Who says that the only people whose experience and opinion of music matters are the "professionals" who are paid by glossy magazines. (Usually to have an opinion as high as the major labels pay!) From the beginning, music has been about real ordinary people sharing and communicating with each other. The "industry" didn't really get in the way of this powerful reality. So, as the big businesses begin to crumble, its time to get back to what really matters, music and people's shared experiences of it. What is more, everyone has their own personal feelings and images associated with music, so why not enrich the whole by sharing them? Please click here and write your own review of one of Justin's records or maybe a live show that you experienced.

Hello everyone
I'm in Canada for the summer, doing some shows and finishing work on the new record.
Its all taking shape. Lots of sketches and ideas that were made in our ocean cottage in Ireland, then experimented with at live shows, and now are finding themselves for a record....
It all starts with an idea
and sometimes that idea has to be killed...(even when you think its the best thing you've done)...that takes a lot of sacrifice and courage...just accept that the original idea was the kernel of the seed's life, it had to be cracked open and then lost, so that the song could be birthed.
eg. Hold onto your Soul started as a weird electro rhythm but once it had birthed the bass,strings,lyrics etc, the rhythm had to go...

Anyway, enough rambling. Here are two rough and unfinished demos for songs that may or may not make it onto the final vinyl. I just thought it would be a nice way of including everyone in the process of making a record...rather than hermit away as I usually do. So have a listen and let me know your thoughts.
Both songs have outros that will have a lyrical part, I just haven't recorded that yet.
The Dissolving is going to have a real dirty old rhodes and a moog when I get to Bill Shanley's studio in Dublin in Sept...for now the fake logic ones with have to do.

Enjoy.


Listen to demos

July 7th-King City

To be an artist is to be a priest is to be a lover. It is not an occupation. It is not a 'job'. One cannot come home in the evening. There is always the deep call echoing distantly in every moment experienced. It is to be a contemplative. To set one's spirit to 'see' in every moment the depths and to be faithful to the call to somehow make this present.
Its is a call and a journey which becomes a part of 'normal' life. The artist is not perpetually in her studio, the lovers are not eternally entwined between sheets, the priest not bound to the pulpit. To succumb to this kind of obsession would be dangerous, destructive to all involved. Yet to treat it as a 'job', to decide to clock in and out would be to trivialize the life of the spirit.
There must be time for taking care of business, for the preparing of food, the chopping of wood, the cultivating of love and community. And in the midst of all these things the artist is constantly aware that the divine spirit is at work and that it demands a melody to bring this connection into the world of vibrations, frequencies, paint, mud, ink.

Its been some time since I last wrote anything. We have been inundated by lovely visitors in our little home here. The seasons are moving in their own gentle way, and I have been moving with them. There has been some digging to do and the planting of seeds. Falling into the earth they crack and die and are suddenly born fresh with green newness. Little shoots from the black soil, innocent, wise, clean and forgiving. This is how I want to live.

I found another Merton book in a tiny bookstore in Kenmare while we were travelling. "To be a seed in the ground of one's life is to dissolve in the ground in order to become fruitful. One disappears into Love, in order to "be Love". But this fruitfulness is beyond any planning and any understanding. To be "fruitful" in this sense, one must forget every idea of fruitfulness or productivity and merely be."

I have been surfing a lot recently and dissolving myself in the ocean. The more I surf and sing and write the more I want to distance myself from the 'industry' of these things. The flashy glossy surf dollars. The music business with all its fashion trends, its poisoned advertising campagns, its cocaine and make-up and fakeness. The whole world is crumbling. New shoots are pushing up from the soil, full of freshness. No more rock stars. No more millionaires. Just newness and realness from unknown names.

I'll leave you with one of the new shoots. Its my friend Kevin Murphy from Cork. Very quiet with a voice like honey and a gentle guitar.
http://www.myspace.com/razhoopla  

Do you remember the time in the hills when the sun was glowing through
the winter trees? The time in the night over looking the bay, in the
empty stillness? The time when I walked and walked in the fields, only
to find you, and your peace? Do you see me here, sitting at the back of
the bus watching the land go by, weeping? Do you see us as we laugh, as
we throw our hands in the sky and dance, as we love, as we hold each
other silently in sadness? The stones are stacked on the wall, the
trees grow and fall and in their rings tell our silent story. Do you
remember the hollow in the bark where we sat and took shelter? The
silver rings we fashioned from old quarters and gave each other? This
moment of breathing. And then the plough goes over the field and the
earth turns again, and we are gone. But what a moment.

On the road from Newcastle to Edinburgh. Snow in the hills and the sky.
This used to be a haunt of mine. Its now the 29th hour of my journey.
Mr. Tambourine Man lyrics are spinning around my head, intoxicating my
brain. He has some strange magic in him that Dylan. A wild brew. I am
wondering what I will I find when I reach my destination.

The thing about bus travel is that it allows you time and feeds you
space. You are well and truly connected to the wheels of your becoming.
Constantly surprised by the horizon unfolding before you.

I was able to catch a few hours with some old pals in Leeds and
Newcastle. Much talk and coffee. Much to share about this living in
freedom, this unfurling of joy and creativity which is winding around
my life.

