The Longer Version:

Who are you? Where are you from ? What do you do? All questions that, in one shape or another, I’ve had difficulty answering all my life. The responses always come in tones and spaces.

It started with a name – don’t get me started on names. I’d left the first band I was in and wanted to write and record songs of my own, but not under my own name. I’ve nothing against my own name – it’s served me well – but I felt the need to name this new thing, to baptise it with a symbol. Searching for something that could fit me, I settled on Husk. It was short and elemental, and suited me. It was a sound to start with, which I could then later graft explanations onto. It spoke to my voice, a rough and at times coarse thing, but the basis of all the songs. It spoke to something stripped back and essential.

Maybe it actually started with the voice. I belong to one of those strange categories, Irish but born in England; my family moved to England for work, and I spent the first six years of my life there. Then arriving in Dublin, where the family returned and settled, my voice singled me out with its accent. In England I had been identified clearly as Irish, while in Ireland my voice identified me as somehow less than Irish, forming a complicated relationship between my voice and identity. Always an outsider when opening my mouth, music became a place where I felt at home.

This was all in Dublin, in the 90s, in a city that shaped and moulded my ideas about songs. A city where bands like Whipping Boy, The Blue Angels, The Golden Horde, and of course The Frames were playing. All bands that contributed to the idea that, in this city on the edge of Europe, you could write songs that could be as important as anything coming from London or New York. Different line-ups of the band formed, played and recorded, and in the new songs there are shades of those days. Between Husk and Husk97 there are journeys though, that saw me leave Dublin, to travel the world, and to settle roots down elsewhere, in another evocative city Bologna, Italy.

And what, then, do you do? I write and record songs – largely holed up in a basement studio. What type of songs? What type of influences? I’ve been thinking about it for years, but don’t have a simple answer – but I can tell you some of the songwriters I keep coming back to: Mark Lanegan, Mic Christopher and The Mary Janes, Sinéad O’Connor, Mary Coughlan, and Nick Cave. What draws me to them? A distinctive sound and voice, a rich songwriting vocabulary, and a spirit of adventure. My songs start with a brief idea, scribbled in a notebook, or recorded quickly on guitar or keyboard. Then the adventure starts, as they take shape, growing into something else.

At its heart, that’s what Husk97 is: songs concerned with place, distance, memory, and the pull between mooring and unmooring, between home and abroad. Musically, it’s built on solid rhythms and structures, punctuated by diversions and question marks — dark, hypnotic, nostalgic.