TMO Music
Dizzy Gillespie once famously said that he didn’t care much about music, what he cared about were “sounds”. Here at TMO Music we’re not focussed on genres, styles or fashion – we are interested in songs and sounds across the board. You’ll find artist / bands / songwriters in interview, playlists, essays and articles on all sorts of music here.
Ed Kowalczyk talks to TMO
Ed Kowalczyk, as former front man of the American rock band Live, has been responsible for some of the biggest and best known rock anthems of the ’90s. Songs like I Alone, Selling the Drama, Lightning Crashes, and Lakini’s Juice brilliantly mixed hard rock, melody and a lyricism that struck a chord with a generation. [...]
Heartless Bastards – the interview
Heartless Bastards, the band centred around the songwriting and vocal talents of Erika Wennerstrom, have been recording and touring for more than ten years now (they were signed to Fat Possum records back in 2004 after a demo was passed on by Patrick Carney of the Black Keys), but have only come to TMO’s attention [...]
Dave Grohl’s Sound City Nostalgia
Sound City, Dave Grohl’s documentary on a Hollywood recording studio doesn’t promise much, on the surface, and yet it turns out to be a heartfelt and eloquent history of something that, with the digital revolution, we seem to have lost – sound. The film doesn’t promise much?Have I gone mad?? It’s got Dave Grohl (of [...]
Uncovering and unpeeling – Sarah Slean in interview
One of the nicest things about Sarah Slean is that she is both talented and prolific- something which makes the creative world smile. Slean has made eight albums, starred in two short films and a movie musical, published two volumes of poetry, held exhibitions of her paintings, written two string quartets, and shared the stage [...]
There is Something Hot about Darth Vader though, isn’t there….. Marianne Lee Interview
Meeting Marianne Lee is as confusing as ordering Wasabi in your dessert- sweet and interesting with an alarming kick that leaves you wondering what to make of it all for hours afterwards. You know that it’s definitely going to be a little different (one of the songs on her debut album is a homage to [...]
Counting Crows – Underwater Sunshine (or what we did on our summer vacation)
Counting Crows follow up on 2008′s Saturday Nights Sunday Mornings with an album of cover versions Underwater Sunshine (or what we did on our summer vacation) from the likes of Big Star, Gram Parsons, Teenage Fanclub and Fairport Convention. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and poorly conceived covers albums (hello Sinead [...]
Band of Skulls TMO Interview
There’s a telling moment, during Band of Skulls soundcheck – on a bitterly cold January night, in a small venue in Bologna, Italy. The three piece from Southhampton, England have been going through song parts individually and together for the best part of an hour, but something doesn’t seem quite right, at least to them [...]
Sinead O’Connor – How About I Be Me (And You Be You)
There’s a quote, from an article that Germaine Greer wrote back in the 70s,which springs back in to my mind continuously when listening to certain albums: “When Joshua fit the Battle of Jericho the walls came tumbling down. That’s revelation. The holy Ghost talking. So it can be done. The way to crack a mirror or shiver [...]
Mark Lanegan’s Funeral for the BLUES: Thank God for the Pick n’Mix
Mark Lanegan is a little like one of those hybrid electric cars – a great idea on paper but one that never seems to have had the legs (or wheels) to take off into the stratosphere of greatness. His profile should be much greater than it is really, given the enormity of musical success he [...]
Existential wanderings – Ane Brun talks to TMO
‘I think I’m mostly inspired by emotional and existential topics, either my own or people around me’, muses Ane Brun, the Norwegian songstress as she reflects on everything from poetry in politics to racism and fantasy collaborations. Having recorded nine albums since her debut album Spending Time with Morgan in 2002, it’s fair to say that [...]
Ring them Bells – Bob Dylan’s Road to Damascus
“For in vain from the grasp of Religion I flee The most tenderly loved of my soul Are slaves to its hated control It pursues me, it blasts me! Oh where shall I fly What remains but to curse it, to curse it to die?” (1) Every bit the sneering, instinctive, anti-puritanical, vote-splitting impulsive Prometheus, [...]
