All roads leading to Monroe’s for lively Track Dogs

Playing trumpet-infused, feel-good music, Track Dogs come to Monroe’s Live on Saturday, September 28. The band consists of Garrett Wall (vocals/guitar/ukulele/piano), Dave Mooney (bass/vocals), Howard Brown (trumpet/vocals/percussion) and Robbie K Jones (cajon/banjo/vocals).

On the first few listens, Track Dogs’ music could strike you as sounding optimistic – a description Garrett agrees with.

“That’s pretty accurate,” he says. “It’s funny, sometime you try to put a darker side into your music and it just doesn’t happen. Not only myself, but for the other members of the band, the music represents our own view on the world, and maybe our own personal attitudes. The fact that it’s happy is a good representation of who we are as people.”

Garrett is on the phone from Madrid which is home to himself and the rest of the Track Dogs.

“We all met in Madrid, we were all working in different things” he says. “Funnily enough, we were geographically working on the same street. I was teaching English in a school about 10 years ago, and the trumpet player Howard was teaching in the same school. Across the road from that was an Irish pub called Finbar’s, which is now sadly closed, and Dave was the barman in the pub and I knew of him because he’d been cast in a very famous Spanish movie as a Scottish man – although he’s Irish!”

It came as a surprise to both of them, but Dave and Garrett were rivals in their younger days.

“I got chatting with him, and it turned out we lived very close to each other in Ireland,” Garrett says.  “His parents live in Bray, my mum and dad lived in the Shankill/Rathmichael area nearby. It turns out we’d shared the stage in a battle of the bands competition when we were a lot younger – my band winning and his coming second!”