"Snowflakes and Wishes"

Another year has gone by, and I can’t believe how quickly.

This will be my second Thanksgiving and I’m looking forward to spending it with the lovely friends I’ve made since moving here to the US!

Even though it’s new for me, I love Thanksgiving. It offers a great opportunity to look back over the year and remember all the things you’re grateful for and that you’ve achieved. Sometimes when we get caught up with daily life it’s hard to take a step back and realise how much we all have to be thankful for.

So, this year, as something extra special I am going to try and spread a bit of holiday cheer by making a video for my Christmas song “Snowflakes” and inviting everyone to be a part of it!

All you have to do is take a photo of you or your family sending a holiday message to someone you love. You can be as creative and imaginative as you like! Email the photo to callaghan[at]callaghansongs.com for a chance to be included in the video.

There’ll be some prizes for some of my favourite photos, and you’ll be able to watch and share the video with all your friends and family on Facebook.

The deadline for sending in the photos is Sunday 11th December.

So get your cameras out this Thanksgiving, or over the weekend, and start snapping!

You can find out all the details and watch a little video message from me on my website: www.callaghansongs.com/snowflakes

If you want to hear snowflakes live - make a date to come to the show at The Crimson Moon, Dahlonega GA on Saturday December 3rd!

I can’t wait for you to send me your pictures and help me create my holiday music video! Happy Holidays wherever you are!

Callaghan xx

Example photo:

 “Remember remember the 5th of November, Gunpowder treason and plot”

I’m sitting in a lovely hotel room overlooking the ocean down in Pensacola, Florida and the sun is shining. I was performing at the Great Gulf Coast Arts Festival yesterday and broke a personal record by doing 3 shows in one day.

I’m quite tired today, so it took me a minute to remember that the date is November 5th, which is Guy Fawkes Night, or Bonfire Night, back in the UK. If I were back in London I might be putting on a scarf, hat and gloves to go out to a firework display.

The tradition comes from a plot back in 1605 when a man called Guy Fawkes tried to blow up Parliament and kill King James I. The plot failed, and so it became a custom to celebrate the date every year. Some people would have a huge bonfire in their back garden or set off fireworks to celebrate. Some people made “a guy” which was a man made out of old clothes and straw and would take it from house to house saying “penny for the guy”, the money raised would be used to buy fireworks. Then at the end of the night the guy would be thrown on the bonfire.

I remember many bonfire nights from when I was growing up. I didn’t really know what it was about, but I did know that there was lots of food, most of which was full of sugar. Toffee apples were a favourite, as well as homemade honeycomb, and something called Cinder toffee (a really dark toffee that was particularly good if you needed a few fillings removing).

I saw this story in one of the UK newspapers today about the direct descendant of the man who foiled the gunpowder and caught Guy Fawkes is now one of the top firework technicians in the country!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2057648/Bonfire-Night-2011-Guy-Fawkes-catchers-descendant-fireworks-display-expert.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

Here’s one more interesting point about the Gunpowder Plot. Just under two years after the plot failed the first permanent English colony in the New World was established as Jamestown in Virginia. If the plot had succeeded and English history had changed, then maybe that would never have happened, and maybe I wouldn’t be sitting here in Florida writing this blog!

Happy Bonfire Night to all my friends back in the UK!

"The snow is softly falling, its like the world just stopped still..."

Actually the snow has been coming down pretty hard since we left Massachussetts this morning. We were supposed to be doing a show in Connecticut tonight which I was looking forward to because the venue, Infinity Hall, in Norfolk, is supposed to be a cool place to play.

Unfortunately the show had to be postponed because of the weather. It's disappointing but better to be safe though and not have people driving if they dont need to.

We've been on the road for 8 hours now driving towards New Jersey for the show tomorrow night.

It's been quite a journey with trees collapsing on the siode of the road and lots of cars that have skidded off the road. Luckily the weight of the RV means it doesnt slide around too much. I hope everyone gets home safely tonight.

I'll be glad when we get to NJ tonight though and thaw ourselves out with a few glasses of something warming!

It’s the 5th show of the tour...loads of fun so far. Fantastic audiences in Roanoke, Ashland Philly and Montclair. I’ve been really enjoying experimenting with my set each night and trying out a couple of new songs as well as tracks from my album, Life in Full Colour. Tonight’s show is in Bethel NY - at the site of the Woodstock Festival.

