Mark Geary

I’ve been on a huge folk kick these last few years and I’m not sure how Mark Geary’s newest album Songs About Love, Songs About Leaving went unheard. This is a spectacular folk record that marks what I’ve known for along time, Geary is one of the best singer/songwriters we have going right now. If you have a soft spot for the softer folk, this is a required listen record. With appearances by Glen Hansard and songs that shake the emotional core, this should have been a record in the same breath as a Bon Iver or the other lauded folk records of 2011. - Zach - We Listen For You - Best of 2011

Born and raised in Ireland, Mark Geary moved to New York City to play music, regularly sharing the bill with artists such as Jeff Buckley and Katell Keinig at Sin-e, a club co-owned by his brother. During this time Geary developed his own sound, one influenced more by his American folk-rock contemporaries than by the artists of his native Ireland.
Geary displays this on Ghosts, an exercise in control and subtlety filled with beautiful acoustic guitar work and hushed vocals. Fellow Dubliner Glen Hansard of the Frames lends his vocals to the catchy acoustic pop song "You're the Only Girl" and the delicate ballad "Mid-nite Sun", while Josh Ritter contributes backing vocals to the title track. As that title suggests, this album is a haunting and memorable collection of songs, and they get better with each listen.
- Greg Yost - No Depression- April/May 2005

The sometime New York-based Mark Geary has travelled a long road since his debut, 33 1/3 Grand Street was released a decade ago. His success has been gradual rather than spectacular. He has a loyal following and deservedly had several songs featured in high profile movies and TV dramas, most notably One Tree Hill and Bones.
But not much has changed over the years as far as his overall approach is concerned. In fact he’s the quintessential singer-songwriter: with just the barest of accompaniment – mainly his gently-plucked acoustic guitar – the songs on this, only his fourth album to date, are textbook exercises in quiet melancholia. And while the prevailing mood seldom varies there are enough strong tunes and melodies to make it a worthy addition to his canon.

The one exception to the rule, ‘Get Here’, a pleasant country-ish romp comes as a welcome respite to the generally downbeat atmosphere. Opener, ‘Fireflies’ recalls early Simon & Garfunkel, the haunting melody and fragile vocals almost chamber-like in their effect; ‘That’s What They All Say’ with Jenna Nicholls on backing vocals boasts a memorable melody; and elsewhere, there are some lovely vocal and instrumental touches on ‘Cali Solo’. A standout is the atmospheric ‘Falling In The Fires’. With its lovely harmonising, it is tailor-made for a TV or movie soundtrack – don’t be surprised to hear it back-dropping a tender scene on your screens sometime in the future. - Hotpress May 2012

Known for his New York connection, having played alongside Jeff Buckley at Sin É, and recently learning lessons in stillness and silence from his Czech fanbase, the ever-gigging Mark Geary rarely sits still. Unless he’s on a plane.
“Touring has a simplicity to it that I absolutely adore,” he begins, “then there’s the last couple of gigs and you’re usually at an airport again, out of your mind with tiredness. I always cry on planes. Well, it’s a kind of gentle sobbing! There’s the lack of oxygen...”

A great excuse. No matter where the Dublin troubadour wanders, however, you feel music always follows. We’ve just called time on an afternoon session of his new Songs About Love, Songs About Leaving material and wrapped things up with a video interview (vimeo.com/42553663) where he dealt with the ‘singer-songwriter’ tag (“I was never part of the gang but it’s like the sailor who has the clap!”) and the pared-back-and-peaceful-nature of his new album (“the manifesto – just get rid of everything”).

He’s happy to continue our chat so after a quick walk soundtracked by football talk – he’s a massive Manchester United fan – we’re sitting outside a café. At the spot where Sycamore St. and Essex St. East meet, an old codger is singing ‘The Aul Triangle’ to anyone who’ll listen. Loud enough for me to shove my recorder closer to Geary, the 41-year-old songsmith laughs to himself.

“Started the weekend early, I think!”

A nice bit of rambunctious ambience – if that isn’t an oxymoron – that Geary probably wouldn’t get in New York.

“Haha, well this is what happens! And the tragedy is, he knows all the words!”

Geary originally set sail for NYC as an 18-year-old and has lived there intermittently since. In that time, he’s watched the Ireland of street corner singing change dramatically.

