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Síomha’s song writing recipe: honesty, love and belief

Róisín Ingle talks to Co. Clare musician Síomha Brock on the latest Music Month episode of Róisín Meets

Fri Aug 25 2017 - 06:00

Síomha Brock believes in being honest in everything she does. In 2015 she flew home from Canada to vote in the marriage referendum, because it was important to her as a gay person to do that.

“There was a lot of people in the Irish community in Vancouver who couldn’t get home and I felt like I needed to get back and make their voices heard,” she told Róisín Ingle, on the latest Róisín Meets podcast.

In her work, that honesty means that “as a rule of thumb, unless I really truly believe in it, from the notes I write for the melody, to the chords or the lyrics, I can’t stand by it.”

That is why she made her band lug all of their equipment, including a hefty generator, onto the Burren at Fanore in Co. Clare at sunrise to record her song July Red Sky exactly where the inspiration for it had come from.

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It is also why she took over two years to write a love song because it was only “when I officially fell in love that I could finish it”.

Síomha’s father Paul Brock is a well-known traditional Irish musician who plays the accordion, so music is in her blood. She started out singing Sean Nós as a child but in her teenage years she picked up a guitar, discovered jazz and has not looked back.

After studying music in Cork and then in France, Síomha packed her bags for the US in 2014, touring the music homelands of Memphis, New Orleans, Atlanta, Austin and Nashville.

In this podcast, she plays three songs live in studio: Why Did We Fall In Love?, Fly and July Red Sky.