Pine and Dandy - Hot Press meets Dave Geraghty

“My name anchors the music to reality too much. It’s a bit ‘singer-songwriter’. I don’t have a particularly rock n’ roll’ name,” laughs Dave Geraghty.
The Bell X1 man first struck out on his own artistically with two solo albums, 2007’s Kill Your Darlings and 2009’s Victory Dance. Now he has released his latest collection, Inherit, under the moniker Join Me In The Pines. So is Dave Geraghty “dead” we wonder?

“He’s kind of the man in the background!” he smiles. “Back in April when I started sticking my flag in the ground going, ‘Here I am. I’m Join Me In The Pines,’ I thought, ‘I actually really like that because it’s not Dave Geraghty, it’s something else’.”
Compared to the solo outings the album is a more polished proposition, drawing on a broader sonic palette. Present throughtout the creative process was Geragthy’s partner and contributing vocalist, Claire Finglass.
“Claire was a fantastic sounding board,” he says. “She would always say, ‘less is more’, which was great advice. When you pile on instrumentation and lots of bells and whistles, the song or the sentiment is lost. She would always say, ‘Take it away. Don’t be afraid of space’.”
Ms Finglass wasn’t the only female in Dave’s life involved in the project, his mother also provides backing vocals.
“Claire has this beautiful, warm, bluesy tone to her voice and I really wanted a voice to compliment that, it just happened to be my mother!” he laughs. “It may be kind of uncool to have your mammy sing on the record but fuck that! Let’s big up the mammies here! Let’s get the mammies in!”
In addition to his JMITP pursuits Dave has also been working on the soundtrack to Aidan Gillen-starring feature You’re Too Ugly.
‘I had been on the radar of John Keville, the producer for a few years,” he says. “I’ve been working on it since May. I’m hoping to draw a line under it in the next couple weeks. It’s more or less finished, bar a few little tweaks. I really enjoyed it and I’d love to do more soundtrack work.”
So where does all this activity leave Bell X1?
“Well we’re in writing mode at the moment: we just did a tour of the States,” he says. “We’ve been over there a good few times so there are familiar faces at the shows now. People turn up with little care packages! Somebody actually sent down a big polystyrene box with six tubs of ice cream. On a previous trip a fan came up with two carrier bags full of snacks; chocolate chip cookies, chocolate covered nuts: it was insane!”
So far, the songs are coming together relatively straightforwardly, he feels.
“We want to keep the momentum going, Actually there’s a song called ‘Restart The Race’: that was too poppy for Inherit. So it will probably surface as a Bell X1 song. We already had a couple of run-throughs of jamming it. I think this Bell X1 album is going to be a bit more visceral.”
You heard it here first!

Inherit is out now.