Interviews | ||
irismagazine.net - October 28 2003 Mark Geary Lets Go: Angela Wade gets deep with troubadour Mark Geary... IRIS: Who or what has been the biggest influence on your music? Mark: There's the obvious ones. …Glen and I always call it 'The Blessed Trinity' of Dylan and Cohen, and he goes Marley. I don't go Marley. Dylan, Cohen, and maybe Nick Drake for me. I guess it's unavoidable for me to have come from Dublin and have what is really the Beatles of my generation… with U2. Whether or not it's cool… and Radiohead, and I'm a Beatles fan, and all of those guys."
entertainment.ie Interview - Feb.2003 Mark Geary here at entertainment.ie: "New York is funny in that once you do your laundry and once you get your first utility bill, you're a New Yorker. It's such an immigrant town…" Interview
RADAR Interview - May 1999 "I came on a one-way ticket from Dublin -- the classic Paddy coming to New York story," says singer/songwriter Mark Geary, whose self-titled debut album has just been released on Serene/Paradigm. In intimate, bittersweet songs set against a backdrop of beautiful acoustic guitar playing and understated drum loops, Geary, now based in New York City, deals with his Irish upbringing in what he describes as "a poor family, but one filled with mad, insane, interesting, nutty people." "It was a tough kind of life," he says. "In my family, you just didn't become a musician. Art is short for Arthur. My father was a bricklayer on social welfare. The whole bit. I just listened to the radio and tried to learn how to play guitar and that was it." After his name came up in a lottery to receive an American green card, Geary ended up in New York's East Village and was finally able to get over the mental and emotional blocks that were preventing him from pursuing his love of music. "First I got sober and I quit taking drugs, and that was after a real battle with it," says Geary. "I was able to sit down, in earnest, and it became very serene and sober just to sing to myself. I learned Beatles harmonies and listened to Nick Drake and Van Morrison. It's amazing to me how diligent I was without any real reason other than that it brought me joy. I realized I had a voice. I realized I could say something. It really started happening and I got better. The whole 90% perspiration thing. I started working at it and nothing else really mattered." As Geary began to focus on his craft, the creative dam broke and the stories began to flow. Although many songs on Geary's album deal with highly-emotional subject matter, he says that his best songs were the ones that snuck up on him: "A lot of the really great songs happen when you're really not taking yourself so seriously. Because you're not looking for the most earnest quality, thinking "this will make them weep." Geary will be in good company when he joins Elvis Costello, Lucinda Williams, Richard Thompson, Luka Bloom, Martin Sexton and other fine singer/songwriters at this year's Guinness Fleadh Festival in New York City in June.
Irish Tribune - February 9 2003 "New York State Of Mind" WHEN you talk to Mark Geary for half an hour you see the real thing: real hurt, real on-the-edge fragility, real drive and a real intensity that has to share a border with a dark shade of obsession. Unlike the adolescent temperaments of some of his many Dublin singer-songwriter peers, Geary's overbearing intensity is not an act, it is a carefully glossed over reality. Geary releases 33 1/3 Grand Street this week, his second album and his debut in Europe. A Dubliner, he never sang a note in public until he moved to New York in 1995 where he built up a reputation on the singer songwriter scene. His folk-pop is distinguished by a sure melodic touch and a searingly intimate, honest vocal performance. 33 1/3 Grand Street is an album of thoughtful, melancholy folkpop. It opens with 'Gingerman', the album's most accessible, melodic and instantly appealing track. Towards the beginning of the album the sound is polished, perhaps too sanitised, but by the time of the last two Barbadosrecorded tracks, some of the sheen has been ditched in favour of a scratchy, atmospheric approach which tempers some of the natural sweetness of Geary's soft voice and twisting melodies. 33 1/3 Grand Street easily earns Geary a place amongst the Damien Rice/Mundy/ Frames/ Gemma Hayes Irish indierati, but he needs to take their lead and expand his range of sounds if he is to keep up. Geary says that his next album, which he hopes to release in September, is written and 70% recorded, but it could be overtaken by even more fresh material. In person Geary is unfailingly, sincerely polite, truly excited that his singing has found such a quick and willing audience and that his hard work has paid off. But underneath the gloss there lurks another man, the one who ran to New York without a plan, who kicked a drug habit when he got there and was a very public failure in his brother's venue when he finally performed after twenty-something years of doubt. Under there, and not too far from the surface, is the man who lived like a monk for years, staying in and working, working, working on his songs and his singing, queuing with 80 others at a time for open mic slots until he could go back to his brother's place to perform with pride alongside the likes of Jeff Buckley. Though he lines up alongside The Frames' Glen Hansard, Mundy, Damien Rice and Gemma Hayes in Ireland's flourishing songwriter renaissance, Mark Geary has done everything differently. He was on the move from 1990 onwards, just trying to get out of Dublin and escape his overwhelming desire to do nothing at all. "It was an act of desperation, really. The best way I can describe it is there used to be