Different Gear, Still Singing

Known for his New York connection, having played alongside Jeff Buckley at Sin É, and recently learning lessons in stillness and silence from his Czech fanbase, the ever-gigging Mark Geary rarely sits still. Unless he’s on a plane.

“Touring has a simplicity to it that I absolutely adore,” he begins, “then there’s the last couple of gigs and you’re usually at an airport again, out of your mind with tiredness. I always cry on planes. Well, it’s a kind of gentle sobbing! There’s the lack of oxygen...”
A great excuse. No matter where the Dublin troubadour wanders, however, you feel music always follows. We’ve just called time on an afternoon session of his new Songs About Love, Songs About Leaving material and wrapped things up with a video interview (vimeo.com/42553663) where he dealt with the ‘singer-songwriter’ tag (“I was never part of the gang but it’s like the sailor who has the clap!”) and the pared-back-and-peaceful-nature of his new album (“the manifesto – just get rid of everything”).
He’s happy to continue our chat so after a quick walk soundtracked by football talk – he’s a massive Manchester United fan – we’re sitting outside a café. At the spot where Sycamore St. and Essex St. East meet, an old codger is singing ‘The Aul Triangle’ to anyone who’ll listen. Loud enough for me to shove my recorder closer to Geary, the 41-year-old songsmith laughs to himself.
“Started the weekend early, I think!”
A nice bit of rambunctious ambience – if that isn’t an oxymoron – that Geary probably wouldn’t get in New York.
“Haha, well this is what happens! And the tragedy is, he knows all the words!”
Geary originally set sail for NYC as an 18-year-old and has lived there intermittently since. In that time, he’s watched the Ireland of street corner singing change dramatically.
“All the vanities... In a country where it rains 365 days a year, getting the ol’ [Australian] BBQ. And then I would go to Slovakia, Poland, the Czech Republic, and the welcome I was getting! I’d come back here and it was ‘these fuckers’ [immigrants]. Having gone on a one-way ticket and a Green Card to New York, having been the Irish immigrant, I just thought, there’s something really ugly about this. Really mean-spirited. But I wanna see my racists and bigots and sexists. All of them, front and centre. I want them wearing t-shirts, and being absolutely despicable. I don’t want them hiding behind some kind of political correctness.”
He eases back into default laidback mode. He still cares about his native youth.
“When I meet youngsters, and they’re all, ‘How does this work?’, I know that I didn’t have that person. I always said that I wanted a ‘Yoda’ to talk to – ‘Tell me, great one!’. And I genuinely didn’t have one. The only guy I had was Glen Hansard, and he was trying to figure it out himself.”
So who plays the role of Yoda in his daydreams? Dylan immediately springs to his mind, and George Harrison follows. The Scorcese documentaries on both particularly hit home.
“Dylan pulled back the veil. He was saying, ‘I only did all this stuff to stay one step ahead’. It made incredible sense to me... Harrison seemed to straddle the absolute pinnacle of ‘rock star’ with all the agony of, ‘How do I justify this?’. All that spiritual searching.”
When he talks of his heroes his tones become even more hushed. He recognises their internal journey and, after a good decade in an industry where he reckons 80% of his contemporaries have given up, he’s becoming a veteran himself. Now he’s looking outside the album-tour-album hamster wheel. He’d like to continue his soundtrack work and quite fancies writing about his touring life, “in a way that isn’t, ‘great gig tonight!’ and more about all the experiences I’ve had. The wonderful, the crazy and the wacky. I’d be really interested, if someone could get me in a room and get me to stay quiet. If you’re creative in one way, what happens if you lose your arms or some kind of sense or faculty? I’m interested in where that creativity goes. If you can’t play guitar, where does it go?”
It doesn’t just disappear.
“Absolutely not. You’re just thinking in that way and coloured by your medium. I’m sure I’ll be writing or...” He pauses to great effect, runs his fingers through his quiffed silver hair and thinks back to boyhood daydreams. “Be a creative midfielder!”

Songs About Love, Songs About Leaving is out now.