Video - An Interesting Life

Just a little something I bunged together while I was watching TV last night; an amazingly high-budget filmclip/slideshow for my song “An Interesting Life” which I wrote in 2009 and recorded in July 2010. (See below video for notes.)

The scene at the start on the train and all of the photos were taken, on a small, lo-fi digital camera in mid-2007 in France, mostly in Paris and on a visit to the Palace of Versailles. I got pretty bored of taking shots of monuments and crap like that so I started taking covert snaps of people minding their own business.

Although the song, with its reference to the Scarab Bar (a perfectly wonderful late-night watering establishment on Main St) is “set” in and around Belgrave, Victoria (as much as any song is set in a location, which is not much), I thought the pensiveness of the images suited the song with its themes of regret and remorse. And anyway, they were all I had besides happy snaps of the family dog or whatever Enjoy! And be sure to watch through ’till the end for a cameo appearance by the incredible speeding Snowflake Man himself!!

Enjoy this post? Then please return the favour by checking out my music - click here -> Seamus’ Music

Never Tell People What You Are Planning

That’s the advice I read from Derek Sivers and I reckon he is one guy who ears should flap enthusiastically towards, so I have left a post I got ready for Seamus.TV unposted, and made a different video instead.

The unposted vid was about all of my plans, and as I mentioned in the last post here, it was a kind of “this is who I am, take it or leave it” thing to all my nearest and dearest.

But it was wickety-wack; Those closest to me know I am a “lone nut” and they only wish me well. I reckon they would just prefer to let me do my thing and I shouldn’t worry so much about what others think.

So I am just forging ahead. I am loving the idea of making music and video blogging about the process and co-creating a source of inspiration for all musicians who may feel frustrated, burnt out or hard done by, for those musicians who think they are too fat, too old, too ugly, too shy, too lazy, too un-hip, or too remote. Every time I bring these kinds of feelings and issues up with musicians anywhere, they all latch on to it enthusiastically. I think a lot of musicians feel the same (that it all isn’t working out for them) and I think we all need to address what “it” is and turn it around. So that’s my mission, to do this for myself (well I already am) and to inspire other musicians to do the same.

Oh wait! There I go - announcing plans again! Sorry Derek, I’ll shut up and get on with it!

So here is the latest episode:

Seamus.TV – A Musician’s Guide to Giving it a Red Hot Go

To “give something a red hot go” is Aussie slang for giving something a try, for having a shot at doing something.

It’s  not about me preaching about “how to be a rock star”, that would be not be keeping it real – that would just be silly.

Rather, it’s a diary of me getting my music out there and generally raving on like a loony hopefully inspiring you to do the same.

So I’ll be making great music, having fun promoting the music (on and offline), and trying my damnedest to find a  bigger audience to dig my musical vibe-ola.

Yes, I still REALLY need to get a better camera. Yes, I have a LOT to learn yet about video blogging. No, I don’t think it’s better to wait until all the ducks are lined up: Real artists ship. Check it out:

Seamus.TV – A Musician’s Guide to Giving it a Red Hot Go

If you like it, please subscribe to it, or connect with me via Facebook or Twitter and let me know what you think. That would mean the world to me.

Ok I gotta go, I got a gig tonight.

2nd video blog episode

Below you will find the second episode in my new video blog experiment.

If the experiment works, and I continue to publish this, I may put it on it’s own domain and find a better name for it, but for now this is all about getting the ball rolling. It’s not about preaching how-to do things that I have no right to teach - it’s about taking people with me on my journey as a musician, and joining others on their musical journeys. I want to connect with all the people out there who (like me) sometimes let their enjoyment of being a musician suffer for various reasons (mainly Fear aka The Lizard Brain) but who (like me) MUST keep making music all their lives no matter what.

I have been working on this for a few days and to be honest it has been really hard to hit publish because my Lizard Brain is resisting like crazy. It is saying:

“Aaagh! Don’t do this - everyone will laugh at you!” (Well maybe they will laugh, more likely “they” won’t even notice.)

“You can’t publish this - the video and sound quality is terrible!” (Yes the quality is a very much on the lo-fi side but I am publishing anyway. If I stick at this video blogging lark I will get a better camera.)

First Seamus Video Blog Post

I have been wanting to do this for ages, but my Lizard Brain kept feeding me reasons why I should hold off till later.

Until today when I said “Screw it, let’s do it”.

