- Music
- 26 Sep 01
BRIAN KENNEDY’s new album Get On With Your Short Life, due for release in early October features a song written in collaboration with PAUL BRADY
‘Call Me Old Fashioned’ was written last year while the Belfast singer was appearing in Riverdance on Broadway, New York, played 290 sold-out performances over a nine-month period.
“I’d been an admirer of Paul’s for a long time,” Kennedy recalls. “I think I first met him when he came to The Point while I was singing with Van Morrison. I ended up down in Cork one New Year’s Eve in a social setting where he was just playing his guitar and bouzouki doing songs like ‘Homes Of Donegal’ and ‘Arthur McBride’. Over the years I became more acquainted with him and we had agreed to do something together at some point. But you know how schedules are, it’s never easy to get the time to do these things.”
Ironically it was in New York, while Kennedy was living in Greenwich Village during his Riverdance residency, that they finally got together, as Kennedy explains. “He came to see the show and afterwards he came back to my apartment and we started working on some songs. He asked me had I got any ‘starts’ of songs so I played him the start of what would become ‘Call Me Old Fashioned’. Collaboration is an intense thing and it either goes spectacularly wrong or spectacularly right. But we stayed with it until the song was finished. I think it’s a beautiful song, we ended up using the original vocal from the demo and he put some harmonies on it at his own studio in Dublin.”
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Kennedy will be one of the special guests at the Vicar St. gigs.
“I’m absolutely honoured to be asked to be part of it,” he says. “I’m not sure what I’ll be doing yet – but I’ll probably sing one of his songs and we might do the song we wrote together. I know it’ll be wonderful.”