It's December 5th and in less than a month, I'll be flying to the USA for the first time in my life - and I'm 58. This is a special time for me and so I think that I should record it. My blog seems the best place to do it and so here we go.
Where I’m at in my life is probably a good place to start.
I’ve been separated/divorced since 1997. My ex is a lovely woman, we had 26 years together – kids when we married and kids when we had ours too.
Two sons and one daughter, all doing well in their chosen fields. Both sons are married, the older with an 8 year old girl and the other with two sons, 9 and 7 bookending the set.
I live on my own and have a big friendly dog for company. I have been in another relationship – possibly still am, it’s a rocky one and I’m not sure day to day. Quite possibly there’s not enough of me to be in a relationship and pursue my goal which is to earn my pension from songs I write.
It wasn’t until my wife and I split that I began to sing and write. I was 47 and went busking in Galway to overcome some block I had with singing in public. There’s lots of background on my website www.seanoneillsongs.com and so that’s enough of that.
Oh yes, I became an orphan this year too – September, and on Monday, work the last day of my notice as I was made redundant almost a fortnight ago. When I say work, I don’t actually mean work as I was told to work or not for the two weeks, and that I would get my basic pay without commission (I sell) or bonus anyway. I felt that putting some sort of plan in place for the future was a better option.
Nashville is not all yee ha and country music – although losing my mam and my job within a few weeks of each other would put me in a good state of mind to write country songs, and if my dog was to pop her clogs, nay paws, before the new year, I could be truly inspired in that direction. Hopefully my dog will last as long as her father, Shep, who died this year aged about two thousand and something in country dog years. Nashville has been a plan since I began writing. It’s the hub of the music business as LA is for film and TV.
In October 2007 and again in October 2008, I attended a writers retreat on Inis Oirr, the smallest of the Aran Islands. It was organized by Brett Perkins – a fine songwriter himself. Brett hosts these retreats in different countries under the name of ‘Listening Room Retreats’. Last year I stated, at the close of the retreat, that, if at all possible, I’d forgo Inis Oirr this year and go to the one in Northern California – The Sequoia Retreat Centre, Ben Lomand – which is on in January.
There’s an earlier blog about the death of my mother here and after she died, I realized how organized she was. Almost everything she owned had a little sticker with a name written on it. Gift I gave her when I was a kid had mine. A die cast model of a cream Morris Minor Traveler – the one with the wood – that I’d found and bought for her a couple of birthdays ago, still in the box, came right back to me. My Ma did her driving test and got a full sized cream Morris after she had her eighth baby and couldn’t get a big enough pram.
The eight of us are all still around – and, since last week, all in our fifties. For each one, there was a bunch of stuff we’d given her – and an envelope with our name on it containing some cash. Mine had, ‘for Nashville’ written on it too.
to be continued…
