Layered, lush feel to Brian Casey’s wintry songs

Brian Casey, a songwriter with real promise, plays Monroe’s Live this Friday night.  Brian has just released his second EP Rain Songs which, his biography says, was recorded in the “southwest of Ireland” Can he reveal the mysterious location?

“My home place is on the Sheep’s Head peninsula, just outside Bantry,” Brian says. “It’s a lovely part of the world, fairly wild and isolated. That’s where I run my recording studio. I half live down there and half in Cork City.”

Brian made the EP in mid-September. The inclement autumn weather and the fact that he had a cold at the time informed the sound of the finished recording.

“I had a bit of spare time between working on other people’s things and doing gigs. I released an EP last year, but I was itching to get something else done. I wanted to make something a bit wintry. Halfway through September, I got five days to lock myself and start working.”

Funerals is an impressive piece of music, a song that starts out quietly and builds into a wall of sound.

“That’s one of the tracks I was most proud of,” he says.  “It actually started as a song I wrote on ukulele – I got one as a present two or three years’ ago. It doesn’t sound like a happy ukulele song now!

“The first day I started recording it, I just took out the guitar. Then I started building, added a few more layers of guitar, then decided I wanted drums. About one in the morning I laid them down, and then some bass, and then I got a friend to play pedal steel on it.”

Brian will be joined by drummer Andrew O’Sullivan for his Galway show. Can a two-piece recreate such a layered piece of music?

“Hopefully, it’s one of those songs that’s equally powerful whether you throw the kitchen sink at it, or it’s just one person and a guitar,” Brian says. “The live show is really coming together, I’m delighted with it. It’s something people wouldn’t expect from a two-piece.”

Already an experienced player at the age of 25, Brian is always trying different things to make his live show better.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.