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Cork’s Music Scene: An Interview with Alan Daniel Tobin

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This week, Eve Lonergan  caught up with Alan Daniel Tobin to talk songwriting, collecting sounds and lighthouses.


“We could be on holiday and we could be at a beautiful beach and I'd be taking pictures of a crack in a footpath,” the Carrigaline-based musician laughs.  


For Alan, artistic inspiration can be sourced from anywhere: a thump on the Luas track, snatches of conversation, or the howling of seagulls flocking around a lighthouse. 


These snippets of the world, urban or natural, seep through the Clonakilty-born musician’s songs, interwoven with lyrics and music.


“I bring an H4, which is this little mini recorder, with me everywhere,” Alan says, “it just adds that bit of a time stamp or takes you away to another place.”


Raised in Ardfield, the Clonakilty native has a grá for the ocean, and an intrigue with the tall, solitary guideposts of lighthouses. 


Alan Daniel Tobin

“I’m influenced a lot by the sea,” Alan says, “last year I did a tour of lighthouses.”


“I curated a tour around six light houses where they had visitor centres and there was a maritime festival at the same time, and then I raised money for the RNLI as well,” Alan says. 


“There I would have gathered a lot of field recordings of the sea, birds, and wildlife. I will use it at some stage. But you put it in your little folder on your laptop and go, I'll come back to that when I need it.”


Alan traces his interest in music back to seeing his older cousin rocking out on the guitar and from listening to - and watching - his record collection.


“It was cool just to see the vinyl turning, it was just fascinating, just thinking that music would come from this thing that would spin,” Alan reflects.


Alan remembers the grunge influence that bled into secondary school bands (“a lot of it was all our own kind of reinterpretations of the grunge rock scene”), before discovering an affinity for electronic music in college.


Alan’s music transitioned into a more “acoustic-based” sound post-college: “I would have gone into kind of alt-country folk.”


Alan moved to Australia, returning in 2007 and began working for the Southern Star newspaper: “I had a bank of songs that I wanted to record when I came back and I met up with Niall [O’Driscoll] in the Southern Star.


“We would have got together at lunchtime in his house over a cup of tea and would have jammed on these songs that I would have written when I was either in Australia or on the road. And we formed Low Mountain.”


To continue reading please see the digital version of The Carrigdhoun https://subscriber.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/subscribe.aspx?eid=c946bff2-f434-4a7b-a75d-621998d7e750


You can listen to Alan’s most recent album Volume Two by ADT Recordings on Spotify.

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