Since the release of his second album, 33È Grand Street, Geary has enjoyed the most fruitful period of his life, playing to appreciative fans across America and Ireland, earning critical acclaim and achieving public exposure. However, if Geary thought that such accomplishments might dull his creative impulses, he need not have worried. Life on the road can still throw up enough failures to fuel his artistic urge.
“The shockers are always good: you always remember them. Otherwise it’s just boring,” he says. “Last year I went down to Florida for a show. I turned up and the booker was a real dodgy dude. He had one of those electronic tags, for parole purposes. And the nightclub was dodgy as hell.There’s a huge cocaine scene, all coming in from Miami. So then I get up there — Johnny Sensitivo with the acoustic guitar — and it was a train wreck.
“But I hung in there, threw everything out, was abusive on stage. They think you’re being very urbane and witty when you insult them in an Irish accent. The whole place was in an uproar, but after the gig it was all back-slapping. Then we went back to this alleged party, which was like something out of Midnight Express. There were no guests, just drug casualties.”
He adds: “I just had to get away but I couldn’t because the booker, who was taking care of me, was in the thick of it. The last I saw of him he was in his underpants. So I just locked myself away in some room there and wrote. And it was bizarre but a song came out of that horror show. And a lot of the stuff on the new record has that melancholy feel throughout.”
Geary’s new album, Ghosts, is certainly imbued with a downbeat, longing quality that seems at odds with the artistic and material fulfilment the singer has achieved after a decade of gigging and recording. Incidents such as the Floridian debacle aside, the past year has gone sufficiently well for Geary to buy a house in Westmeath while maintaining his base in New York.
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Nor do things seem set to recede in the near future. Having built up a reputation in America through regular stage performances and frequent appearances on soundtracks, Geary is set for a profile-boosting slot on Jay Leno’s chat show next month.
For all his success, though, the title track of the new album has him singing about “fighting for your right to fail”. Geary is clearly still wary at the prospect of fortune. “I just think there’s something dodgy about that whole American thing, of having to be No 1 or your life has absolutely no meaning,” he says, in an incongruously chirpy tone. “Here we are, in the middle of the Olympics and it’s all about gold medals, whack some drugs into me and let me be the best. I think there’s something charming or more honest if you go: ‘You know what, I’ve had enough of the winners’. I write from that place, where it’s kind of lonely. So fighting for your right to fail — it’s a kind of whispered plea.”
The irony is that Geary’s path was kick-started by a success story of sorts, that of his elder brother Karl. An aspiring actor, Karl moved to New York in the late 1980s. He ended up cavorting with Madonna in her infamous book Sex and co-founding Sin-e, the Irish-American cafe which enjoyed a reputation as one of Manhattan’s hippest hang-outs. To the aimless, angst-ridden Mark, his older brother’s example provided the perfect antidote to the boredom and constraints Geary felt as a teen in the south Dublin suburb of Blackrock.
“I was falling through the cracks,” Geary recalls. “I’d love to say I always had notion of being a songwriter but at that time I didn’t know. I felt pretty helpless and afraid. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen to me and I got really spooked. So I got a one-way ticket and ran. There was never a notion of me making it. Karl could have been anywhere and I would have run to him.”
When Geary arrived in New York in 1992 at the age of 18 he drifted into bartending. But he gradually found himself inspired by the creative environment he encountered at Sin-e, where Jeff Buckley was beginning to make a name with his haunting performances. Much has been made of Geary’s friendship with Buckley, who drowned in 1997, but beyond cherishing his “incredibly irreverent and funny” character, Geary plays down any influence on his music.
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“It’s been mentioned in America but not half as much as it has been mentioned here,” he says. “I think a lot of the time there might have been interest in me because the people I knew and associated with were quite well known. Which was difficult in a lot of ways because I sound nothing like Jeff Buckley.”
As Geary made his first tentative steps into songwriting and performance, he not only resisted the temptation to sound like Buckley, but also avoided playing at Sin-e, which was then attracting visitors such as Bono and Johnny Cash. Instead he started performing his songs at open-mic slots, honing his craft, landing support gigs and eventually recording his self-titled debut album with local record label Paradigm. However, things fell apart in spectacular fashion.
“The company folded the day of the album’s release,” Geary says. “I only found out after calling the label guys because I had walked all over New York looking for my record, and it was nowhere. And there I was, thinking it was after selling out.”
True to form, failure only sharpened Geary’s creativity. Under the auspices of his manager Gill Holland, an independent film producer, Geary independently recorded and released 33È Grand Street, an album which made its mark with its genre-bending combination of cool Manhattan poise, rootsy Americana and the heartfelt balladry typical of Irish singer-songwriters.
Just as Geary is spending more time in Ireland these days, so the new album drifts stylistically towards the emotiveness of Irish acts such as the Frames. This is hardly unexpected given that Ghosts was largely recorded with Dave and Karl Odlum, who have worked with the likes of David Kitt and the Frames’s frontman Glen Hansard.
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While he counts Hansard as a friend and says the success of Damien Rice has made him feel less of an isolated figure in America, Geary is not overkeen to be associated with Dublin’s singer-songwriter ethos.
“I’m not part of that Whelan’s lock-in scene,” he says. “In America there are people who have been on the road as singer-songwriters for 40 years. It doesn’t have that thing — that you’re in the Glen or Damo scene — that we have here.”
His two forthcoming shows at Whelan’s aside, Geary remains anxious not to end up as yet another tortured Irish singer-songwriter. He says he was conscious of not sounding too self-indulgent or emollient when recording Ghosts. Indeed, the melancholic nature of much of the album is offset by upbeat songs which are, if anything, more affecting: the rallying title track, the rousing Fanfare and the charming You’re the Only Girl, the song born at the debauched Floridian party. As he showed with Buckley, Geary is too much of his own man to be a mere imitator. If he’s going to fail, he’ll do it on his own terms.
“I generally attempt to keep my side of the street very clean and just do my own thing. I’m a realist: this has very little to do with fame and fortune. There’s no money for me, it all just goes back into the thing. But I’m a cheap date. I’m very content.”
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Ghosts is released on Independent Records on Friday. Mark Geary plays Whelan’s, Dublin, on Friday and Saturday