It was a hot August day. I boarded a fight from Dublin to London alone. I took out my lyric journal and started to write stuff down, as I looked over the wings of the plane. It had been a tough few years. The independency of the music business had taken its toll and I needed to find inspiration again. And it was there at a songwriting workshop on Ship Street in Brighton that I discovered it… the sound I really wanted to make. My debut EP ‘10,000’ was safe. I didn’t know where or how to start out so I just jumped in and started making music. I was too wet around the ears to really know what sort of a musician I was myself. As someone who played in bands, (folk and pop), taught children all genres of music lessons, I was totally unaware of the music I wanted to put out there. A sound that actually sounded like ‘me’ and not little titbits of anyone and anything else.
When I went back to the studio to record ‘Ship Street’, the first thing I did was ignore the 3 minute rule of radio song editing and allowed the song to take its natural course. The visit to Brighton was also very dream like. In a way it brought me back to that original dream of just writing and making music regardless of the number of streams and fans etc. The sounds we chose for the track all stem from that desire to create a dream-like piece of music. The whole objective was ambience and creating something quite meditative. It was the first time I walked away from a recording knowing I had created the sound that was actually inside me and not the sound I thought it should be.
Why not have a whole 4 minutes of dreaming… with me… thanks for listening xx
Ship Street
Sinéad McNally 