It feels like a dream. It's September 2018, and one minute I'm gratefully living back in Dublin, after 5 years in Western Australia, and then, the next thing, my brother Andy dies in what feels like an accidental-on-purpose tragedy.
For the next 8 years, I'm in an ethereal bubble, feeling like a red balloon floating high above the world in a meandering spell. All the while, all I could hear was a mermaid-like entity calling me back down to earth, out of the clouds, like a Siren from some distant rocky seashore. She is otherwise known as the Muse, and she doesn't take no for an answer. She speaks and whistles in a foreign language and nudges you like a wet-nosed pet dog who wants to go out in the woods of a city park for a walk, although she is too old and can't walk anymore, and you have to carry her in a backpack. You do so willingly, drinking in her joy at being alive and free, riding high on her Papa’s back as she leads you, from her backseat, into the deep dark green forest.
All the while, she is still endlessly dictating, now more like a besuited 1950s office boss who can't type, and seems like he doesn't actually know what he is saying, to his secretary, who tries to take it all in, and note it all down, syllable by syllable, out of sequence and jumbled up like a pile of jigsaw puzzle pieces dumped on the lounge room floor.
Someone put the puzzle box lid, with its completed puzzle cover art image, in the Green recycling bin. You don't know who put it there; you only know that it was found by a hobo at 4am, outside your front bedroom window, waking you up while they raided your wheelie bin, out on the street, before taking off with the only clue as to what you are meant to be putting back together. Leaving you listening to screaming seagulls fighting over scraps of food in the dawning-light-distance and the strange sound of foxes on heat, vixen-screaming and running past your house, down a laneway that is too narrow to be a busy thoroughfare but has no choice in being seen as a highway without a speed limit.
Meanwhile, the Muse, who isn't masquerading as a man in a 1950s office anymore, or an old dog on your back, doesn't care if you like her song; she keeps singing it until you get the message. Not just the mumbled words she is saying but every nook-and-cranny nuance of yet-to-be-conjured resonating vibration, contained in the turns of phrase and the timing of the breath required to express her song. A song that is capable of gradually reassembling and putting a crashed train back on its tracks. Tracks that are pointing in a new direction. Tracks that leave you with nowhere else to go, except where the train tracks lead.
When you finally get off at the end of the line, it's a yellow-brick and sandstone-built train station with beautifully repointed mortar joints. Joints with ornamental lines of extravagant detail. A brick and sandstone descendant from some long-past colonial world, renovated and freshly painted, with a hipster cafe on the platform, occupying what used to be the Waiting Room, now repurposed and gentrified because people don't have time to wait anymore. On the platform, the people who come and go think it is the only station in the world worth going to. There's no one there to meet you, but it's a new city, a new start, a new life.
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Here are the links to my brand new acoustic single, "Your Eyes Adjust to the Dark," out today, Wednesday 2nd September 2026
📻 Bandcamp
📺 Youtube
🎧 Spotify
Ahead of a full-band record coming in 2027, I wanted to capture these new songs in their natural form. So, on my last trip home to Sydney, I recorded a 10-song solo acoustic album live—one acoustic guitar, a few mics, and zero overdubs. Meanwhile, "Your Eyes Adjust to the Dark”, is the first song from the acoustic version of “Blue Shadows & Golden Light” (Monochromatic Edition)—out on Wednesday, Dec 2, 2026
