Survivor Andy plays the Crane to launch new book and CD

Andy White is not your everyday songwriter. When the Belfast born musician plays The Crane Bar on Saturday, February 27 he will be launching a new album and a new book. A musician with over 20 years’ experience, White’s literary career is also something he’s had on the go for a while.

“About 10 years ago, in 1998, I had a Best Of album come out,” he says. “They wanted to bring out a book of poetry with my lyrics in it; all the songs from all the albums, which is quite a lot.

“I’m not crazy about lyrics books and I had poetry I’d written since I was a kid. My dad kept one of the first poems I wrote – when I was nine – and ever since I’ve kept them.

“I got out a poetry book which, in fact, I read from at Cúirt in Galway called The Music Of What Happens,” he continues. “Ever since then I found myself writing more in prose and when the blog thing started to happen on the internet I started a Myspace blog. Very soon, quite a lot of people started to read it. It’s remarkable the amount of people that will read something like that.”

And so 21st Century Breakdown, the story of a modern musician, was born.

“The publisher said ‘I want a book like On The Road, I don’t want to know what the apple strudel is like in Vienna’ – in other words, he didn’t want a travel book,” Andy says.

“People have an image of the way U2 tour and the celebrity world. And it’s not that it’s unglamorous – it has its own peculiar glamour. That’s the kind of thing I was writing about in the blog – how you’d check in luggage without paying excess fees. Or driving in Italy – what hand signals you should learn how to make. There’s not a lot of me saying ‘what a great gig that was, I was superb’, that kind of thing. It’s more like a novel than an autobiography.”

Andy also has a new album to promote. Songwriter, his tenth studio album, sees him collaborate with members of esteemed folk band Be Good Tanya, amongst others. Working with other artist is a process he enjoys.

“You grow up not even knowing what it is to write a song, or how you write a song,” he muses. “When I first wrote songs I didn’t really think about it very much, it just came out. Eventually, through many albums and becoming very ancient, you do discover that there is something you’ve got.

“Mainly, I think I discovered that by writing songs with other people. When you write songs with other people you really dissect them much more carefully. You have second opinions and you can end up arguing about them or toasting each other.”Calling the album Songwriter is a fairly straight-up job description, one that reminds Andy of a funny story from a recent tour.“I had a piano player from America and I had to take him to hospital in London – nothing bad,” he says. “They asked him what his religion was and they had a pop-down list. This guy was a real American and he just looked at the woman and he just went ‘Madam, I’m a folk musician!’.”

For more, read page 30 of this week's Connacht Tribune.