserve a person, a place, a moment or an emotion, and then allow someone else’s life to enter it.
Finding the right room
Writing and producing music is intensely collaborative. It means spending hours in rooms with other people, trying ideas, discarding them, exposing unfinished thoughts and trusting someone else with something that may initially exist only as an instinct.
Finding the right people with whom to do that has taken me years.
I have come to understand that the relationship between songwriter, musician and producer matters enormously. The right collaboration creates the freedom to experiment without losing the original emotional impulse of the work.
That search has been part of the journey rather than a delay in it.
Currently
An EP, Coming Soon
I am currently developing a body of original songs for my first EP.
The project grows out of the same world as my painting practice: interiors, memory, architecture, faith, relationships, atmosphere and the emotional lives contained within spaces.
Ultimately, I want the paintings, interiors, music and other sensory elements of my work to speak to one another, creating environments that can be seen, heard and inhabited.
More will be added here as the recordings develop.