I was born into a world that revolved around churches, sermons, hymns and the bible. I wrestled to keep accepting it, and participating in it, and sometimes flourished in it, but, eventually I found it to be a burden that was too much to bear. 

And the Lord said, " Come all ye that are heavy laden, and I shall find you rest"...but sometimes the burden is the religion and the belief, and the rest is something outside of that. 

Grace be upon you

We Were Never Sinners

This was the first of these songs that I wrote in November 2013. This in only a rough recording I did in my bedroom, and may well be changed at some point. 

It has a gospel feel to it, yet for me it is expressing the desire to find something in the ashes, when your belief in love or god has crumbled into nothing. That 'something' I found in the ashes was compassion. This is a song about compassion. Passion comes from the Latin "to suffer", and Compassion, is to "suffer with", which I think is notably different to the Western idea of love. Compassion often sits silently, in the midst of our own discomfort and unknowing. 

This is about meeting people in the midst of our shared brokenness, and shared common humanity, in the knowledge of our shared human condition. 



Broken To Broken [DEMO]

This was my second song, written around the end of 2013. 

This song is set on a December day, hence the title and the references to the landscape of the Lagan Valley as it runs through Belfast. It is set on one of those crisp, cold, but sunny, blue-skied days...but that is just the backdrop for a song, which is essentially about my own struggle to accept myself, especially in intimate relationships. However, it is easy to project our own lack of acceptance onto our closest others. So this songs resonates with the residual and haunting questions, of "is this good enough for you?", "am I good enough for you?". 

This song is also for me, partly, about making my peace with the ordinary things, after 'losing' a belief that offered me a lot more significance. The question asked, is, "is this life without that significance, good enough for me?"

But, hopefully you will find your own meaning in it, and maybe even enjoy it too.

December Days [DEMO]

This song was written after a period, where I even questioned whether I was cut out for songwriting at all, as I hadn't felt vaguely creative or moved to write from January 2014, until March or April that year. 

It is a song about an intimate, cohabiting relationship, that has gone toxic, to the point were you are both communicating or not, in terrible ways. Often, it seems, that the people we say we love the most, are the ones we treat the worst. Yet, no-one means to do this, we want to love, but it is as if we aren't equipped to express it, but, at least in this song, and at that time of my life...if this was "love", I wanted to be a million miles away from it. 

It speaks for itself, but leaves with the paradox of, "Love brings you close, but to close to love"...as if the very desire that brings us into relationship, kills itself...it brings us so close, it snuffs out the flame of desire.  

I'll leave that one for you to ponder 

The Other Side Of Love [DEMO]

Ricky has been singing more or less since he left the womb, memorising lyrics from his brother's vinyl collection [hence the love of the eighties], and influenced alot by his church background where he got his first taste of singing in public. However, it was when he started busking four years ago after being made redundant [good came out of bad] that he really started to develop his own unique style, find his voice, and learn how to bring a fresh twist to the songs he plays.

Ricky McQuillan