Guitar Strings and Irish Dreams with Declan Sinnott – Episode 52

Join us as we unravel Declan Sinnott’s remarkable journey as an Irish musician. An esteemed guitarist with over five decades of innovation and collaboration, Declan shares the rhythm of his life’s work, from inspiration from the Beatles’ and his self-taught music skills to being in the right place and time to connect with rising music legends such as Christy Moore and Mary Black.

Declan shared insights into the collective spirit of the band Moving Hearts and the behind-the-scenes tales that fueled their unique success. He offers pearls of wisdom for emerging artists, emphasizing authenticity over imitation, and the benefits of understanding the technical craft of recording. We also chatted about his creative synergy with Evelyn Kallansee, as they blend diverse musical influences for a joint album and tour that includes New Ross Guitar Festival 2024.

This episode celebrates the ongoing odyssey of a musician who has not only witnessed, but actively sculpted, the landscape of Irish music.

Connect with Declan:
www.youtube.com/@EvelynandDec
www.facebook.com/evelynanddec
open.spotify.com/artist/4cgdnma1NWqFAWPTT4YYcV
www.evelynsings.nl/

Aideen Ni Riada: 0:02

Welcome to the Resonate podcast. I’m Aideen Uriada and my guest today is Declan Sinnott. Hello, declan.

Declan Sinnott: 0:09

Hi Aideen, how’s it going?

Aideen Ni Riada: 0:11

Really good. Great to have you here Now. For those of you who don’t know, declan Sinnott is considered a legendary figure in Irish music and for his involvement with many of the most iconic Irish musicians known around the world. He has a career spanning over 40 years and has played alongside and produced music for artists such as Christy Moore, mary Black, sinead Lowen and John Spillane. He was a founding member of Horselips and Moving Hearts. He spent 13 years with Mary Black and 30 with the iconic singer-songwriter Christy Moore. Declan was born in Wexford Town, so not too far away from my hometown, new Ross. His father ran an optician and jewellery shop on Main Street and then he moved to Dublin in the late 1960s. Declan, you didn’t follow in your father’s line of work. How did you ever come up with I’m going to be a musician? Was that part of your family or were you encouraged in that as a young person?

Declan Sinnott: 1:12

No, I was severely discouraged, which worked in my favor, because I didn’t have an easy upbringing. My father wasn’t a nice man and he tried to stop me from playing music, basically, and, and, and, because that we didn’t get on. That was encouragement in a sense. Uh, you know what I mean reverse encouragement. By the way, I was playing with horses 54 years ago, uh, not 30 or 40 fabulous 54.

Aideen Ni Riada: 1:42

You, you’re, you’re proud of it.

Declan Sinnott: 1:45

I am actually, yeah, yeah, to be still doing it, you know. So I pestered my mother to get a guitar when I was 13 years of age. Basically, I’d heard the Beatles and I thought, well, that’s where, whatever that is, I want to be part of that, you know. And so she got me a guitar and I started learning it and, uh, I I had. There was no such thing as the music business and there was no, like I remember, trying to figure out how do you play the guitar.

Declan Sinnott: 2:16

But you know, in in this day and age, you can go on the internet, you can find out anything you want you, you can get, you know any information about it, and there are books everywhere about everything I had no way of connecting with, except there was one book came into I think it was Launi’s shop.

Declan Sinnott: 2:38

It wasn’t, I mean, there were no music shops. It was a shop that had a guitar book in the window and once again I passed it to my mother until I got the book. And then I started learning everything that was in the book and the very first sentence in the book was in order to play the guitar, you need to know how to read music, which is completely untrue but I believed it because that’s all the information I had. So I learned how to read music straight away. And the second book I got was a book of little classical pieces and I learned how to play all them. And so I was listening to the radio and that mistake, in that I was learning from both sides of the of the road at the same time, and I felt it has stood to me and that I have a what you call it, an academic view, as well as a what you call an ordinary singer, songwriter view, or whatever you call it.

