Traditional Irish Music | Original Irish Songs | Both Barrels Irish Band

Whilst visiting relatives in Co. Leitrim, we took a drive out to Bundoran on the Donegal coast. Just north of Bundoran is a quiet beach called Tullen Strand, which is cut off from the more populated seafront by sheer cliffs that you can walk across by a rough single track.

On the top of these cliffs are three natural rock features that have, over the years, been sculpted by the elements and are called the "Blowing Hole", the "Fairy Bridge" and the "Wishing Chair". My favourite of these is the Wishing Chair, which faces the immensity of the Atlantic Ocean crashing below, and stretching far and wide beyond eyesight. It's a wonderful place to sit and reflect and I have returned there time and time again. This song describes one occasion when I found myself reflecting on lost love and regret.

This song was written in one night as I was able to go into the studio the next day and was one song short. It always amazes me when songs sometimes almost write themselves like that. The words are based on two separate friends of mine, each of whom I knew at different times in different places but both of whom had an identical outlook and attitude to life - a daily aversion to any level of commitment or settling down with anyone which ultimately cast them both adrift. I saw them both wear a mask of carefree indifference that, at times, I would envy whilst in reality they became prisoners of a self imposed isolation and loneliness. I still love them both.

A simple song about a simple subject. You know her. That beauty that always walks into the bar and turns every male head in there. Just like most men, I can't help noticing a pretty girl, but I have three very good reasons for not making the effort to get to know her:-
a. I'm a married man
b. She would probably tell me to sod off anyway!
c. This way, I don't give her the opportunity to shatter my beautiful illusion of her. It's better all round this way!

For a Limerick girl.

This is my attempt to write an Irish Ballad in the tradition of some of the great ballads hailing from Ireland over the years that I have admired when delivered by the likes of Jim McCann, Luke Kelly, Paddy Reilly or Christy Moore.

I don't know if I managed it, but I enjoy singing this one and I've had favourable reactions to it so I can live with that I suppose.

My favourite W B Yeats poem "The Stolen Child" is set in and around Glencar Falls on the Sligo-Leitrim border. It's a beautiful location in the summer and I was there in 1998 when I was told the tragic story of a 19 year old girl who, a couple of years earlier, had, one bleak winter's morning, left her hospital bed and took her own life in the falls. On learning this, the place looked different to me. I looked around at its beauty trying to imagine how it would have appeared in mid-January. It seemed to me that the noise of crashing water around me resembled roars and keening for what had happened there and I was all at once overwhelmed with a horrible sadness.

Yeats' poem has a refrain:-
"Come away stolen child
to the water and the wild
with the fairy hand in hand
for this world's more full of weeping
than you can understand"

It took on a whole different meaning for me after I was told of this girl. Maybe she read the poem, knew the poem, and maybe she understood it better than most of us dare to.