Given it's the season, an' all. I made a couple adjustments here and there, which is probably blasphemous, but if you can't blaspheme at Halloween then when can you?

Halloween (Dead Kennedys Cover)

A semi-improvised take on a track off of Rihanna's third album that I recorded around Easter time and then footered about with for a bit and now here it is.

Take A Bow (Rihanna Cover)

Written by Sinéad O'Connor. 

Jennifer and I have been recording versions of this song every couple years or so since about 2015. This version was recorded in August, and so it's both the most recent version and also the first version to have been recorded in this baffling sort of a world we're in now, where Sinéad O'Connor just isn't here, and that's it.

This Is A Rebel Song ft Jennifer Gasperich (Sinéad O'Connor Cover)

There's a video you can see, if you'd like: https://youtu.be/yq6WvelRjPE?si=acpzVVRgGapyE55B

This is the first thing I've put out to do with the EP I'm working on and hoping to have finished shortly, even though this song isn't on there. But it could be, for it's a set of traditional songs that I've pulled together because there are certain thematic things going on across them that I got all excited about when the notion of doing something like that hit me earlier in the year. Eerie sort of supernatural rumble to most of them, and all of them fairly queer in their stew. And at least two of them I first learned from recordings made by Shirley Collins, as with this song here. So this could easily have been part of it all, but it isn't. Nonetheless I've recorded a bunch of different versions of it since the project got going because I love playing the song, and this was one of the first proper takes, recorded back in October. I've since added a few more guitar lines and some of those embellishments I've arrived at because of what I heard going on around me when I've performed this song in recent times with the wonderful folks of the Sailortown Folk Club in Belfast. Some of that stuck and is in there mangled up a bit but not too much mangled up sometimes. Wee nod and a thank you to them ones, anyway, who've made me feel very welcome any time I've passed though, and to whom I'm indebted for some of the pickin' in the pickin' patterns. 

In any case, I hope you like it, and hopefully if you do well then maybe you'll like the EP too, when that appears.

Hares On The Mountain (From The Singing Of Shirley Collins)

Written, performed and recorded by Aaron McMullan

This is the December 2021 mix of a song that appears on my album Swing Hosanna, Sing The Salt, released earlier this year. It's a few "final mix" mixes behind the album version, but It's more or less the same, save for the fairly full on sort of Middle 8 thing that happens towards the end. I ended up removing that portion even though it was probably my favourite bit of the song for it sort of got in the way of what the rest of it was doing. To my mind anyway. But here it is back again, that bit. 

If you already know the song well hopefully you'll enjoy this very slightly different version of it, and if you don't know it, well hopefully you'll feel it was worth getting to know. The album version is still the proper version, but I kind of like it this way too.

The album itself is in all the usual places and at aaronmcmullan.bandcamp.com

In The Limbs Of Things (Extended Version)

Tiny song, just, for a change. Originally a far longer thing but I ended up scrapping most of it after deciding actually I like this one bit as it is on its own, so this is how it's staying I think, just a wee breath of a thing, something different to most of the other things I'm writing at the minute, none of which seem very keen at all on getting much done in much less than ten or twelve minutes if you want my opinion. If they can loiter about for fifteen, well so much the better. Anyway, here this is. 

Written, performed and recorded by Aaron McMullan.

Drowned To Distraction

A sparser and coarser maybe pre-album-mix pre-mix of "Go Fuck Yourself" from off my first album, Yonder! Calliope?, released away back a whole million years ago, before ever the first sun was released from the sea. A proper collaboration really with the brilliant producer / arranger / bandleader / performer Andrew Gardiner, and beyond that with the incredible team of musicians who helped blast those arrangements all up through my songs. If ever Paul Rudd makes a whole hash of it it in a foggy old Spielberg barn in a trailer somewhere so that we have to release it all over again just like it was in the olden times, well probably we should make more of it, in the Paul Rudd Rescue Edition Re-Release material, the extent of that collaboration and how it worked. 

Anyway there are a few outtakes or alt mixes to do with that album that I've been thinking about maybe putting up here or somewhere for although I used to be fairly conflicted about it, poor old Yonder! Calliope?, well I feel differently about it nowadays, especially since the last album, and the finding myself finally in the writing / recording of that and... Och, was a whole thing. 

It circles back round to that first album at a fair few points, that 2023 album, as do some of the tracks I left off that one, in the end, but will make available in some way soon enough, if you're into leftover songs looking at you all "shortly." 

I dunno that all of the humour across those Yonder! songs has aged especially well, is a thing worth pointing out, and probably that's why the songs mostly operating in that register - admittedly thin on the ground, like - haven't really made the twenty near year journey to come with me into nowadays, the way that other tracks on there have done.

But, I'm putting this up on here when I'm in the notion, because I like this mix, and because the album's been a sort of active presence again in different ways the past while, and because this track still gets the odd ear turned to it or the odd nod, whiles, and so here now it is in different, case you've been asking about that round the markets.

Credits: 
Written by Aaron McMullan. Performed in this mix by Aaron McMullan, Andy Warmington and Andrew Gardiner, and maybe Ryan Fleming too. Produced and overseen by Andrew Gardiner.

Go Fuck Yourself (2006 Pre-Album Pre-Mix)

From the Raise The Waking Water EP, available at https://aaronmcmullan.bandcamp.com/album/raise-the-waking-water

Written, performed and recorded by Aaron McMullan

Underneath The Waking

Written by Aaron McMullan. Performed by Aaron McMullan and Jennifer Gasperich. From Your Face Breaks My Heart. https://aaronmcmullan.bandcamp.com/album/your-face-breaks-my-heart

On His Breath (Featuring Jennifer Gasperich)

Traditional (see notes below), arranged, performed and recorded by Aaron McMullan. Mastered by Joel Harkin. From the EP Cut Fernenst The Clay: Queer Encounters With Traditional Song, available in all the places EPs live, or you can visit: https://linktr.ee/aaronmcmullan

The bulk of the lyrics belonging to a ballad called "My Mary" that I found in Robert Joyce's wonderful book of "Ballads, Romances and Songs," with some lines carried over from another ballad, "Carrigdhoun," and a further interjection or two from me. The tune I set it to derives from yet another traditional song, or a bit of it anyway, "Lady Mary," or "The Sad Song," specifically the intro section as you might hear performed by Nina Ricci if you're lucky enough to be there when she's doing it (or if you watch the video of her doing it on YouTube, as I did).

My Mary Is Far From Me

Rare Wild Healing

Written by Aaron McMullan, performed by Aaron McMullan, Ryan H Fleming, Andy Warmington and Andrew Gardner. Produced by Andrew Gardner. 

From the album "Angus, After All"

https://aaronmcmullan.bandcamp.com/album/angus-after-all

Blackmill Road

I've been listening to Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison a whole bunch these past few weeks, having last heard it all the way through maybe, I dunno. Ten years ago, sure, we'll say. As a consequence I found that this song, written by Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkin and first recorded by Lefty Frizzell, was coming out of me any time I had my guitar anywhere about me, so I decided to record it.

Long Black Veil (Cover)

Trad. Arranged by Aaron McMullan. From the album "And Ye Are Not Your Own." 

https://aaronmcmullan.bandcamp.com/album/and-ye-are-not-your-own

It Is Finished, Blessed Jesus

Northern Irish Alt Folk / Folk Punk Singer-Songwriter.

Aaron McMullan

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