Aideen Ni Riada: 3:42

You know yeah, not everybody realizes that you can learn music by ear. Well, of course, before written music, every music was by ear and you were just sharing it with someone and showing them visually how to do it, or they were listening to you and you’re repeating yeah, um, and it’s often, I feel, a bit of a barrier to people starting to think that the only way is to do it through learning how to read music. But I know that it can be a great benefit in terms of communicating what you want from somebody and working with a musical group. It probably stood you in good stead that you had done the more academic learning as well.

Declan Sinnott: 4:25

I felt it was good for being able to think I don’t know how technical your, your, uh, your podcast would allow it. I don’t want to get. But basically, if I’m in a situation where there are there are working out harmonies with a bunch of people and very often like when your ear fails you, if your ear doesn’t, if it becomes a calculation, then I’m good at that, which is it’s that’s like the last resort, where you work out in, in like mathematical detail what you should do and then you test it out and see if it works. But if you only have your ear, you can’t get to that point.

Declan Sinnott: 5:06

But having said that, most of the great musicians, non-classical musicians, don’t read music and they’re better off far. I mean the you know, you. You hear somebody who’s all he’s done is he’s written songs and he can only play his own songs because he doesn’t know how to connect with the normal musical world and he’s maybe tuned the guitar differently than most people do and he’s worked out what sounds good, so it’s so intuitive and it can be so beautiful, because he doesn’t know what he’s doing. John Lennon said he wrote on the piano mainly after the 60s because he didn’t know how to play it.

Aideen Ni Riada: 5:47

So it opens up a different level of creativity when you take up a new instrument or when you use an instrument in a unique way. And also, I think, with the guitar it sounds so different when you tune a guitar in a different way. I believe it was Joni Mitchell, was it, that used to just use very unusual guitar tunings, and with her voice and the unusual guitar tunings it became a very unique sound, and that’s really something that every artist strives for.

Declan Sinnott: 6:17

Somebody has analysed her tunings and written them all out and it’s something like 68 different tunings, which is mind bogboggling. I mean I don’t even know how that’s possible, but she’s. I mean she is maybe the most complete artist I can think of in terms of a writer, a singer and a guitar player, and she’s brilliant at all of them and she’s a great piano player. Everything she touched turned to gold, you know.

Aideen Ni Riada: 6:46

And I think the barrier in her head wasn’t oh, I need to learn it a certain way.

Declan Sinnott: 6:52

Um, she was open to just going into it and discovering how to play it, rather than learning how to play yeah, absolutely, and and that’s where you should be in a way, I mean, you’re going to be what would you call it? Narrowed down. That’s part of the process of being in touch with other music and also being a fan of other music. Like there are people who are such a fan of other people, of artists they’ve heard, that they emulate and they never manage to become themselves. You know, they’re not distinctive and you know the thing of I know this fella. He sounds just like Eric Clapton. He’d be huge. No, he’d be nobody. There is one of them, and one is all you’re going to be able to have, you know.

Declan Sinnott: 7:44

So, so cool, so cool, yes, so interesting who said was it oscar wilde said be yourself, everybody else is taken yes, I love that, and I often say to people um, don’t try to fit in yeah we’re not meant to fit in.

Aideen Ni Riada: 8:02

So when you were younger, obviously you didn’t quite fit in. No, you with you know this, this pull to music it just the Beatles lit something, a spark in you, and you were. This is me. Now I need to absorb as much of this as I can. What happened like? What like did you? Did you find that you were pulled back by your family’s kind of lack of encouragement? You said it was a bit like fuel for you as well.

Declan Sinnott: 8:31

Yeah, no, I just ignored it. I mean, my mother wasn’t aggressively opposed, but she, she had a very what do you call it? She thought I should get a job in the bank or the civil service and she said you can’t make a living from music. And we didn’t know anybody who did. Everybody who played in bands around Wexford at the time had jobs. They worked in the hardware shop or whatever, and so it didn’t seem we had no immediate examples of people who made money out of music. Now it’s completely different. Lots of people who made money out of music Now it’s completely different. Lots of people are thinking about people who take up an instrument or take up singing and writing songs because they know they can make money out of it. We were the opposite back in those days. You know you couldn’t make money, but there was no path.

