SOMETIMES timing can be everything and that is certainly the case for Limerick based singer-songwriter Sean T MacLeod.
He will be a special guest at the opening night of the Acoustic Café, which begins in the Sallymills Bakery in the Milk Market on Thursday 13, 8:30pm.
This coincides with the release of his new single ‘Light Up The Sun’, an upbeat pop/ indie number with a positive tempo to match the recent summer sunshine.
Sean, who teaches Music Studies at Limerick College of Further Education, says that the song was inspired by his relocating to the city from his native Dublin in 2008.
“When I moved to Limerick I found that I had a huge wealth of material and I wrote a lot of stuff very quickly. I didn’t labour over it.
“It’s been one of the main pieces that I’ve done in sets around Limerick. It has been played on Live 95FM and Wired FM that I’ve always wanted to record. It’s a simple song and it has an uplifting summer sound.
“The production actually came together pretty quickly. It took only a day or two, which was relatively quick as these can often take about three to five days.”
Sean is no stranger to gigging around the city, having played in The Locke Bar, Bentley’s and Riddler’s to name a few, and he is delighted to be involved in a regular session again.
He explains: “I had been playing at music nights in the last three years but the pub scene is dying a bit in the city and I’ve had nowhere to play in the last year.
“We were looked for a better approach so we started looking around for a cafe venue and we got talking to the proprietor of Sallymills, which is a developing place only about a year old. He was very open to new ideas, so we suggested this idea.”
Sean first starting playing music at the age of seven and he has had an eventful career in the entertainment scene, having been part of Dublin-based group Cisco in the 1990s and going into production with Sonic Eye Media.
Cisco enjoyed a reasonable degree of success in their native city, with some record labels showing an interest, but after a few years the group went its separate ways.
Sean is now involved with Wake Up Records, a new record label whose first release came as recently as March, and he is glad to be on board with this new venture.
“It’s an independent label seeking to find local talent and produce good quality records. There’s a lot of talent out there but people don’t have the money and their sound might not be coming up to the highest radio quality. Wake Up Records will encourage these artists to record with them.”
He has a large portfolio of music written and recorded but he is happy enough to work on one song at a time instead of releasing an album.
“I’ve done an EP before but it took two years between recording and financing and I was burnt out after it and I felt that the tracks weren’t up to radio quality. The potential was there but we didn’t push it and we probably needed to go that extra mile.
“I find that I can focus on one song and it takes a lot of pressure off. It’s different from listening to 10 songs and if I have 10 songs recorded, that’s 10 things I have, but if I put out an album of those 10 songs, I have just one thing.
“If people like one song, they’ll listen to a second song. If they like that, they’ll listen to a third song, and so on. People can now put together their own playlists and they’re doing that now anyway.”
