About

Sean McGrath playing guitar with saxophone and harmonica

I am a hobbyist singer/songwriter based in Galway, Ireland.

All my songs are released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY) licence. Basically, this means they are free to use in any way you like. Download them, share them with friends (or enemies), create your own versions of them if you are a singer/musician, etc. All I ask, and all the licence requires, is that you acknowledge the source.

My songs cover all sorts of topics and are in a variety of styles. Some are thematically abstract and some are very literal. Some are very auto-biographical and some are not auto-biographical at all. I don't feel qualified to say for sure what category any of my songs fit into.

I like to inhabit characters and write from their "first person" perspective. Some of my songs are written from a female perspective. They just come out that way. I try not to judge the songs or let myself get caught up in the "why" of it all.

I like to think that my love of language comes through in my lyrics. I love the metaphors that seem to come from nowhere when I am "in the zone" writing a song. When that happens, I truly feel as if I am just writing the song down — without any real understanding of where it has just come from. I know that sounds sort of mystical but that's just how it is.

I can only productively work on writing new songs for about an hour each day. I do it right after I get out of bed and before the caffeine from my strong cups of morning tea has kicked in. Once the caffeine gets to work, I revert to my day job mode (I am a software engineer by trade) and I become all about logic and true/false and right angles and measurements and judgements. Once that happens, my songwriting is over for another day.

I took to music late — at age forty. I started writing songs in my early fifties. My main instruments are guitar, harmonica and saxophone but I also dabble in mandolin, banjo, piano, clarinet, trumpet and bouzouki.

Most of my original songs start out on guitar or piano. I almost always approach songwriting from a "music first" perspective. I will find some sound that I like — it could be a little melody, a chord progression, a rhythm. I will play around with it until the emotion it invokes suggests a word or a phrase to me. Then I "pull on that thread", so to speak, to write the song. Essentially, I tell myself that the full song is already "out there" in the noosphere and I just keep pulling on the thread until I find the rest of it.

My process is based on writing lots and lots (and lots) of songs. I do this in bursts of songwriting. For months on end, I might write a song every day. Then I might stop for months on end. I will typically only pick one out of every ten songs to put full polishing effort into.

I delay making these judgemental decisions about songs until months after I write them. I like to let songs "sit" for a while. If, months after I wrote it, a song still speaks to me, then I will make it a "keeper". For songs that don't make the cut, I will sometimes separate out the lyrics if I feel they have something to say. Then I give them to songwriter friends of mine who like to work with lyrics and add their own music.

Recently I have started writing more poems — consciously approaching them as poems, not songs. I learned this from a documentary I saw about the great songwriter Guy Clark. He said that a song needs to work as a poem first. I like that. Sometimes my poems turn in to songs. Either songs I write myself from the poems, or as material for other musicians (even some virtual musician software apps these days). Some of the poems just want to be poems so I leave them that way. I will start publishing these on this website once I have a decent batch.

I founded Galway Jam Circle in 1994 and I am the co-founder of letsjam.org.

Contact

To contact me via e-mail: put a dot between "sean" and "mcgrath" and add on "@gmail.com".

You can find me and my music online here:

Songs and song batches

I currently have ninety original songs on this website, organised into nine batches of ten.

Each song page links to the Youtube version and has the chord/lyrics chart. You will also find a ChordPro file for download, and an MP3 of the original recording. A complete songbook PDF of all 90 songs is also available.