Aideen Ni Riada: 9:19

You didn’t know how. It was the same in my family, and I mean I do now combine teaching singing and doing singing and all the other things, but for quite a while that idea that you can’t make money in music stopped me from pursuing it. It took me a long while to overcome that, but it’s very rewarding when you acknowledge your internal drive to do the thing and you give. It’s almost like giving yourself a gift that well, I know it’s in my heart. I know what I like to do, so therefore I’m going to go ahead and do it, because nobody knows who we are on the inside. That’s something that it’s like a little idea that, oh, I’d like to learn to play the guitar. Nobody else can see that, only you can feel it and eventually we can’t see it either.

Declan Sinnott: 10:13

Most of the time, I mean, certainly, when I started I didn’t know where it was going. I never figured out where I was going. Really, it was just it was an addiction. It was a really strong addiction, so I wasn’t thinking where this will go. I had no idea that it could go anywhere. But that didn’t matter. It was too much of an addiction to be worried about where it would go. I mean, the heroin addict isn’t I think it’s more important.

Aideen Ni Riada: 10:42

No, but where? Thinking about where it can go is it can be a barrier as well. It’s that journey. It’s like I like doing this, so I’ll do it right now. That’s I mean. That brings you somewhere.

Declan Sinnott: 10:53

What you do today brings you to tomorrow yeah, but I stopped playing at one point and I thought I’m getting nowhere, you know. And then a man called dennis hogan, who is a year older than me probably, called to the door and he said we heard you played the guitar. And I said I don’t really. And he said, well, we have a folk group looking for a guitar player. And I said, well, I can’t really play. And he came into the living room and the Burl Ives songbook Burl Ives is a folk singer from the 50s and probably the 40s as well was. That was on the dining room table and he opened it and he said could you play that? And the song had two chords. And it was that song.

Declan Sinnott: 11:30

The fox went out on a chilly night. He prayed for the moon to give him light in many a mile to go that night before he reached the town over town. And so he opened that and I played it. He said you’re as good as we are. And I wasn, but he was convincing me to and I joined the group and that’s how I started to play again. I think I hadn’t played for about three months and I was only playing for something like six months and I gave up. But when I joined them. The other guitar player knew more than I did and I watched him and he encouraged me, and then it went on from there. But but that was great. I’ll never forget that incident, you know.

Aideen Ni Riada: 12:11

At what point did you find you could make the music a lifeline in terms of you know career, or did you have a job as well, the whole way along?

Declan Sinnott: 12:21

No, I very seldom worked at anything, anything. I worked in a place in Carlow for a few months because my mother said either I applied for a job, hoping I wouldn’t get it, and I got it, and I think I might have been the only person who applied for it, because, anyway, my mother said you have to leave the house or take the job, and I don’t think she would have implemented it. But I took the job and I hated it. But eventually I just gave it up and took my chances. When I was, I moved to Dublin with nowhere to live, nothing. I had a guitar and that’s all, and I was sleeping on floors and sleeping outdoors even at times, on floors and sleeping outdoors, even at times. But, um, I went, I was going into folk clubs and I’d put my name up and that let you sing two songs or whatever. And at one of those, um, emin carr, who was eventually the drummer in horselips, he said he had a poetry and music group and I had played a few of my own songs and he said would you like to join us? And I would have joined anything you know. And we started that and and we were actually on the late, late show in 1969 and the band was called Tara Telephone and Eamon and there was a Bernie Barrett from Wexford, another Wexford guitar player. I suggested him as a member of the band and so he came along as well, but there were six of us in the band and then after a while there was some disagreement between two of the people in the band or between one member of the band and some other members of the band. I won’t go into that. But Eamon Carr said I have another band going going and it’s an electric band and we’re trying to play some rock and roll and would you be interested? And so I left tar telephone and I joined what became horse lips, and that was in just near the beginning of 1970, I think, and uh, and I played with horses for a while while and we were trying to be a rock band but we weren’t good at it. Nobody I knew how to play rock and roll, but most of the band didn’t.