I’ve also been trying out a new t-shirt design. You might have seen the famous World War II poster from the UK with the slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On”. I’ve adapted it so it now reads “Keep Calm and Listen to Callaghan”. I hope you like them!

The new t-shirts and my album are available from shows on this tour and are now also available online from my website. The album won’t be officially released until 2012, but so many people have been asking me if they can get it online, that I thought I’d put some copies out early for y’all!

So if any of you would like to buy a CD, t-shirt, or a special super-fan-package we’ve put together, head over to www.callaghansongs.com/store. You could solve all of your stress this year and get all your friends’ and family’s Christmas presents from one place!

Thanks for listening and supporting my music - I couldn’t do this without you!

“Exercise is bunk. If you are healthy, you don't need it: if you are sick you should not take it.” Henry Ford

An interesting point of view and one I had some time to think about this week while my latest exercise obsession had left me in excruciating pain and unable to move.

This recent passion of mine is boxing. I knew that boxing had its dangers - judging by the facial structure of some boxers I knew the risks - but I didn’t think a twisted rib was one of them.

I didn’t even know you could twist a rib? I’ve heard of them breaking, but other than that I thought they were all pretty much happy where they needed to be. Well it turns out they don’t always stay put and when one twists and hits a nerve, believe me, you know about it - and you cannot play your guitar.

Thankfully a couple of trips to an excellent chiropractor put everything back in place and I’m pretty much fighting fit for the tour which starts on Monday.

Perhaps I’ll leave my new pink boxing gloves at home though.

Any suggestions for a song title inspired by this experience?

I’ll take a guess that most people have had someone suggest to them that they should back up the files on their computer, and if they’re anything like me, will have thought, “Yeah yeah, great idea, who has the time for that?!”

Well I (almost) learnt my lesson the hard way.

During a trip to Tennessee where I played a gig in Chattanooga and had some great meetings in Nashville, I managed to leave my laptop to fend for itself in a coffee shop somewhere in Music City.

Only after having driven 2 hours back towards Atlanta did I realise it was missing, so had to turn the car around, spend an extra night in Nashville and hope that it was still there the next morning.

It is only at times like these you wonder whether that very helpful email in the drafts folder with the subject “Passwords” really was such a great idea, and whether putting every important document since moving to the USA in one place might have been foolish.

Not to mention all of the music files of new songs I had been working on and countless photos. It was bringing me out in a cold sweat imagining just how much I could lose and was praying that the Frothy Monkey was visited only by kind and honest people that day.

Thankfully I was lucky. The lovely manager had noticed it had been left and looked after it for me. What a relief!!

Now that me and my laptop are both safely back together, the first job for it will be a trip to Amazon to buy an external drive...

The calendar is filling up fast between now and Christmas, and it’s time to get back out on the road. I’m really looking forward to going back to some places I’ve already played and to discovering some new ones.

I’ll be touring for the last 2 weeks of October with Shawn Mullins opening shows for him up the East Coast, and also doing some of my own shows between now and the end of the year.

Dates coming up in Georgia include a special Christmas show at The Crimson Moon Cafe in Dahlonega on Saturday December 3rd. I did one there last year and it was so much fun. Dahlonega is so pretty at Christmas, it’s all lit up and Santa Claus was there with his sleigh and some huskies!

I’ve also just booked a full band show at Eddie’s Attic for Saturday January 7th. The last one at the end of June sold out so quickly and was so much fun that we decided we had to do another one! Once again there’ll be a great line up of players giving you the full Callaghan sound. It’ll be a real chance to shake off those New Year blues.

I hope to see you at some of the shows. For a full list of the places I’ll be playing, go to www.callaghansongs.com/gigs - new shows keep being added, so check it out!

I’ve been using the map below to plan touring routes in 2012...it’s brought home once again that the USA is a very big place. Still like the song says..‘Blue skies and an endless horizon...this could be the best year of our lives!’

Friday 26th August
Even though it’s August I’ve decided to make a New Year’s resolution early (or late, depending how you look at it) to blog a little more often. So I’m going to try to sometimes share some thoughts about my music and sometimes about things I have read which have sparked my curiosity. Because I’m living in a new country those kind of things come up all the time, when I’m on the road here in the USA or reading about what’s going on back in London.

