This much I know: Jimmy Crowley, Musician

The songs you have to work hard at are not real songs at all.

Creating music is not routine. It comes in like a harvest. The muse descends on you, it’s not about talent. It’s about acute sensitivity. Something might come to you when you are doing laundry or washing dishes. It’s an idea, a kernal. A feeling that goes beyond words and music. Then it passes but it is still working away in the subconscious and after a period of gestation it comes out as a song. When that happens I think, somebody wrote that song other than me, I just mediated it.

I am really looking forward to playing with Stokers Lodge again.

We have work that has yet to be done with the street songs and ballads of Cork. We will have a lovely orchestration of instruments, that has always been very important to us.

I adore being on stage and it’s only recently that I’ve realised how cathartic it is. You are seen in a different light when you perform, you put your best foot forward.

I have a great love for Irish. I’m doing a Masters in Irish Language at UCC. For me, the language answers all the questions about the place we are in today but let’s face it, we have failed to revive it and questions have to be asked about our national cultural and linguistic policy.

I don’t set out to impress people. My biggest challenge in life so far has been not to be selfish, to forget myself and focus in a benign way on others and to become a real artist, which is the struggle. To make work that means something within the community.

What I value most in others is integrity. Having the guts to speak out about things.

I grew up surrounded by music — my dad was a beautiful light tenor — and from a young age, singing brought me to a different place. I was very encouraged. I was sent for piano lessons and then when I got older I fell under the spell of the Clancy Brothers.

Growing up, I had a flair for languages and would have liked to teach but my father said we can’t afford it boy, get a trade. So I became a cabinet maker. That was the family trade. A lot of Crowleys are wood machinists and French polishers. But it was the worst possible trade to put me in. I had no interest in it and am not strong on drawing and visuals. I certainly wouldn’t get a job in that field today.

I started playing gigs in 1976 and never looked back.

I’m a hopeless romantic. I’ve always been attracted to old things — secret carvings, ancient histories, poetry and songs.

I lived in Florida for five years. There was not a lot of work there for me but I certainly saw a lot of the States. I came back two years ago and now live in the Holy Ground.

I love sailing. I have a modern version of a traditional sailing boat in Cobh. There is a fundamental change that happens to our innards when we leave land, it has something to do with being surrounded by negative ions. You let go of the every-day pressures of making a living, you leave it all behind you. Time seems different. An hour is still an hour, but it is more like an old fashioned hour without email or texts to interrupt you.

It is not cool anymore to be Catholic but I have begun to think that there is nothing wrong with what we always believed in this country hundreds of years ago — not the Italian version of Catholicism introduced after the Famine. I was awful lonesome when I gave it up, I missed the sense of community that it provides.

Once you get over 50 you’d better have a system of belief. A theory of existence. You need to look at the bigger cosmic picture and ask where we are all headed and why. There is nothing new in that.

* Jimmy Crowley and Stokers Lodge will be re-uniting for the first time in 30 years — appearing on Sunday March 16 at The Everyman, Cork.