I won't know the exact date till early next week, but my record (aka "The shadow in the sky") should be available in Road Records and from my website (pending) before the end of the month. In the meantime, you can check it out here: http://www.myspace.com/themusicofjobe

Incidentally, if anyone knows anything about webdesign, or has any ideas of people or places I should send the record to... now would be the time!

Eoin

Late addition (2009-07-20): The release date is July 31st!

While the premise of most festivals is flakey at best, I think St. Patrick’s Day is perhaps one of the more ridiculous ones. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think celebrating for the sake of a party is a thoroughly noble cause. I’m just not sure why we bother doing it in the name of a man whose fame centred around (if I remember my primary school lessons correctly) being kidnapped by pirates, doing a little shepherding, and somewhere along the way finding the time to eradicate our rich and distinctive Celtic culture and traditions. And something to do with shamrocks and Jesus. I hope you like the amusingly alternative perspective I put on the story, incidentally. It's only half-ironic.

Basically, I would prefer us to just call it the celebration of nothing at all that it really is, and be cool with that. I’m an atheist to my godforsaken core, but I still have Christmas, and – would you believe – it’s the exact same experience; except for the hour of my life that isn't sacrificed to god via an institutionally standardised and dreadfully homogenous ceremony observed once per year. We celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, as we celebrate most religious festivals, by defiantly indulging in the vices and evils that said religion opposes. I’m all for the vices and the irreligion here; I’m just not big on the implied hypocrisy. Well, okay, excessive drinking is not something I am a fan of either, admittedly – but complaining about that on St. Patrick’s Day would be like objecting to Santa Claus at Christmas (because it involves lying to children). I’m just pushing for a more secular and cultural perspective on festivals generally here.

One of the things I do love about St. Patrick’s Day is that we basically have an Ireland Day which is celebrated internationally by several hundred million people. Given how small our island is, I think this is a truly impressive achievement. It goes like this: people wear green, they parade around (no excusing the pun) and they drink a lot. (As well as being our national colour, green is better known as the colour of envy. I’ve always thought this oddly appropriate to our society. But I digress.) That, in any case, is essentially the entire tradition as transposed into modern practice. People all over the world wear green, because it’s Irish. Lots of them use the excuse to get wasted, because this is also Irish. We honour them in return by playing to our stereotypes.

While walking to Tesco this afternoon to buy coffee beans (not very Irish, I know, but we weren’t out of tea or potatoes) and noticing that those who weren’t wearing green hats, green jerseys, or Irish flags were at least wearing some overt token-green item of clothing, I realised that I was wearing a blue shirt (with which green tokens would have clashed horribly), in complete neglect of the cultural obligations incurred by the harp on my passport. While actually random and thoughtless, I'm going to claim this as a manifestation of my inherent non-conformism. I did it because blue is the colour of my true nation (Europe, of course). I never got the opportunity to outrage anyone's sense of patriotism by making this claim at the time, unfortunately, but I think it's important that it be noted in retrospect.

Anyway, complaining and ranting also being national traditions, I trust that I’ve now sufficiently honoured the occasion in lieu of getting drunk off my ass or painting my face like a fucking leprechaun.

I’m endlessly amused by the most stupid things sometimes. We stress the word “record” differently depending on whether it’s a noun (a vinyl RECord) or a verb (to recORD), despite the fact that the meaning can always be deduced from context. The slightly redundant existence of the additional noun “recording” is something I’ll allow, since there are contextual differences – a record implies a coherent body of work or account. Of particular note is the fact that the stresses for recording, recorded etc. are all aligned as per the verb. If we were to invent an adjective to imply that something has properties much like those of a record, we would presumably stress it as per the noun. Example: “This sounds quite recordy”. It gets a little more complex if we adverb it (and yes, I just verbed the noun adverb). For example: “the day passed quite recordingly”. This is presumably stressed as per “recording”. But if we were to say “I recordily request that you desist from inventing words”, it becomes difficult to establish how the adverb should be stressed. It has to be derived from the noun “record” as per a historical record, but it’s counter-intuitive in English to stress the first syllable of a multi-syllable word. This is a dilemma.

On the subject of odd stressing, does anyone else get that thing where you’re right in the middle of a sentence and you just compulsively stress words wrong? It’s sort of like that impulse I get if I’m holding my telephone when I cross the Ha’Penny Bridge. I can’t stop thinking I’m about to throw it off the bridge for no apparent reason. If I ever do it, I’ll likely try to pass it off as freeing myself from the shackles of something or other, but between you and me, I did it for no reason at all and probably regret it deeply.