This first post, completely spontaneous and unscripted, is a ramble touching on what this blog is about and where I see it going - essentially what it means to be a musician, how to get satisfaction as a musician (as I reckon 99% of us are frustrated) and ways to differentiate ourselves as musicians. I don’t actually answer these questions yet - but feel free to start up the convo!

I recorded the above video on my iPhone, same goes for this song below called “Never Gonna Be A DJ”:

Never Gonna Be A DJ - A Ghost Story…

I wrote this years ago but it is still the best song I have to end a set with.

The story is about a young guy, Steve, who I was working as a kitchenhand with at a restaurant called Torlanos on Fitzroy Street in St Kilda, Melbourne back in the mid-late 90s. The head chef was Iain Hewitson who Aussies would know from TV. (By the way, on TV he is very jovial, but my memory of him - not necessarily reliable - is of a tough-as-nails swear-bear who really used to rip into the apprentice chefs … having said that he never gave me a hard time at all, in fact he barely spoke to me.)

Although Steve held a full time job as a kitchenhand and had done so for some time, he was apparently homeless, I can’t remember if it was by choice or not. He was a great guy and an incredibly hard worker.

He used to talk a lot about becoming a DJ but in fact he never did because he suddenly died.

He never used to miss any time at work but one day he didn’t show for a few days in a row until it was eventually learned that he had turned up dead in the Yarra River.  And this is where it gets weird… Shortly after learning about Steve’s death, which was reported as accidental (the police said he slipped and fell to his death while urinating in the river), I was visited by Steve’s ghost.

(I  should point out here that I am not particularly interested or frequented by ghosts, in fact if not for this incident I would probably poo-poo the idea, but this definitely happened - call me crazy.)

One night I was minding a friend’s house and dog, a doberman. I was awoken by the dog going crazy one night, and I just knew somehow that Steve was with me. Steve proceeded to tell me about how he wanted everybody at work to know that he didn’t die accidentally but was deliberately pushed. He told me some details, which have become hazy with the passing of time, but from what I remember he said he had been walking into the city, all the way from St Kilda (a long walk) with some people, one of whom was a young homeless lad who was giving him a hard time about something. Steve described the guy’s clothing to me, and later I was told by a co-worker that they had seen Steve shortly before his death, walking up Barkly Street in St Kilda, towards the city, with a young guy wearing clothing that matched Steve’s description. According to Steve (or his ghost anyway) it was this guy who pushed Steve to his death while he was “cracking a whizz” over a steep riverbank edge.

I told people at work this story, and if it hadn’t been for the corroborating evidence, I am sure they would have dismissed my wild tale out of hand. As it was they just sort of said “wow, trippy” and left it at that.

Steve had two other things he wanted to tell me. Firstly, that he regretted having never made the time to properly pursue his dream of becoming a DJ (he used to work long hours). He pleaded with me not to make the same mistake; timely advice seeing as I was treading water at the time instead of getting on with my music. These were his actual words:

“If you’re going to do it, then go ahead and do it before it’s too late.”

As a result I walked out of the kitchen half way through my double shift one day soon after, and went out to have dinner with some friends of mine who were in a band called The Mavis’s. We ended up partying with Kylie Minogue that night which I took as a sign that I had done the right thing. (In retrospect it would have been wiser to go and do some work on my music career rather than get pissed - but 20/20 hindsight and all that…) I have always kept this advice close to heart, and whenever I find myself off track, I make sure to correct my course and just get back to pursuing my dreams, rather than worrying too much about money and security.

The third thing Steve wanted to tell me was that death is ok; it’s nothing to be afraid of. This has been an issue in my life, despite all my Zen posturings, so I like to remind myself of this when I am succumbing to fear (on airplanes, for example).

Go Away - Live song

Seamus and Peter (ex-Reckoning) doing “Naked”

Ok - Seamus is me (blue shirt), Peter Owen is the handsome guy on the drum. We used to be in a band called Reckoning and this is us on December 4th 2008 doing one of our old Reckoning songs “Naked” at the Grace Emily Hotel, in Adelaide.

There was a small but appreciative crowd that night, maybe 50 or more in that small back room … so it was cozy. The laughing at the beginning is because I was cracking jokes about the lyrics (most of the people there would have known the lyrics back in the ’90s). The joke was that (as the song says) if ‘we’ were to “sneak out at 2am” these days then we’d need to get a babysitter… well, I guess you had to be there …

Anyway, me and Pete will be recording and gigging some new music this year plus wheeling out golden oldies like this so stay tuned…