I have been thinking a lot about the record industry. The label who put
out my records have folded in the economic situation (too many foreign
licencing deals) and it leaves me feeling that there is this choice to
make a radical change in the way we live out our art. England is
depressed, everyone clinging to their money in fear. Yet I’ve always
lived somewhere on the edges of the “system”, even the “record
industry”. Does that allow me to respond differently? The trees and
vegetables will still grow even in an economic depression! The world
gives itself to us in joyful abundance, despite our bitter
mistreatment. Perhaps as an artist it is my decision to follow this
gentle example. Maybe this next record I am working on will be
available to everyone (for it is for people, not money, that I make
this music) freely, feel free to give a donation or come buy a ticket
to a show. It is time we were freed from the dreary slog of
accumulating un-needed coins. We have what we need to survive. Perhaps
we can give this music more generously. Who says a record has to cost a
certain price, or be a certain length? The joy of endless possibility.

A time is coming when artists will dive into the beautiful freedom of
their own unfolding, with no pressure of “commercial success” or
“making their name”. We are free. We are free. We are free.

t is night-time. I am on a bus from Dublin which will take me across
the sea and over that vast maze which is our England to Scotland. The
papers are full of stories of the world crashing around us, the
economic depression, the fall of the empire of consumption. Which would
always fall.

I have left behind my wife and my little cottage life in West Cork to
board 5 buses and a ship, to journey for 2 days by road to the funeral
of the man they called Horse.

It seems it has been some time since my feet were skipping roads and
the wheels turned under us, our little musical caravan which rolled in
freedom. And yet here I am again, making the journey. So I write. I
think. I see. I pray. I put on my headphones and fiddle around on
Logic. Life is webbed and complex, mapping itself in earth and
electrons.

There are many reasons to get wheels under me, the wheels on the bus go
round and round, round and round, rather than to fly. The main one is
plainly put: aeroplanes are one of the single biggest contributers to
climate change, and unless we all stop being lazy and start being
adventurous and going on real journeys that take time and change us
from when we left to when we arrive, there will be nothing left.

The world is greedy and fat. We have become lazy. We have become
selfish and hot-tempered. Yet we will arrive. We will return. We come
from the source and we will return to it, rich and unhappy, poor and
unhappy, clean and free, lost we will be found. Yet there is some joy
in being quiet, in breathing air,in letting the life run through us, in
sitting on a bus leaving Dublin dreaming of fire my wife is cooking
over.

Internet is still down. I have become a hermit on the edge of the world. Australia is burning in a fireball. I managed to fire off some emails from a friend's computer to my dear friends in the Yarra Valley, hoping for some reply, some sign of life. Turns out the fires have devastated so much of that beautiful area. They came right to the car park of my friend's vineyard but got no further.

And here I sit in cold damp Ireland, the sky is bright but washed with watercolour, the sea is the line of a brush strove, wet and shining. I'm wondering if the washing will dry. Soon I will have to light the wood fire in the stove so I can work in warmth. It must be a million miles away from the fires. We are the other side of the planet. Yet we're so close in our souls.

How is it we live this life of movement? A little house in Durham, a sofa in London, a hotel in Italy, a van in a forest in California, a basement in Vancouver, then an attic, a farmhouse in Melbourne, a backyard studio in Fairfield, a bus across the Prairies, nights of looking up at the stars over Alberta, a cottage by a lake in Ontario, an old school in Yorkshire, a flat in Edinburgh, a field by a river in Wales, a boat across the sea, to a tiny cottage on a bay in Ireland. Spinning around and around and around the globe, like a flickering reel of film, dust flecks in the corners. Summer, winter, sipping wine, running out of petrol, losing everything and then planting and growing afresh. And yet now as I look out over the freezing cold ocean through the window, I can see it all, I can feel it all as one. This pure experience of time and space, this glowing life of the spirit.

I chop the wood. I make the coffee. I put out the washing. I live in this silence and the thoughts and words and melodies begin to make themselves known. This rhythm I was thinking of in a previous blog, this rhythm becomes a life of colours and loves. All these roads I have walked that have brought me here to where I sing this one pure note, made up of all the notes I have ever sung.

Tonight and tomorrow I'm going to play two shows in Cork, it will be viola and thumb piano and I want to try out my new Two Horses song. I've done some work on that one, i'll try to post it here soon.
Sending you all love. Write me anytime here.
Inshallah.

Hi all
Sorry for the late blog this week, internet has been down in the cottage and so our little Beetle has been leaking petrol all over the highways and byways....So its been a busy one.
Still, lack of internet has led me back to good old pen and paper. So here's a wee poem I wrote last night, who knows, it may become a song on the new album. Thoughts on a postcard please.

There's two horses running
There's two horses running on the sand
The white one's ever coming
The black one's in my hand

There's two trees growing
There's two trees growing in the field
The oak is ever knowing
And the hazel can't be killed

There's two waves breaking
There's two waves breaking on the shore
The fall is full of aching
But the tide opens the door

There's two colours burning
There's two colours burning in the sky
Your life is ever turning
And you're not afraid to die

There's two horses running
There's two horses running on the sand
The white one's ever coming
The black one's in my hand