A very British response to rioting...

It was tough being away from London, watching those riots take place and wondering what was happening. My old street was smashed up, and it was shocking to see the amount of destruction a small number of people could unleash. But for each story which made you begin to lose hope in society, another would appear to restore your spirits. Like the communities who peacefully stood up to the looters and refused to let them trash their neighbourhoods, the teams of local people who showed up with brooms to clear up all the mess, or this young couple from London who made tea for local police officers who had been working non-stop for 30 hours. The good old British maxim that, whatever the crisis, a cup of tea is always the answer has stood the test of time!

---

Trying out a new accent...

I hadn’t seen too many of Anne Hathaway’s films before I moved to the USA, apart from the Devil Wears Prada, which I thought she was great in. I’ve been looking out for her films more since I got here because quite often after shows people very kindly tell me I look like her - which is a lovely compliment. So I was interested to see her pop up a lot in the news recently. In her latest film her British accent has received mixed reviews. I’ve only seen a clip of the movie and it sounds pretty good to me ( it’s nowhere near Russell Crowe in Robin Hood), but it does seem like the British accent isn’t an easy one for actors to do. A lot of the time you can spot a fake a mile off, but I wonder if it’s the same for Brits trying American accents? As a big fan of the series The Wire, it took me a good while to notice that Idris Elba is actually from Hackney, London, because he sounded so convincing to me. I more recently found out that Dominic West, who plays McNulty is from Sheffield, and I never would have guessed! He even pretends to be an Englishman when he goes under cover, and his impression of an American attempting a British accent is so good, it’s a whole new level of acting! I wonder if those Brits doing an American accent are convincing to American ears?

A final note on accents, I’ve noticed that I have started saying y’all when I am on stage...it really made an American friend laugh to hear y’all in a British accent! People often say that British singers lose their accent when they sing...interesting

I’m aware that I’ve not been the best at writing regular blogs but there’s nothing like a new bit of technology to encourage me to be more interactive online.

I recently decided that my lack of decent camera and recording equipment was not helping the situation and it was time to invest in something I could do video blogs on, record new songs, and take traveling with me. Most importantly, it needs to have good sound so I can record songs and post them online. The video should be good as well, but not as important as the sound quality.

After spending hours and hours reading endless pages of reviews for cameras, I have narrowed it down to 3 options:

The Zoom Q3 Handy Video Recorder ($150)

The Zoom Q3 HD ($299)

The Olympus LS-20 HD (250)


Now comes the difficult part - choosing which one to get! All of them get good reviews for sound quality, and pretty good rating for video. I wanted to see if anyone has used any of these cameras and has any info that could help me out in choosing the right one.

I need your opinions!!

On a separate point, I thought it was funny that when you type “audio video recorder” into Amazon the first thing it brings up is a load of James Bond-type Spy Gear like sunglasses with a hidden camera, or a very innocent looking Smiley Face badge that secretly records. Who are the people buying this stuff I wonder?...Perhaps best not to think about that too much!

August 18th 2011

I have to admit that before moving to the US, the concept of house concerts was a bit odd to me. Going to a stranger’s house, setting up in their living room and singing songs to them seemed like something my parents might have warned me against at some point!

But after doing a few I now know they are a fantastic way to share music with genuine enthusiasts in a relaxed and positive setting, and most of all so much fun.

I did two house concerts recently up in Michigan (a particularly intriguing part of the US to me as part of my family way way way back settled there - but that story is for another day...). The families hosting me were so lovely and treated me to things I would never get at a usual gig, including a big bag of British goodies, and a day out on the lake learning to water-ski!




The bag of British goodies was somewhat easier to master than the waterskiing, although after numerous attempts and huge amounts of lake water swallowed, I did finally get up on those skis, and was so pleased with myself! The funny thing about it was that once I was up, I had no idea how to stop. I figured that going at some speed it might be painful hitting the water, so I just kept on going until my muscles could take no more. And let me tell you, I felt those muscles long after the trip home from Michigan. Just as well I had those chocolate biscuits to ease the pain!


A look of happiness, exhilaration and terror!