From CMAT's newsletter: I wrote this song when I was living in Paris at the beginning of the year. I went, to be honest, slightly mad in my Airbnb flat, because I was trying to write music, and it wasn’t going very well. Truth be told, I was trying too hard! Too funny, too serious, too catchy, too boring- everything felt a bit too *everything*. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t *deserving* of a good song, of decent expression, because I was not being a good person. Drinking three bottles of wine a day, spending a month alone by myself in Paris on a whim to -work on music- when I have family and friends to attend to, and generally living my life in a very self-serving way.

Then one day, after about 2 weeks, I got a knock on my door. I hadn’t spoken to anyone in real life the entire time I had been staying there so it really discombobulated me. I answered the door, and it was an American woman. A tourist, a woman around my age. The only thing she said to me was ‘Oh! You’re not my friend!’ before she scurried on upstairs to the next floor. Towards her friend, and away from me- the creature living below them. I spent the next week listening to them laugh, and enjoy tourist splendour, and every so often bumping into them. Every time we passed each other in the stairwell I could feel that on some level, they wished I was not there.

The song came pretty quickly after that, as I realised who it was I represent and write for- The Uncomfortable. I am always feeling uncomfortable, and awkward, and undeserving, and I always feel I am stuck in purgatory yet surrounded by American Angel Tourists. Since I wrote this song, I haven’t been able to stop myself ruminating on this. Like when I was in Nashville, playing a live session, and three entire tables of people walked out because they didn’t like me. Or when I was in a hospital in LA wearing a Cowboy Hat, and feeling the eyes medical staff follow me around in awkward, semi-disgust. Or being in England and forgetting that I cannot use the word ‘Cunt’ as liberally in a sentence as I would like without people getting nervous. All this discomfort- It envelops me, and I have been swept up by the magic of it!

Sounds like an exam. "Have you passed your CMAT yet?"

More Irish, more better!
Thank you RP. 

Nashville via Dublin. Open with a 6 to give some room on the upside.