Declan Sinnott: 14:30

So we started playing Irish music with a rock and roll influence and we were offered three of the guys in the band were in advertising so they could open doors that wouldn’t be open to most musicians and we got a TV series playing one song a week for six weeks on an Irish language TV series and rather than try and sing in Irish, we decided we’d just play instrumental music and so we would rehearse all week for one song and I became by default the main arranger for one song and then I was the main. I became by default the main arranger for the band and I didn’t even know that was a thing, an ability, but it was just everybody. We’d be throwing ideas around and most of my ideas became the ideas we used, and then it became obvious that that’s what was happening and it still took me a long time after that to understand that that was an ability. But then we got a gig in the RDS at the bottom of a bill which had, I think, manfred Mann. They were a big band at the time. They had number ones in England, they were the main band, but we were nine bands down first band on and there were 6,000 people at it and we got a standing ovation from the whole audience and In one gig we played for what?

Declan Sinnott: 15:56

20 minutes, something like that. We were made. The next gig we played we’d been playing to 50 people before that. The next gig we played, there was 500 people at the gig and 500 people turned away. So that’s how, with no internet and no other means of communication, word went out, went out and I had gone from playing in folk clubs months beforehand to being in a band that everybody was talking about, and it was really disturbing. I remember going home after the RDS gig and making a cup of tea and thinking I don’t know who I am now, I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know. I don’t know who I am now. You know, I don’t know what’s going on, I don’t know what happens next or how to face it, or it was.

Declan Sinnott: 16:42

It’s like a paradigm shift complete shift, yeah, wow, and then I, then I, in a sense, that’s who I, that’s like a, that’s a mark that goes on to your credit score, that stays there forever. You did that, you know.

Aideen Ni Riada: 17:02

Amazing. And so when did you start working with, or like playing with, christy Moore? That was probably one of the earlier kind of big successes was when you started working with him, was it?

Declan Sinnott: 17:15

Yeah, well, in 1978, I was in a band with Jimmy McCarty and we had a band called Southpaw right Okay, and we were from Cork and we saw ourselves as being outsiders in relation to Dublin, so we ended up calling ourselves Well. The bass player was left-handed as well, I can’t remember exactly how the name got. Anyway, we were playing with this band. Sorry, I get that I go off on distractions, but we were playing with this band and we had a gig in the meeting place in dublin, which was a really good venue at the time small room. But christy moore started turning up regularly to our gigs and, uh, we all knew who he was. He was already famous with tankstein.

Declan Sinnott: 18:01

But uh, I had a flat in dublin and christy moore and donald only turned up one day. They rang and said can we come over and talk about something? And the three of us sat down and had a conversation and they said we want to start, we want to do something with irish music, but we want you to introduce the rock and roll element to it and see what happens. And so I said, absolutely, I mean, that was a great offer. So we started Moving Hearts and we picked people. Then I picked the drummer and the bass player and Donald picked a, a piper and then sax player suggested himself he’d heard there was something interesting going on and he suggested and he was the right man for the job. And so we started. And that that’s when I started work.

Declan Sinnott: 18:51

And then, I think, just before moving hearts, I did a few support spots for christy and got talking and I found that was a real education to me because his point of view on the world was something I wasn’t really familiar with. He educated me in lots of things. He had a great knowledge of what was going on in Northern Ireland, the kind of information that wasn’t coming through RTE or the Irish Times or the Irish Independent, the kind of information that wasn’t coming through RTE or the Irish Times or the Irish Independent. And it was kind of the first time I was looking around the back of the picture, in political terms particularly, but in all kinds of other ways. I would see a piece of information and accept it as reality and Christie would be saying but is that true and what are they actually saying and why are they saying it?

Aideen Ni Riada: 19:41

and that was a great education for me I think you know it’s interesting there’s so much misinformation in general these days, especially because we get, we have so much access to information that you know, but it’s at any. You know, any young person, especially an innocent young person, needs that advice at a certain point, because most of us take things at face value until we realize there’s more to this that meets the eye. I’ve definitely learned that lesson kind of more later in life than earlier, but, um, it’s a really important one yeah, and when you say there’s more information, I think there’s actually less information, unless you consider misinformation information.

