Another song from the Passing Through CD from 15 years ago. Inspired by being in Bremen train station, Germany at rush hour on a Friday evening..commuters going in all directions, laden down with all sorts of baggage both physical and mental. I assumed they all knew where they were bound as they boarded the endless stream of trains arriving and departing the station.

Passing Through

From my CD Passing Through, a song about a girl I knew at school who sadly passed away a few years later

Slipping Away

Soot Drop
My father came home from somewhere one day. It was mid-summer and the hay making season. Like any good Irish summers day there’d be the odd heavy shower to keep down the dust. My mother called them, a deluge. 
  ‘ I was talking to Tom White’, said the Da.’That shower came down like a soot drop .’ Tom had said. ‘
   ‘What’s a soot drop?’ I wondered.
I recently googled it but nothing in the way of a credible explanation was found. So Tom White was a smarter man than Google.
    But it harks back to the days of the open-heart fireplaces and those wide chimneys. The soot congealed on the side walls of the spacious chimney openings. After a while, when it all got too heavy and a deluge of rain came, the whole thing flopped down into the fireplace, creating a shower of a thick, black murky dust that momentarily plunged the living room into a stygian darkness.
    Old Tommy Francey who lived along the pass over from our house had such a fireplace. Id peep in his window when Id pass by. It had the open heart and the crook. He cooked on it. His living room was an open plan type space that you often see in modern houses featured on some TV make-over builds. It was kitchen, living room and rubbish dump all in one.
    Tom White like most others of the time lived simply. H didn’t have much money to spare and the little he did earn from his small farm he was keen to hold onto. 
And in those days, they all felt they were being robbed by the shopkeepers. My mother would utter,’ he saw me coming,’ if she thought she paid too much for a new milking bucket .AS foe Tom White, he hid money outside in the ditch. I came in from school one day and my mother announced that Tom White had been raided. A year or less later I came home again and my mother announced that Tom White had been raided.
   But we were busy getting the hay, mowed, turned, and shook up again and built into cocks. In early August the cows got the smell of fresh after- grass. They busted through wire, badly bushed gaps and holes in white thorn hedges into the fresh pasture. They were so happy to be there, that even before tasting a blade of grass, they played a game of tossing the cocks of hay and giving them a good ruffing up. Not really a sensible move on their behalf, not realsing that this would be their winter feed. But that was our signal to bring it in
Musicians on this track
Brian Reynolds. Vocals and harmony vocals. All guitars.
Sean Maguire Bass
Recorded by Fintan mc Manus

Soot Drop

This is another mix of this song...work still in progress.
Soot Drop
My father came home from somewhere one day. It was mid-summer and the hay making season. Like any good Irish summers day there’d be the odd heavy shower to keep down the dust. My mother called them, a deluge. 
  ‘ I was talking to Tom White’, said the Da.’That shower came down like a soot drop .’ Tom had said. ‘
   ‘What’s a soot drop?’ I wondered.
I recently googled it but nothing in the way of a credible explanation was found. So Tom White was a smarter man than Google.
    But it harks back to the days of the open-heart fireplaces and those wide chimneys. The soot congealed on the side walls of the spacious chimney openings. After a while, when it all got too heavy and a deluge of rain came, the whole thing flopped down into the fireplace, creating a shower of a thick, black murky dust that momentarily plunged the living room into a stygian darkness.
    Old Tommy Francey who lived along the pass over from our house had such a fireplace. Id peep in his window when Id pass by. It had the open heart and the crook. He cooked on it. His living room was an open plan type space that you often see in modern houses featured on some TV make-over builds. It was kitchen, living room and rubbish dump all in one.
    Tom White like most others of the time lived simply. H didn’t have much money to spare and the little he did earn from his small farm he was keen to hold onto. 
And in those days, they all felt they were being robbed by the shopkeepers. My mother would utter,’ he saw me coming,’ if she thought she paid too much for a new milking bucket .AS foe Tom White, he hid money outside in the ditch. I came in from school one day and my mother announced that Tom White had been raided. A year or less later I came home again and my mother announced that Tom White had been raided.
   But we were busy getting the hay, mowed, turned, and shook up again and built into cocks. In early August the cows got the smell of fresh after- grass. They busted through wire, badly bushed gaps and holes in white thorn hedges into the fresh pasture. They were so happy to be there, that even before tasting a blade of grass, they played a game of tossing the cocks of hay and giving them a good ruffing up. Not really a sensible move on their behalf, not realsing that this would be their winter feed. But that was our signal to bring it in
Musicians on this track
Brian Reynolds. Vocals and harmony vocals. All guitars.
Sean Maguire Bass
Recorded by Fintan mc Manus

