Lemoncello Lore #5
Sun's coming up like a big bald head
Hey hey Substack it’s been a good while.
How are we doing? Are we making it through the winter ok? We surviving so far? The evenings are getting very dark here in Ireland and it comes as a shock somehow every year as the days close in.
I’ve decided this year to try be a bit more proactive in fighting away The Winter Blues. I’ve been trying to get out for a sunrise walk, inspired by my friend C who did it every day for a whole year. After trying it, I nearly don’t believe that she did that. Every morning she walked in honour of a different person - 1 week for John - 10 days for Mary - 3 weeks for the neighbour down the road. She’d send them a little video to let them know and some nice words alongside or a memory they shared. I loved her account of it. ‘Oh yeah I did it for my brother in law for about 5 days.. he never replied or acknowledged it at all but sure that’s that. It was good to get out anyway’.
Thankfully sunrise right now is 8:15am which doesn’t sound so bad - especially for people with real jobs :) but to consistently keep it up every day has actually been much harder than you’d think. Like everything for me - sporadic bursts of obsession where I’m getting up like clockwork and then I fall off for what I think has been 2 days but has actually been a week and a half. It’s hard to get past the cosy love barrier of duvet, never mind out the door. The ritual of it when I manage it is having a good effect on my mental health. It’s been a nice way to connect to family and friends that I don’t see often, sending them a little hello and a picture of the light dawning inside the grey overcast sky or sometimes the odd crisp golden horizon.
We’ve been busy working away separately and together on things Lemoncello and other music things. Many projects in the works which I will get into.
First must plug gig.
We come out of hibernation this weekend for the glorious festival that is Other Voices in Dingle. By god it’s a long journey but it’s so worth it. This time we play in Páidi O Shea’s at the Powers Golden Hours event on Sunday evening alongside legendary Noel Hill, Liam O Connor, Joshua Burnside & Súil Amháin; hosted by Doireann Ní Ghlacáin. We’re on at 6pm. It’s ticketed separately to the music trail and is already full but if you’re around you can join the waitlist here. Excited to make more Dingle memories and add to our collection of dodgy receipts.
We also have two shows coming up in January that we are excited for. On the 22nd of January we play our first headline show at The Black Box in Belfast and on the the 23rd of January we play at the lovely YARN in Ballycastle. Tickets still available at the links there for both shows. We’ll be testing out as much new material as possible as well as playing your old favourites.
Which brings me on to - yes- the new projects. Oh heeeeeeeelll we are excited for the music to come. Next year there will more than likely, hopefully definitely be a new Lemoncello album. (!!) We are listening to mixes the past little while and they are shaping up very well. We’re getting into the nitty gritty and sometimes it feels as though we’re going insane listening for and changing intricate details that the average listener will never notice. Someone once told me mixing was like organising what people will smell off the music rather than what they will hear. As I type that sentence I don’t know if it makes any sense. Another way of putting it might be that mixing feels like decorating the room that the songs are going to live in, the context that you’ll hear them in. Will the walls be yellow or green or red? Will the room have windows? A ceiling? How big should the curtains be? What will the lighting be like? How many lamps? Fluffy rug or carpet or wood or glass? You’re not supposed to notice these things because you’ll be too enraptured in what’s happening in the music to notice how the mix was shaped for your ears. Here is a brief snippet of a song in the recording works before mixing ever began. Gives me butterflies thinking about where this album is going, we’re so excited about it.
Separately we’ve been busy also. Claire is spreading her wings touring around Ireland, the UK and Europe with the lovely and brilliant Monaghan superstar Jamie Duffy. They even - excuse you - played for the legend Catherine Connolly’s (Yay) inauguration in Dublin Castle. Here’s a pic of Claire getting cosy with the president.
I have been in a cocoon, working away on a batch of solo material that I’ve talked about releasing for a long time. Over the last few months I’ve had the chance to put the finishing touches to a batch of songs and get creative riding bikes and chasing seagulls around town for the sake of videos and artwork. Little BTS here for a video I’m working on.
I’m finally delighted with the sound of what I’ve got and have decided to drop (love that word, as if it’s so effortless) an EP before the end of the year. This goes against all music industry advice - no build up, doomed to be swallowed by Christmas songs and faff etc. but I just want to get it out there. With Lemoncello things soon to be very busy there is no time like the present. Follow me on Bandcamp here - (that’s where I’m going to release it) and on instagram here for news.
Last but not least a funny little tale.
Claire and I recently played a show in Kinsale, Co. Cork. By recently I mean September. The day after the show we decided we would go to the sauna by a pub called The Bullman. Not being from Kinsale, we didn’t clock that the time of day really matters when you’re doing a sauna by a pier with a massive wall before the sea. We were delighted that we were the only ones booked in at 1pm but were not so delighted when we looked over the wall and found to our dismay that the sea was a very very long way down. At high tide I imagine you could jump in but at this point in the day, possibly the lowest tide, you had to scale down a ladder attached to the wall about 10 meters (!!!) before you reached the sand, and then you walked in a few meters to get a little bit wet in the sea. Clinging to the ladder was terrifying enough but as we scaled our half naked bodies down the wall for the 2nd or 3rd time we noticed a crowd was beginning to form outside The Bullman. This crowd looked as if they couldn’t have been from anywhere but East London. They were very shiny. We, on the other hand, after being roasted in the sauna, resembled lobster humans; red, patchy and terrified, scaling down the ladder. We started to get lightheaded after a while and didn’t want to risk our lives going down the ladder anymore. The only other option was to waddle through the crowd of people drinking pints of Guinness in leather jackets, new haircuts and expensive sunglasses to a little ramp at the other side of The Bullman which went down to the water. We put on a show for them as they gathered around gawking from their pier, warm and dry exclaiming ‘Go on Girls!’ and ‘You’re amazing!’ and ‘Is it reaaallly cold?!’ at us smiling through gritted teeth and freezing our little arses off below; trying desperately to cover our lobster pink skin in the low tide that only came up to our shins.
Later that day, we asked the person we were staying with what was going on at The Bullman for there to be so many people there. She said ‘Oh that’s the Kinsale Shark Awards. It’s some advertising awards thing. They are judging the awards this weekend.’ We did not engage much further but it did explain why all the people looked so shiny and Londonesque.
Two weeks later, we got a lovely email from the team at Big O to say that our arrangement of Breathless in the St Patrick’s day tourism Ireland ad won silver in The Kinsale Shark Awards. We didn’t even realise we were up for an award. Clearly.
Did our appearance as lobster women somehow make its way by osmosis into the judges’ heads? Did they recognise us, feel sorry for us and think ‘those women need a break’? Who knows. Either way, it was Sharkey’s day and the moral of the story is- don’t book a sauna at low tide at The Bullman, but also - maybe being humiliated once in a while can be rewarding in ways you don’t expect.
Chat soon!
Laura XX