The idea for this blog was utterly and totally ripped off from a blog posted not so long ago by another Tralee band by the name of Stupid Betty. I thought it was a great idea and decided it would be fun to do the same thing for songs by DNS. So here it is, the stories behind the songs and the names of the songs, in chronological order, no doubt. Thanks to Ivan, Mark, Colin and Tony for not filing lawsuit.
Tough Love
It was the summer of 2006 and 4 young sons were occupying their time by playing loud music in a spare house somewhere in the vicinity of Oakpark, Tralee. After half learning a classic Led Zeppelin tune, the lads felt it was high-time they self penned a song to show the world (the KDYS side of it) that they were much more than a bad cover band. We had already been jamming like mad, not really intending to keep any ideas for actual songs, when Ken suggested that we do a sort of guitar/drum duel riff thing, which transpired to be the intro to Tough Love, so in reality it was the drummer who instigated the writing of this song. The first song. Ever.
After we looped the opening bars a couple of times, the band burst in to an out-and-out jamfest for no shorter than 20 minutes, each member putting equal amounts of sweat into this funky facade of thick-skinned riffery. At the end of this initial play, we had all the intro parts and the 2 first verse parts down. Then we went to the shop for, among other things, Fruit Pastilles and Ice-Burgers. When we returned we recorded the next jam onto our ghetto tape player to see what it sounded like to outside ears. Being, inexperienced in the art of songwriting, we thought this was the coolest stuff ever written. Well, I did anyway. The next day we played together, as far as I can remember, we literally 'balled in' the outro section, which we conjured from nowhere. It was going swimmingly. At home later that week, I (that is, Neil) was messing about with simple powerchords and came up with the cheesy chorus, but it went perfectly with the rest of the song, and so, it stuck. We had the bones of our first original!! 'Oooooh, this is so much fun' we said. I'm not sure if that happened or not, anyway, it seemed all that was left was lyrics and a solo, and heaven knows how much I would suck at both of those, but I was nominated to do the former out of necessity, so I stepped up to the plate.
I based the lyrics on my very little knowledge of the alien race sometimes referred to as females. This gets cheesier every second. So I sat in my room, humming the verse music in my head, and basically free-wrote the lot. I was actually quite proud of it at the time, I especially liked the way that it didn't rhyme. Not so typical for a first song, might I add. The title is pretty self explanatory; The chorus refers to the fact that love, or what you might think is love at the time, is a pain in the ass, and will come back to haunt you once it dies.
The solo was also written in the weeks following the initial writing, but I don't want to dwell on that to much. Nobody wants to know where I ripped the licks from, do they??
So that's it, the story of a song, start to finish.
After 8
In the last few days before Dara Ken and Neil were shipped off back west for 3 weeks to speak Irish to an insufferable mid-wife, the main/verse riff was penned in the early afternoon in the brothers' bedroom. I had just being toying with it really, not expecting to have it used for anything in particular. When we arrived at the Gaeltacht, we were pleased/surprised to notice that the room we had been assigned to also contained the 2 next-most metalheads on the course. It was strange that only 3 people in the whole place had long hair, and all of them were in the same room. Naturally, we befriended these new boys in ways which are too graphic to mention, and it wasn't long before we discovered that Adam Govan, the dirty goth freak from Dublin, had brought his acoustic guitar d
This guy seems to really like the sounds of DNS. On The DNS!
Shane Barry 0 ReplysIs out to murder cripples
Neil O' Carroll 0 Replys