33 1/3 revolutions per minute

Mark Geary left his native Dublin in 1995 for New York with $100 in his pocket and a green card. He never looked back. The legendary Sin E Café in the East Village became his home from home, where he played alongside the late Jeff Buckley among many, many others.

“There is this bloated myth about him being the tragic, twisted artist that needs to be blown out of the water,” Geary believes. “He was one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met. I feel like it’s one of my duties to blow that one whenever it comes up. He wasn’t a broken person at all. I fondly remember him.”
A place called 33 1/3 Street also became very important to Mark. “It is a place in Williamsburg in Brooklyn,” he explains. “Five of the songs were recorded there with Mark Roule who worked with the Happy Mondays and played in Tom Tom Club. He was the first guy I met as producer who got inside me and pulled stuff out that I hadn’t realised yet.” The results are to be found on Mark’s debut album, also called 33 1/3Street, which is aptly released on Valentine’s Day. “It’s an amazing coincidence,” Mark agrees. “If you look beneath the surface, it is an up record and a very romantic record. Someone asked me yesterday what is the emotional point of what I do. It’s kind of like a series of lullabies, but it’s a lullaby after a train wreckage so the whole place is in tatters. But it’s from the perspective of someone who has survived. It’s optimistic in spite of the madness.”
A post-wreckage catharsis is painfully familiar to New Yorkers. “ I did a Firefighters’ Benefit with Denis Leary because I know him from playing an altar boy in a film he did after No Cure For Cancer,” Mark recalls. “We did these benefits and suddenly the backdrop of all my songs changed. ‘Volunteer’ and ‘America’ were all very much about New York and all had a resonance. I was really nervous at first because I thought that it was a bit inappropriate. Nobody knew what to do after September 11th. When America went to war, New York was still grieving. The fire didn’t go out for seven weeks. Initially, I felt awful about getting up there. I was paranoid about furthering my career and selling my songs. But it was what we all needed to do. It was the most charged room I’ve ever played. It hasn’t left me.”
Mark is a true troubadour of the live circuit. “There is a lot to be said for doing it night after night after night,” he believes. You are much more at ease. I did Nashville, Kentucky, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Boston, Philadelphia, three nights in New York and then flew to the Sundance film festival and did four gigs there with Emmylou Harris and Daniel Lanois. After that, I got on two planes, got picked up by Glen (Hansard), drove to Galway and played that night and the next night and the next night. If you can play with jetlag screaming in your head and still do an amazing gig, you’re just operating on a whole other level. There is no other way to learn this stuff. People are discerning audiences, and particularly here more so than in America. Now people are being schooled with The Frames, Damien Rice, Gemma Hayes, Mundy, Damien Dempsey – you name them. They’re all blowing people away.”