My two favorite places growing up in Dublin were Bull Island/Dollymount Beach and Howth Head. You could see both from each other so you never lost regardless of which one you paid a visit too. I was very lucky as they were both no more that five or ten minutes from my house.

When I was nineteen the drummer in a band I was in lent me a four track recorder. I was in heaven. I spent hours every night for months experimenting and recording songs. I had spent most of my teens experimenting with song structure and lyrics. Unusual chords, dark eeriness, harmony and melancholy was what I decided done it for me. I was hooked. Hence my obsession with Queen, Neil Finn and Pink Floyd.

In the time I had the four track I recorded an album called “The Bare Bones” on a tape cassette. I drew all the art work and organized the track listing. It was filled with mostly electronic guitar based tunes that often went on for several minutes longer than was bearable. Songs about UFO abductions and the apocalypse took up most of side one. I made one copy and put it in a drawer and showed no one.

Going through some old demos and random music I stumbled across a track from the album. I realized that it was my first ever officially recorded song. It’s not the first song I ever wrote, that was “Easy Come & Easy Go” a dreadful jazz thing about not being able to get into a Dublin nightclub. It was as awful as it sounds. I wrote the song about Bull Island and called it, well, Bull Island. The sound quality was terrible and all effects were produce with Zoom foot pedal and a second hand Epiphone Stratocaster that had only one working pickup. I was so proud of it along with the other tracks. Why I would write a song about a place I loved so much sound so creepy is anybodies guess? I was very melancholic when I was younger. Anyway, I get a big laugh out of hearing it. Here’s the song and some pictures of Bull Island itself taken by me upon my many trips home, it’s usually the first place I visit.