It’s happy days as Dylan launches ‘Anxious Times’

Groove Tube with Jimi McDonnell – tribunegroove@gmail.ie 

Dylan Murphy is a songwriter with wit and attitude, as well as a gifted guitar player. The Limerick-born, Galway-based singer has just released the four-track EP Anxious Times, which was recorded in just five hours. Dylan was joined in studio for Anxious Times by David Shaughnessy on drums and Colm Bohan on bass.

He has been playing with the two lads for quite a while and it’s a process he enjoys.

“I’ve always had a deep love of three-piece bands,” he says. “It forces you to be resourceful as a musician because there’s lot of space that needs to be filled up. I think it comes from bands like Nirvana and The Police, where everyone is really contributing something.

“I think Dave is one of the most reliable and in-demand drummers in Galway,” he continues. “I bumped into Colm when we were playing in the orchestra for a musical at NUI Galway, quite a while back! We both share a love of groove-based music, and that really comes through in his playing.”

Given how quickly it was recorded, is Dylan happy with the sound of the EP?

“Yeah, I think I am. It wasn’t exactly a rush job but it did come together very quickly. When I listened back to the recording it had this real lightning-in-a-bottle feel, so I just wanted to keep that as it was.”

The title-track of the EP was inspired by Dylan’s experience of spending an evening watching the results of the most recent US election.  Living in Cork at the time, the singer was all geared up for Trump’s expected defeat.

“It’s a bit clichéd to write about Trump, but he’s this very big wig-wearing elephant in the room that we all have to talk about,” Dylan says. “I wrote that song the day after the election, when I’d stayed up with my housemates in Cork and projected the results of the election on to the wall of our living room.”

“We gradually watched the walls turn red with Republican states. That was very demoralising, and it was around the same time that Prince and Leonard Cohen passed away. So that’s where the line ‘watching all the best ones leave the party’ was about. I felt a kind of helplessness watching the best ones pass while the worst ones got into power.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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