Seeing as though the number 9 is my favourite number of all time, this post, by transitive property (props to my grade 10 geometry teacher), has to be my favourite timinganddelivery soundcheck, right?
Pretty damn close!
This past weekend my friend Anna was kind enough to invite me into the middle of nowhere. Once we were there, however, a wedding happened. A wedding I won’t soon forget.
Before you start firing off emails wondering why you weren’t invited, no…it wasn’t mine. Aside from being set on a farm in the country (with hay bails as pews and a barn converted into the coolest dance hall this side of American Bandstand), the happy couple are really great people (didn’t know them previously). What’s even cooler is that the two of them spent a great deal of time in Ireland and, as you might expect, attached to this particular wedding was a whole whack of Irish friends from, you guessed it, Ireland (unlike those of us that say we’re Irish and were born in places like…Winnipeg). But I digress.
With that said, let me introduce you to the topic of timinganddelivery soundcheck #9, Paddy Casey!
Paddy Casey (Addicted to Company, Pt. 1) – Talk about luck of the Irish! Back in early 2006, Paddy found himself in LA for the US-Ireland Alliance pre-Oscar party playing in front of a crowd of posh folk, including a gaggle of film and record company executives. While he only played for 10 minutes, his music caught the ear of Larry Hamby, the man who did the A&R work on the best selling album of all time, Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The rest…well, you know what they say.
Paddy hails from Dublin (great little town) and his sound, the first time I heard it, reminded me of a more aggressive David Gray (with a better accent to boot). Check it out for yourself on one of the first tracks I heard, The Lucky One. Other tracks that will, and I’m serious, have you singing or doing something musical out loud, Fear, City, and Saints and Sinners.
Turns out I’m not the only one who finds this guy’s stuff pretty damn good. His last album, Living, which went eleven times platinum in Ireland had sales in excess of 175,000. According to his Web site, it would easily have been Ireland’s biggest selling album in 2005 but for a band called U2 releasing an album the same year. Who?
It’s because of my new friends from Galway, Dublin and Kerry that Paddy Casey’s name was dropped as something to check out (after mentioning some of my current UK-inspired musical tastes). You can honestly say that they led this horse to the water…and he drank!
Slainte!
darren
