Glór gig for I Draw Slow

DUBLIN group, I Draw Slow will perform in Glór on Saturday. Their second album, Redhills, was recorded in Windmill Lane Studio and since its release last month, it has reached the Irish iTunes download chart and was number one in the singer/songwriter category. It followed on from Downside, their first release, which was well received and continues to sell around Europe.

Siblings Dave and Louise Holden form the backbone of the five-piece group and Louise told The Clare Champion they will offer the Ennis audience something a bit different.
“All the songs we write ourselves and they’re in the style of old-time Appalachian music, which is basically American traditional music.
“We are all Irish and some of us would have been involved in playing Irish trad before, so there is an influence from Irish traditional music as well. It’s kind of a cross between Irish traditional and American traditional.”
She says the genre enjoys a decent following around the country and that their songs tell stories.
“It’s very popular in Ireland and there’s a lot of bluegrass and old-time roots festivals around the country. We went to one in Dunmore East, there’s one in Omagh every year, there’s one in Sixmilebridge that we go to fairly frequently. We just got really into it; we started listening to people in it and got really interested. Myself and my brother had been writing music for a long time in different genres and when we started writing music in this genre, we found it quite easy, particularly from a lyrical viewpoint because a lot of the songs are stories.
“We tend to write narratives. We have a murder ballad about a lighthouse keeper’s daughter, who has an affair with a miller and gets killed at the end. It’s very much in the American tradition to have murder ballads. We have a song about a bordello. They all feature characters and they tend to be period pieces.”
She said she and Dave have been writing songs in their favoured style for a number of years, after he learned about it while travelling.
“We’ve had loads of different bands but we only started writing in this style in the last six or seven years. My brother was travelling the world and he met a retired policeman in Australia who was playing bluegrass guitar and he taught Dave how to play it. When Dave came back, he started showing all this old-time music to me and we really, really liked it.”
Louise said both of their albums have performed well and there has been some international interest.
“The second one is starting in iTunes pretty consistently. We don’t know what the CD sales are like yet because that’s a process that moves more slowly but they keep selling out in Tower and HMV in Dublin, which is good. We’re also getting a lot of reaction from overseas. We’re getting a lot of emails from Germany, the US, the UK, Belgium and we charted in iTunes in Denmark, which was surprising. It’s great the reach that music can have now through Youtube and Myspace and things like that.”
The Glór show is the last in a series of gigs that have been held across the country and Louise says the reaction has been favourable.
“The live shows have been well received. The style of music is quite infectious. Often people who come along but wouldn’t normally listen to American roots have an idea that it’s like country music but they find out that it’s quite different. It’s like Irish traditional music, it really sucks you in; it is quite atmospheric.
“The lyrics are stories and hopefully, they find them engaging and want to know what’s going to happen at the end. They tend to start out as listening gigs but because we have a few high-octane songs towards the end, sometimes people get up and start dancing,” Louise concluded.