Declan Sinnott: 20:28

I think that the, the general, uh media is less accurate let’s say, for want of a less nice term than they have ever been, and I think it’s a real problem. And finding out the truth, even about the simplest things. You know, there are so many different opinions and I mean I look for people that I trust and like I listen to a lot of their opinions and eventually I think I know this person’s heart is in the right place. I know that they’re thinking, I know they’re looking at the picture, I know they’re looking behind the picture and when they say something, I’m very likely to think that they’re speaking the truth, at least the truth as they know it.

Aideen Ni Riada: 21:12

Yeah, we have to keep our ears open and to the ground. Tell us a little bit about working in the band Moving Hearts, in terms of the band dynamic and working with Christy practically as a musician, and also in terms of you know the personalities of the band and things like that. I think everyone would be interested to hear a little bit about what was going on behind the scenes.

Declan Sinnott: 21:38

Well, it was a very political band. I mean it was almost everything we did had a political basis, or at least I’ll hold you, kyle upset the apple cart basis and we were a co-op. There was 10 people in the co-op. All of the crew and all of the band were in the co-op. We didn’t have a manager. We were considered difficult by the music business. People didn’t really want to touch us because we were, but for we. Nothing about us said you would be able to manage, you’ll be able to manipulate us. Everything about us says you won’t be able to manipulate us. We won’t be playing the game. You won’t be playing it in terms of the audience, in terms of the media, in terms of anything. And so it became successful because it was unignorable and we weren’t like anybody else. I mean you could see Horsets and Moving Hearts as having something strongly in common and that we’re both using Irish music and electric instruments and making more noise than Irish music normally made. It was a really interesting band to be in. As a live we made. Well, there were three albums. I wasn’t involved with the third one, neither was Christy, but the first two albums we were didn’t really represent us. People who saw us live know that it was an incredible live band. It was like a heart attack happening in front of you. It was incredibly energetic and alive and we were all playing for our lives. It felt like it was an incredible thing.

Declan Sinnott: 23:27

The first album we put out was delayed because of it just took us a while to make it so that we were well known as a live band and people knew about us, but we hadn’t put out anything. And so when we put out the like, we put out the album, and I have a memory of playing in galway and pat egan was the promoter. And when we played the sound check and we went back to the hotel and pat egan said your album is in the charts and we said, well, that’s great. What number is it? And he said it’s number one and it’s never been done before by an Irish band. No Irish band has ever gone straight to number one. But it was partly because the album was later than it should have been in coming out maybe a few months later, you know. So we had time to build up an expectation of what would happen.

Aideen Ni Riada: 24:17

Phenomenal. We had time to build up an expectation what would happen, phenomenal. Well, you know a lot of artists. You know they start playing covers, then they might attempt a couple of songs on. You know new songs and then you know, doing their first recording is a really big deal. What would you say to say you know up-and-coming artists, or even artists that are around a long time that haven’t done any recording, and like, how would you, what would you say to encourage them? What do you think the importance of that is?

Declan Sinnott: 24:43

learn how to record. That’s the first thing. I mean, the tools of recording are so cheap and at least one person in a band should learn how to record, I think because there’s no reason to pay studio fees anymore. I mean, I have a studio in my house and I record all the time, and the album I’ve done with Evelyn is just in a bedroom in my house and it I mean big productions. If you’ve got an orchestra, you can’t do that. A real orchestra you can’t do that, but you can do most things.

Declan Sinnott: 25:23

I think. Learn how to record. I also think stop looking at what everybody else is doing. Understand that what makes you different is really what’s going to matter, and what makes you different sometimes is the thing you’re trying to hide because you want to be cool or you want to be. I mean, I go into Spotify and try things that I don’t know anything about, and so often there’s a certain kind of singing, singer-songwriter singing that people do. I think Ed Sheeran is probably Ed Sheeran, who I quite like, is probably responsible for at least some of it and it’s just you can’t. Maybe they will be successful for a small while, but really being individual, being somebody that the minute you hear them, you know who it is. That’s hugely important.

