
Our aim was to capture the essence of each story in the lyrics of a song and the sentiment of the story in the music that we wrote for it. It took us just over a year to complete the writing process. In January 2021, we decided to write some more songs and within a couple of months our ambition had expanded to write an album of 15 songs, one for each short story in Dubliners. We clicked immediately and within 48 hours we had completed our first co-write of what would become a much bigger project. We were put into random pairs and Gráinne and I ended up being paired together. In the third week, the assignment given was to write a song based on the short story Araby by James Joyce. The workshop ran for two hours every Tuesday evening over a six-week period, with a song-writing assignment to be completed each week. In November of that year, a friend asked me if I would sign up to an online song-writing workshop with her. The following months were challenging, as we all tried to reinvent ourselves to some extent. We were both gaining momentum with our respective original music projects when the curtains closed on live music in March 2020. In my case, I left an actuarial career of twenty five years to begin a graduate degree in music in 2014. We had followed quite different paths up to that point, but we shared a common thread in that we both left non-music jobs to pursue music full time. Gráinne and I met by accident in late 2020. Not for one moment did I think that more than years later I would resume my affair with Dubliners and that, in collaboration with Irish folk artist Gráinne Hunt, I would be on the cusp of releasing an album of original songs based on Dubliners, to be performed during the 2023 Bloomsday Festival. That was as far as my relationship with Joyce went a literary one-night stand. I recall enjoying his collection of short stories and was struck by how readable they were. Some time in the late 1990s, I read Dubliners by James Joyce.
