Windings celebrate colourful new album with free city show

Limerick band, Windings, who make music for the sheer joy of it, play Róisín Dubh on Thursday, December 5. The Limerick-based band have just released their third album I Am Not The Crow and Steve Ryan, chief songwriter of the five-piece group, explains how Windings came to be.

“The first album I released in 2005,” he says. “It was like a solo thing I was doing on the side of my other band [the hard-rocking two piece Giveamanakick]. Then that band finished and we put out the second album as Windings – there were two other lads involved at that stage. 

“Then, come this year, there were five of us altogether. Since finishing the album and releasing it, we’ve lost one member and gained another. It’s kind of constantly changing! But the line-up that recorded the line-up is pretty spot on; we’re very happy.”

I Am Not The Crow was recorded in two sessions, one in Montreal and the other in Donegal (“All the –als!” laughs Steve).

The album has been released as a vinyl picture disc, and the nature of a record informs the mood of the album – Side A was recorded in Montreal, while side B was laid down in Tommy McLaughlin’s studio in Donegal.

“We happened to be over in Canada because we’d been invited to play Music Week in Toronto,” says Steve. “Then we went up to Montreal by train. Before we had even left for Canada, the four songs were rehearsed to within an inch of their lives. When it got to the studio, we just set up and did every song 19 or 20 times until we got the one we wanted.”

From the outset, Windings wanted to make an album that would be one cohesive piece, and not just a random collection of songs.

“We had the album envisioned as eight songs, we knew how we wanted the songs to be ordered,” says Steve. “I had been DJ-ing with a friend of mine called Tim, from a band called Hidden Highways. We had this night where we’d only DJ stuff from before the eighties.

“Basically, it got me rooting through my record collection. All the stuff my dad owned – Neil Young stuff, Funkadelic and David Bowie, who used to make albums that only had seven or eight songs, but it’d be a whole piece. It’d build up from the start of side A, and down from the start of side B – and that’s what we were looking to do.”

The album cover and picture disc features a vividly coloured bird, and was designed by Mattie Bolger and Emily Lidstrom, who go under the moniker M & E. Bolger is a member of Redneck Manifesto, and the couple have also designed sleeves for that band as well as for Si Schroeder and Choice Prize winner Jape. Anyone who buys I Am Not the Crow on vinyl has a work of art in their hands, something the Windings’ front man is proud of.

“We had a choice doing this album – print up 1500 CDs or we could get 500 vinyl for the same price,” says Steve. “And our vinyl is a picture disc, so it has a piece of art on it that we commissioned people to do. Now, it’s a much more limited run than CDs, but for the same price I think it’s more worthwhile, to look at, to appreciate, than a CD box would be.”

To celebrate the picture disc, Windings played a show in Limerick, but it would be fair to say, the event sounds more like the opening of an exhibition than a record launch.

“Kind of!” says Steve. “It was everybody’s first time seeing the record. Maybe we wouldn’t have made such a big deal of it if it hadn’t been a picture disc. We played a gig and played our record about two hundred times!”

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.