Aideen Ni Riada: 26:12

Yeah, yeah, that’s really good advice.

Declan Sinnott: 26:14

Yeah, and sometimes the thing that you think is not good about what you’re doing is exactly what you should the thing that reveals you too much. Because you’re going to be vulnerable, you’re going to be sensitive about what reveals you, but very often that’s exactly the thing that is going to make you appealing. People like to see vulnerability. They don’t, you know, being impressive or being, or. There’s another kind of pretend vulnerability where you sing like somebody else and you pour your heart out in this, but I think people can see that that isn’t necessarily the real thing either, you know.

Aideen Ni Riada: 26:49

Yeah, you mentioned Evelyn there and I wanted to come around to Evelyn because Evelyn is touring with you and you have your you know an album out. And just to you know, evelyn actually said she was born on the tropical island of Curacao.

Declan Sinnott: 27:07

Yeah.

Aideen Ni Riada: 27:07

And then moved to the Netherlands and now lives in County Kerry. So what’s Evelyn’s background with music and how did you figure out that you had compatibility for performing together?

Declan Sinnott: 27:19

Evelyn has been involved in all kinds of things. She’s what do you call her. She has acted as a professional singer, you might say, for a long time. She was in Les Miserables and she’s been in an acid jazz band and she’s done all kinds of things and she would be. She is a great harmony singer. And so she earned her living in Holland doing many different things and she moved to Ireland. No, she didn’t move to Ireland.

Declan Sinnott: 27:51

They had a holiday home in Kerry and two days before lockdown they arrived there and suddenly they couldn’t leave, and just before that they had been offered they had been offered high-speed broadband and which they weren’t really interested in. But they said yes, because why not say yes? And that meant her husband, who, who works as a, an architect or an engineer or a civil engineer, could work from home and then they could survive in Ireland. They were going to have to. She couldn’t sing and they were going to have to find some so he could work from home, and so they were there for a while.

Declan Sinnott: 28:32

And then Hank Wiedel you might not know who he is, hank is a Cork singer singer, songwriter and guitar player, and he was recording with me because I couldn’t work either. But but during the times when we were allowed to meet up, we would meet up and we just started recording for no other reason than let’s do something. And we started recording and then we realized we’re making something really nice. So at one point he said there’s this, and we started recording and then we realized we were making something really nice. So at one point he said there’s this singer, evelyn, and I’ll see where she is, but she happened to be in Ireland. He thought she was in Holland, and she came into my studio and sang a couple of harmonies and a couple of hand sounds and my ears went up and I thought, oh yeah, I like that. That’s interesting, not only the sound of her voice, but also she was quick and accurate and she had all the trademarks that I like you know, like really professional, good at it.

Declan Sinnott: 29:28

And then after that, so I took her phone number and we both had the same thought. She liked what I was doing as well. So she got a commission from a thing called the I Am Academy, which is kind of a spiritual, online spiritual website, and she got a commission to write a song for them and the song was kind of preordained in a way it had to be, about what they believed in. And she asked me would I join her in writing it? And so we sat down and we wrote the song and we recorded it in my studio and then, uh, she said at the end of it.

Declan Sinnott: 30:08

I said to her that’s not going to be the last thing, is it that we do together? And and then we I went down to our house and we sat down at our kitchen table to write songs and see what we could do. And I picked up a guitar and I doodled one of the things I would play, you know, without thinking. And I said, so where do we start? And she said, with that, whatever I had played, and sorry, if you don’t mind, I’ll just play it.

Aideen Ni Riada: 30:44

We’d love to hear it.

Declan Sinnott: 30:50

That was it, and from that we wrote a song called Unraveling. That was the first apart from the commission song was the first thing we wrote. And called Unraveling that was the first apart from the commission song was the first thing we wrote. And we started from there and Evelyn hadn’t. I had written a fair bit at that point. I put out two solo albums where I wrote or co-wrote everything on them, or more or less everything, but she hadn’t written so much, but together we found a way to write. She is a very positive person, a very deliberately positive person. I think she, uh, she focuses on positivity and she teaches, uh, breathing exercises, like in terms of meditation and breathing. She, she’s in that whole area and she teaches that online, and so she’s, she’s focused on being positive. And I’d be less positive than her, I’d be, I’d be more of a cynic than she would be, but it’s a good trade-off, you know very good.

