Mandolin Mountain sees Tony 'firing on all cylinders'

Tony Small is a folk singer who keeps alive the tradition of the travelling troubadour, yet he retains the fire and independence of the modern musician. The Galway based singer has just released his latest album Mandolin Mountain, which he recorded in Dingle, a place that’s close to his heart.

“I’ve been going there since the early 1980s, because I had bands down there,” he says. “Eventually I just stuck there and played with all the musicians around there, and got to know the people.”

Mandolin Mountain was produced and engineered by guitarist Donogh Hennessy, a former member of the group Lúnasa and a regular with the Sharon Shannon Band, and it features several Dingle-based musicians including uilleann piper Eoin Duignan and singer Pauline Scanlon.

“I know those people for so long, and they know me so well,” Tony says.

“They know what’s going to happen. So we didn’t have to do that much rehearsing at all. What we had to really was pare down the stuff we had recorded. We had pianos and god knows what, and we just pared it down to the right feel.”

Tony is full of praise for singer Pauline Scanlon, who has also worked with John Spillane and has toured successfully to countries including Australia and New Zealand. Pauline began singing with Tony when she was just 14.

“When I was singing around Dingle, Pauline was mad to learn a few songs and used to come into the gigs and sit down with me,” he recalls. “We shared a lot of songs; and her career has blossomed. I was very proud of that – she’s become a major singer.”

Tony keeps himself busy as a live performer, but he also enjoys working in the studio. Mandolin Mountain is a focused collection of songs, an album its maker put a lot of care into.

“I love doing it,” Tony says about recording. “It’s where I perfect the songs. When I go in with songs, I just put them together and as the process goes on, they improve and I see what’s possible, what’s crazy and what’s right.”

The album opens with the celebratory Mandolin Mountain, a song that could be seen as a reflection on life as a musician. Tony recalls how the song came about.

“I was sitting down with this guy one night, the two of us banging guitars,” he says. “I had this line in my head ‘my life is passing through me/I’m mostly satisfied/The old songs keep calling me, calling in the night’. The song just fell together; I wrote it in ten minutes. There were 20 verses, and then I just pared it down to what we have now.”

Tony launched Mandolin Mountain in Galway City’s Crane Bar recently. In the album’s liner notes, musician Mick Crehan, who runs the pub, says Small ‘holds a justified and well-earned place of affection, reverence and respect in the cultural story of Galway’.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.