graffiti in Dublin toilets that said 'would the last person out of Ireland please turn out the light'. There was drug addiction and alcoholism and wife battering, I come from a working class family, my dad was a bricklayer, there was the dole and the building trade but nobody was building. I ran to London, my sister was, worse again, running a bar in Kilburn. My brother was running a bar in New York so I went there in '90. From '90 on I wasn't going to go to college, there was a whole bunch of things I couldn't do, didn't want to do, so I missed that transition where Dublin was getting economically viable." Geary was terrified of performing in his home town, and felt he would never sing outside his bedroom unless he left. A green card lottery came up with his name and he moved to the US. When he got to America, Geary was surprised by the fact that, for the first time, he had some kind of identity that he could latch on to. Having felt like an outsider in Irish society and having left because of it, he suddenly could be Irish, but only by leaving. It was something that he still feels ambiguous about. "With eight million people you are absolutely anonymous and New York is all about reinvention but I couldn't even do that. It was an amazing experience actually leaving Ireland and suddenly realising 'wow, I'm one of those ex-patriots'. Joyce talks about what everyone has: anger, exile, what that meant, suddenly becoming quite sentimental and being really afraid of being an Aran sweater wearing, you know, more Irish than the Irish. I was in East Village which was a hotch potch of crazies from the sixties and punk rockers and transvestites, it was the greatest thing for me because I wasn't Irish any more." He derived some strength from that identity, even if it meant finding somewhere that he could lose his newly acquired Irishness again. Too early, he took to his brother's stage at Café Sin é, a famous songwriter haunt that at the time had Jeff Buckley as its Monday night resident. "My brother had opened the Café Sin é with his partner Shane Doyle, so when I got there Jeff Buckley was playing every night, Katell Keinig, and Sinead O'Connor, and it was the unofficial meeting point of bands that were passing through. I played a couple of gigs there, but I just wasn't good enough, it was too terrifying." It was after this failure that Geary began to show some of his frighteningly steely determination. "I just went off and did open mics, I did it for maybe a year and half. You just got two songs and maybe 80 songwriters would show up on a Monday and you might not play till two o'clock in the morning to a guy who was working the sound and a waitress and that was it." Overcoming stage fright was only one part of Geary's battle, though. When he arrived in New York in 1995 he was already a drug addict. Though he will not say what he was taking, he does say it was certainly not just marijuana. He felt that if he was ever going to try and be a songwriter, he had to clean up. "I gave up everything, and it wasn't just hash. If it was just hash it would have been alright, or maybe not. They say that drugs and booze is low grade spirituality and it works for some people and it was killing me and I didn't know how to stop and I couldn't stop so I got help, and what was left was a very frightened, burnt out child. I put the pieces back together, or was helped to put the pieces back together, and that's where I got the discipline for just sitting at home and the wreckage of the past or whatever you want to call it, sitting there just playing music and finding my original passion." "I come from a big family and they would put me in front of a record player and it would spin around and I'd zone out for days. That was my original drug of choice." Geary's determination turned him into a successful New York performer, hammering the local circuit and supporting acts like Coldplay, Elvis Costello and Joe Strummer. He signed his first record deal and released an album, but the record company went bust and it was back to bartending for Geary. Then an extraordinary coincidence ("it was the stuff of the Gods, " beams Geary) brought him his second break. One of his customers, film producer Gill Holland, raved about a live recording an acquaintance had sent him, and duly turned up to a gig with a crowd of friends and film world movers and shakers. "He thought I was this guy, multi-platinum Mark Geary or whatever, and he suddenly realised Mark Geary was the guy Mark who was working in the bar he went to every weekend, so a day later we shook hands on a gentleman's agreement that we would try to help each other. Six months later I had a record finished." New material is on the way for Geary. For the past month he has toured with old friend and Frames' frontman Hansard, and says that this has forced him to speed-write just to keep up. "Glen and I have been writing songs the night before, go out on stage, ask someone to hold the piece of paper and walk the tightrope. We have been upping the ante, two and three songs each of us would do in a night, just taking that risk. I wrote four new songs, Glen might have beaten me with four or five, " he says. Speed writing competitions, radio play and a new album in the bag were all distant dreams when Geary left Ireland, another disheartened, disillusioned emigrant barely daring to hope for a successful reinvention. His act of desperation paid off, and now 33 1/3 Grand Street 's listeners can reap the rewards. 33 1/3 Grand Street is out now on Independent Records. Mark Geary begins a national tour at the end of February. Matthew Magee | ||
Main Page
News
Biography
Discography
Lyrics
Images
Sounds
Videos
Reviews
Interviews
Links
Messageboard
|