Excreting Songs – Glen Hansard of the Frames
Firing questions at anyone for a half an hour about their motivations and identity is bound to produce contradictions, but an interview with Glen Hansard, chief songwriter from Irish band the Frames, throws up more than its fair share. It’s not that he’s confused, or indeed confusing. Rather, the context that he and The Frames [...]
Classic Albums – Rum Sodomy & the Lash, The Pogues
Anyone who has caught “Reeling in the Years,” RTE’s knock-off of the BBC’s “The Rock’n’Roll Years”, in which contemporary music is spliced in with archive news footage would quickly be reminded that Ireland in the 1980s was a basket case. Moving statues, hunger strikes, mass emigration, and Miami Vice-style jackets all featured prominently in the [...]
Beautiful Noise – Helen Seymour Interview
‘Dublin,Ireland. 1985. A war is raging between The Government, RTE [the Irish state broadcaster] and the 28 illegal Pirate radio stations, who have taken control of the Nation’s airwaves and the advertising revenue that goes with it’- so reads the description on the cover of Helen Seymour’s debut novel, Beautiful Noise- a story about an [...]
Lucio Dalla
Sad news today as word came through from Montreux, Switzerland that one of the giants of Italian music, Lucio Dalla, had died of a heart attack just days before his 69th birthday. The news all the more shocking for most Italians as he had been seen performing at the annual San Remo music festival just [...]
The Brad Mehldau Trio live in Dublin’s Vicar Street
Word filters through the most discerning Dublin circles when news that someone of Brad Mehldau’s stature is riding into town. Accompanied by bassist Larry Grenadier, and drummer Jeff Ballard, it seems that every pork-pie hat and pair of knee-length suede boots have been spruced up to greet Mehldau’s latest visit to Irish shores. Not that [...]
Bobby Lynch – The Forgotten Dubliner
A dual sequence of events had already etched the autumn of 1982 into the Irish psyche. Along a sultry Mediterranean roadside, the demise of Monaco’s Princess Grace was viewed from stunned television screens, mourned by the heartbroken Diaspora. At 52, she was crystallised into the same national trophy cabinet as Jack Kennedy, an iconic pair [...]
This is a Fix – The Automatic in interview
Welsh band The Automatic were the sensation of 2006 – in the UK at least. The band, after several succesful tours including the prestigious NME New Music Tour, released their debut album ‘Not Accepted Anywhere’, only to find, thanks to two very succesful singles Raoul and Monster, that quite the opposite was true. Monster in [...]
Bring the Dance – Simon Fagan Interview
Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher bemoaned the state of the music scene lately because modern bands just didn’t have that genuine feel to them anymore.“If they weren’t in bands they’d all have great careers anyway,” he reckoned and when you watch Coldplay front ads for Greenpeace and Fair Trade you get the impression that early 90s [...]
Challengers – The New Pornographers interview
There’s nothing I like more than getting hooked on a melody, then stepping back an instant and realising that there’s an intelligent lyric shouldering the song up. Sure, there are plenty of good songwriters where the poetry is the element first and foremost that you notice – an arresting line, an alliterative glance that catches [...]
Singing for his Tribe – Luka Bloom
Luka Bloom is Irish and while his name looks Irish it always feels like it couldn’t belong to an Irish man, it sounds too cool almost. Maybe that’s why Barry Moore chose it? He is of course a brother of Christy Moore, perhaps the definitive Irish artist of the last 20 years in the sense [...]
Deals in luck and despair, Delorentos in profile
Where the name comes from is something they’re going to keep to themselves. Just to retain a little mystique, just to keep something exclusively for themselves, it ain’t the greatest secret in the world but in a world full of people who know everything about everything, it’s hard to keep anything in the dark. [...]
Comprehensive Guide to Polish Popular Music
“Rockman” is a word in the Polish language.