Soot DRop Mix 2

Rootin
I was talking to a farmer one day. The conversation went from one thing to another, the usual small talk about weather, jobs that had to be done around the farm, the yard and slatted house had to be power hosed, still a bit more silage to be made.
  ‘Ah just rootin’ he exclaimed at the end of it all.   
   ‘Rootin is right,’ I thought to myself afterwards. Don’t we all indulge from time to time? Starting a job, then a different job, and another one after that, never getting any of them finished.
And everyone all over the world is at it. Farmers, people in towns and cities behind the boundary fences of their back gardens. Men women and children, in India, Namibia, North and South Yeman, parts of Germany, China and Japan, boyos in North Korea all busy Rootin.
Maybe farmers do it better than most. Seven days a week, Sundays and Mondays and Church and Bank Holidays. Myself and the family would be coming home from somewhere on a Sunday evening in our good clothes, and there’d be your man coming out of a guttery gap on an old clapped out Massey, belching out toxic fumes that would punch holes in the ozone . There’s a wrapped bale, wrapper dragging on the ground. Lumps of clay and muck on the road and its nearly dark but the lights don’t work…Rootin

Rooting Mix 2

Rootin

A single that released in May 2020...getting great feedback and views also of video on U Tube

Rootin
I was talking to a farmer one day. The conversation went from one thing to another, the usual small talk about the weather, jobs that had to be done around the farm, the yard and slatted house had to be power hosed, still a bit more silage to be made.
  ‘Ah just rootin’ he exclaimed at the end of it all.   
   ‘Rootin is right,’ I thought to myself afterwards. Don’t we all indulge from time to time? Starting a job, then a different job, and another one after that, never getting any of them finished.
And everyone all over the world is at it. Farmers, people in towns and cities behind the boundary fences of their back gardens. Men women and children, in India, Namibia, North and South Yeman, parts of Germany, China and Japan, boyos in North Korea all busy Rootin.
Maybe farmers do it better than most. Seven days a week, Sundays and Mondays and Church and Bank Holidays. Myself and the family would be coming home from somewhere on a Sunday evening in our good clothes, and there’d be your man coming out of a guttery gap on an old clapped out Massey, belching out toxic fumes that would punch holes in the ozone. There’s a wrapped bale, wrapper dragging behind the tractor on the ground. Lumps of clay and muck on the road and its nearly dark but the lights don’t work…Rootin

Rootin Video

On the Sunday night of the May Bank Holiday 2020, the Bailie Hotel, in Bailieboro, Co Cavan, Ireland posted a photo on social media of a totally deserted Main street. There wasn't a car or a human being to be seen anywhere. Normally on the first bank holiday of the summer, the town would be a hive of activity, with people and revellers going from pub to pub and onwards to the hotel's nightclub. But of course, this was the middle of the Corona virus lockdown and people were taking it very seriously.
I made a comment on the FB post, that' one could lie down out in the middle of main street and be safe ‘or sleep all night on the pavement and their wouldn't be one to endanger or bother them. That was basically the first line of the song which you see here.
I made the recording on a Zoom R8 digital recorder and also did the video myself.

Lockdown.

Guitar player, songwriter for many years.more than I care to remember.

Brian REynolds

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