Colm draws from the past and present for his third solo album

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Q, otherwise known as Dublin based musician Colm Quearney, plays The Crane Bar on Thursday next, April 29, opening for blues player Chaz De Paolo. An in-demand guitarist for major acts like Mundy and Jerry Fish, Colm has just released his third solo album Root To The Fruit. The album was recorded in The Cube studios, a space Colm built himself from scratch.

“It’s in Northstrand in Dublin and it was really built with the purpose for me to have somewhere to record and just get in to production,” he explains. “It was really built out of necessity as well – studios being so expensive. Any money I seemed to be making I was handing over to studio owners, so I thought I’d be as well to start with humble beginnings. I’m glad I did now, two years later.”

As well as recording his own music, Colm has been able to hone his skills as a producer. It may have been six years since his last solo record, but he feels it’s been worth the wait.

“It was definitely a fresh start and a new beginning,” he says. “I had to up my skills in engineering. It wasn’t just my own music, but to produce other people – I produced an album with The Pale and a guy called Mick Duffy.

For the making of Root To The Fruit, and any other album to be recorded in his studio, Colm wanted to draw from the past as well as the present.

“I knew that records from the 60s and 70s, to my ears, sounded better than more recent records. I wanted to investigate the whole idea of analog and digital equipment; I came up with an assimilation of using both.”

Colm explains the difference between older and newer recording techniques thus:

“When you’re working with analog equipment it’s all about pre-production; a band really has to have their stuff down. I think that’s what happened in the Sixties – bands gigged and rehearsed so much that when they went in to the studio they really were putting down a final article. More and more now, tracks can be built in the studio and e-mailed all over the world for people to play on.”

When it came to picking the ten tracks for Root To The Fruit, Colm had to work his way through a lot of material.

“There’s some really nice songs that didn’t end up on the album but they just didn’t fit,” he says. “I had about 30 songs, and 22 or 23 of those were finished. There’ll be more releases in the future.”

Some musicians see their songs as ‘babies’ but Colm was less precious when it came to picking which tracks he’d use.

“I am quite decisive – I was never one to write hundreds of songs, I kind of know whether an idea’s worth developing or not. I don’t really have a problem with that; I’m quite good at working on a song and putting it away and working on other stuff, then coming back and re-jigging it.”

One of the stand-out tracks on Root To The Fruit is El Capitan, a song that a sort of Tom Waits feel to it.

“That was a bit of a joke song,” says Colm. “I got this new Hammond organ in the studio, which is an old instrument. It has these bass foot pedals and different functions on it and I used to play music on it for people coming into the studio, as a showcase of what it could do. I just decided to record it one day and I had a set of lyrics that were kind of like a children’s song.”

“It didn’t seem right to sing it in a normal voice so I cut off the end of a Ballygowan bottle and started singing through that,” he adds. “There was no intention of putting it on the album but when I started playing tracks to people they were going ‘that definitely has to go on the album.’”

Music has been part of Colm’s life since childhood – his father John Quearney is a veteran double-bass player in Dublin’s blues scene. Did Colm inherit his work ethic from that generation of working musicians?

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.