First day done and not expelled - yet

Yesterday was my first day in college.  While I’m studying for a post graduate course - a Masters in Songwriting - my primary degree was earned outside of a formal educational establishment, The University of Life and 19 years of Busking.

While yesterday was a fairly grey day with a lot of rain, the campus is beautiful and I’m sure I’ll be posting many photos over the course of the course and the year.

My course director is Carl Corcoran and, after meeting him for the first time last week and again yesterday, I believe he’ll be a great asset to the course.  Carl has a vast musical knowledge and, having had a career spanning almost 50 years - from pop star to musical jukebox and eventually to radio presenting to community arts.  As there is only one other person studying with me, I know we’ll get all the attention we need.

Today is the first day in a while I have had time to sit and write a little.  Last week, knowing I wouldn’t be back home for a few weeks, I had a lot of loose ends to tie up, documents I absolutely couldn’t leave home without, communications with revenue and Susi (the government centralized student grant organization), getting my car through it’s road worthiness test amongst others.  All in all, a very stressful week leading to me coming down with a dose of something which I’m managing to shake off with the help of lemons, ginger and honey.

It seems that Tuesdays will be free of anything scheduled and today is the first chance I’ve had to catch my breath and even get a chance to study the course core and elective modules. 

After my initial interview/audition, I was accepted - subject to submitting a sample of writing, new or something I’d written earlier and around 500 words in length.  I sent two.  One, a piece written a few years ago for my Facebook page (smileys removed and grammar tidied up here and there) and also wrote a new piece which follows.

A day in a life                 

It’s Tuesday 1st June 1999.  It’s early afternoon and I’m sitting on a rock by the sea, doing my transcendental meditation practice (which I’ve been less disciplined with for a while). It is also the first time I’ve taken out to notice the sea since I came to live in Galway.

I moved here just 12 months ago, almost two years after leaving the wife - and life - I’d had for the 26 years prior to that.  Kris Kristofferson said in his song 'Me and Bobby Magee', "Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose", and that’s exactly what I had - nothing left to lose - when I arrived in Galway.

I woke up today as deaf as a post - an intermittent problem for me at the moment, one that usually only lasts an hour or two. Today, however, it's different. I spent the early part of the morning trying to shake off the deafness in order to go out to drum up photography work or even to do some busking. A few hours later, all I can hear is the blood pulsing around inside my head.  

It was with nothing left to lose (except maybe a broken heart) that I took my guitar to the street within a few weeks of arriving here. I'd sing the songs of Kris, John Prine and Leonard Cohen and, within a few months, Sean O’Neill too.  My guitar comes everywhere, along with my cameras, lights and equipment and my busking is often an hour grabbed on the way to a shoot.  I love it.

Here on the beach in Spiddal, from nowhere, four words, ‘I can’t hear you’, complete with melody, interrupt the beat of my blood in my head. I leave the seashore and head back to Salthill, to find a cafe where I can sit and write down the rest of the song.

Ten years later, in 2009, Guy Clark releases his thirteenth album, Some Days the Song Writes You.  That sums up that Tuesday for me.  ‘I Can’t Hear You’ is one of my best songs.  Finished before my coffee, it tells a completely different story to the one I sat down to write.

Over the next two hours, a second cup of coffee and an avocado, cream cheese and bacon bagel, four more songs arrived. The following day - with normal service being resumed to my ears - I began the slower process of learning to play them.

Of those five songs, two appear on my first album, Losers & Sinners;  ‘I Can’t Hear You’ and ‘Looking for a Woman (but not Looking too Hard)'. One is featured on my second album, Odds & Sods:  ‘I’m Not Nice’ and one on my third, still LIFE in black & white: ‘Chemistry Lessons’.

The fifth song?  I’m still learning to play it.

An artist I met, soon after arriving in Galway, told me that music has a way of ‘accelerating your karma’.  It certainly did for me. By the end of the millennium, I threw away my camera and safety nets and was on the road, full time, with my songs.

Sean O’Neill   22nd June 2017