Aideen Ni Riada: 31:45

What can people expect from your gig in the New Ross Guitar Festival?

Declan Sinnott: 31:51

well, this summer there won’t be much show-off guitar playing or anything like that. It’ll be basically her singing and me playing, and I sing a few songs as well, but basically that’s the bones of it, and I think we do a great gig. We talk a lot. Well, I don’t know about the guitar, we probably will play our normal gig gig, but we talk a lot, we, we, uh, we’re both, uh, we, we, we’re as spontaneous as we can be. We don’t like the idea that we would, you know, think about what we’re saying beforehand. I think we’re both confident enough to just talk and, uh, we play all the songs from the album that we’ve made. We’ll play some cover versions, we play a couple of my songs, I sing a couple of my songs and yeah, that’s basically it. It’s song based more than guitar based, but you know.

Aideen Ni Riada: 32:48

Well, that’s still a beautiful thing. Will there be any songs that people might recognize from your repertoire from days gone by?

Declan Sinnott: 32:57

Yes, I sing no Frontiers Mary Black’s. You know Jimmy McCarthy’s song that I recorded with Mary Black. Yes, and there’s not much that people will know, but it tends not to be like. We’ve done a number of gigs now and we go down incredibly well, particularly considering we do virtually nothing Unless they’ve heard our album. We do virtually nothing that people would know, but it doesn’t matter.

Aideen Ni Riada: 33:26

What is the name of the album and where can they get it, if people would like to explore that.

Declan Sinnott: 33:31

Make for Joy is the name of the album and the title comes from it was. There’s a use of a word like if that doesn’t make for a good night I don’t know what does and make for. So the title of the album is make for joy and there’s a song called make for joy, but the line in the song is if that doesn’t make for joy. And. So they can get it if they go to Evelyn and Dec website and find out. I also make videos for all of the singles we put out. I’ve made six videos so far that are all on Evelyn and Dec and the. And is Dec and the and is. I think it’s the. And is the scroll, not the word.

Aideen Ni Riada: 34:22

The ampersand I think they call it. Yeah, perfect, I’ll be putting some of those details. Ampersand, isn’t it?

Aideen Ni Riada: 34:30

Oh, very good but I’ll put the link in the show notes as well. So if you’re listening to the podcast, I will be putting some of those links there and you can certainly find um evelyn and and x website pretty easily, I’m sure if you google it. Um, we’ve kind of come to the end of our our time together, declan, is there anything um that you particularly might like to say to people who’ve been listening to today’s um interview? Anything that final words, final words of wisdom um, not really.

Declan Sinnott: 35:03

I mean, come along to the gig. It’s a lovely gig. I mean the. The thing that I feel about it is a lot. A lot of people who became famous years ago are now doing what they did all the time, and I wouldn’t like to be like that. I mean what Evelyn and I? I love the fact that we’ve done something completely different with Evelyn. We’ve just started from scratch. I’m not depending on my reputation, she’s not depending on hers. We’re depending on the quality of what we’ve done and if and when you come to the gig, you will understand that because we are we, we don’t need, nobody needs to think oh, that’s Declan Sinnott, it must be good. I don’t. I don’t like that idea. Even I like the idea that you will judge me right now, here and now. I’m only as good as the nuts I’m playing right now thank you so much.

Aideen Ni Riada: 35:53

Uh, declan Sinnott, thank you for being on the Resonate podcast today. I know that it’ll be an amazing gig, and so if anybody is in Ireland in the New Ross area, please look up the New Ross Guitar Festival, and I know that you have other gigs that you have around the place as well. I’m sure those are on your website, so there’ll be lots of opportunities to hear you live and get the album. Thanks again, declan and goodbye to the listeners. We thank you for listening thank you very much.