Buy Me A CoffeeWhen I was ten years old a blind man by the name of Mr. John Mitchell taught me how to play the piano accordion. I learned how to read and write music over the next two years and I could play a good selection of waltz’s and marches. The Centenary March, The Boston Burglar, You and I are a few I can remember. It’s a tricky instrument to play, with the bass keys on the left the piano keyboard on the right and the pulling and pushing it in and out. You feel a bit like Silas Marner at his loom when everything is trundling along together. With each new tune you learn you go through the process of feeling that this is impossible; this is barely possible; this is okay; I can do this without thinking about it.
I find the process of committing something to muscle memory fascinating. It was around this time my mother, who is an excellent singer, decided she would learn to play guitar to accompany herself. She bought a wine sunburst acoustic guitar and attended a weekly class, keeping a folder of songs with chords written in over the lyrics and diagrams of the chord fingerings.
I can still remember the first time I took it out of it’s case and began to learn these shapes from the diagrams, G… C, that was all that was needed for the first line of the first song in the folder – My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean. When I sang that first line and changed the chord under the melody something switched on inside me that has never switched off ever since. My mind was blown. I could feel the vibrations of the chords and it felt like every cell in my body was resolving as the chords changed supporting the melody. From that moment on the accordion gathered dust and what could only be described as an obsession with the guitar began.
All I wanted was more chords and more songs to play. Every day I would play through the folder of songs until my fingers were raw and I would have to wait in frustration until the following day to play more. My mother became disheartened with her progress when she could hear me flying through the chord changes and she was still struggling. The simple fact was I was practicing fifty times as much as she was. There’s no big mystery or gift involved in learning to play an instrument, it’s just a matter of whether you are obsessed with it or not.
I’m not as obsessed with huge amounts of practice anymore. I just target specific pieces that I am working on or gigging at the time and rehearse those for a couple of hours. I find that it’s just as important to prepare mentally for a show or recording as it is to physically prepare. I had to develop relaxation techniques and routines to calm my body and mind before and during performances. When I say develop I mean tailor my own personal program, the actual techniques themselves have all been around for centuries. I use a combination of yoga postures to ground my body and connect with my breathing coupled with the practice of positive visualization.
There are so many things that can go wrong that could spoil a gig or a recording, if you start worrying about them you will drive yourself crazy. So stick to the positive outcomes only. Of course it pays to have all your equipment in good order and your chops down.
I am currently the guitarist in the Dublin based band Shakalak. In this outfit I get to play fun electric guitar lines over a fusion of electro-poetry. It’s a very creative group and our songwriting process is organic and spontaneous. At our rehearsals we allocate time for creation, sometimes nothing of interest will arise and other times we write an absolute hit, start to finish in twenty minutes.
All of us in the band have our own solo projects and we tip away at these concurrently. I am almost finished writing my second solo album and I am working on the pre-production of these songs at the moment. I am not trying to consciously target any specific genre with these new songs.
Are they cool? I don’t really know what “cool” is anymore. There are so many different types of cool now it’s a mine field. I am just following my gut instinct and playing what I want to hear at the moment. Hopefully they will resonate with some people and I will step on a cool bomb every so often. I am really enjoying playing and singing these new tracks so that makes me happy. I went through a fallow period a few years ago and it feels wonderful to be back in love with writing songs. It’s easy to lose your confidence and mojo for writing. I have psyched myself out of the game a few times at this stage. You just have to keep showing up at the office and something will eventually happen. These are the glory days.
My first solo album released 12-02-2020: https://johnnyjude.bandcamp.com/album/vitamins-wine
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