“All the vanities... In a country where it rains 365 days a year, getting the ol’ [Australian] BBQ. And then I would go to Slovakia, Poland, the Czech Republic, and the welcome I was getting! I’d come back here and it was ‘these fuckers’ [immigrants]. Having gone on a one-way ticket and a Green Card to New York, having been the Irish immigrant, I just thought, there’s something really ugly about this. Really mean-spirited. But I wanna see my racists and bigots and sexists. All of them, front and centre. I want them wearing t-shirts, and being absolutely despicable. I don’t want them hiding behind some kind of political correctness.”

He eases back into default laidback mode. He still cares about his native youth.

“When I meet youngsters, and they’re all, ‘How does this work?’, I know that I didn’t have that person. I always said that I wanted a ‘Yoda’ to talk to – ‘Tell me, great one!’. And I genuinely didn’t have one. The only guy I had was Glen Hansard, and he was trying to figure it out himself.”

So who plays the role of Yoda in his daydreams? Dylan immediately springs to his mind, and George Harrison follows. The Scorcese documentaries on both particularly hit home.

“Dylan pulled back the veil. He was saying, ‘I only did all this stuff to stay one step ahead’. It made incredible sense to me... Harrison seemed to straddle the absolute pinnacle of ‘rock star’ with all the agony of, ‘How do I justify this?’. All that spiritual searching.”

When he talks of his heroes his tones become even more hushed. He recognises their internal journey and, after a good decade in an industry where he reckons 80% of his contemporaries have given up, he’s becoming a veteran himself. Now he’s looking outside the album-tour-album hamster wheel. He’d like to continue his soundtrack work and quite fancies writing about his touring life, “in a way that isn’t, ‘great gig tonight!’ and more about all the experiences I’ve had. The wonderful, the crazy and the wacky. I’d be really interested, if someone could get me in a room and get me to stay quiet. If you’re creative in one way, what happens if you lose your arms or some kind of sense or faculty? I’m interested in where that creativity goes. If you can’t play guitar, where does it go?”

It doesn’t just disappear.

“Absolutely not. You’re just thinking in that way and coloured by your medium. I’m sure I’ll be writing or...” He pauses to great effect, runs his fingers through his quiffed silver hair and thinks back to boyhood daydreams. “Be a creative midfielder!”

Songs About Love, Songs About Leaving is out now. - Hotpress August 2012

The spirit of Jack Kerouac must’ve possessed Mark Geary when he took his show on the road, leaving behind what seemed like the ultimate gig. Geary—who’d left Dublin, Ireland, in 1992, NYC-bound—landed a spot playing at his brother’s coffeehouse, Sine-é, a quaint little Irish joint on St. Marks Place in New York’s East Village. At the historic venue, Geary often opened for Jeff Buckley. But instead of staying put and trying to impress label execs, he opted to crisscross
the world playing to crowds of both MTV spring-breaking frat boys in Barbados and
Buckley-worshipers in Dublin. “As a songwriter, the most important component of all was that I wanted to be kind of a dusty road warrior,” says Geary. “I thought that was necessary as part of the equation that I lived on the road—a sort of country-and-western or hippie notion that that’s what it meant to be a songwriter.”
To Geary, staying close to home base “doesn’t make you any better as a writer or performer.” He’s been traveling and playing so long that when it came time to make a second album, he cut the whole thing with relative ease. “There comes a point when you’ve gone and you’ve literally done a thousand gigs and you’re kind of on top of your game,” says Geary.
His sophomore album, Ghosts—sweet, melodic and altogether enchanting—is fondly reminiscent of Buckley, with breathy angel-voiced lyrics on “Up & Up” and twangy guitar on “Morphine.” “I think what I got from [Buckley is] that you bring yourself up to the stage, you bring yourself up to the table, and you say, ‘this is who I am,’” Geary says. “So anything that comes after this is a bonus.” Moving forward in true Kerouac fashion, with plenty new experiences under his belt, Geary is ready to ?nd new places to visit and new audiences to play to. Even he doesn’t know where his current tour will end, but his instincts to leave Ireland, then New York haven’t steered him wrong yet. “I think I’m gonna be OK. I’m just gonna be taken care of,” he says. “I just have that sense about it.” - Paste Magazine- Issue #15

New York-based Irishman Mark Geary, a recent finalist in Disc Makers' Independent Music World Series (of which Billboard is a sponsor), offers an outstanding sophomore release in "Ghosts." His obscurity should end
here: With sparse but superlative meditations like "Beautiful," "You're the Only Girl," the pretty lullaby "Midnite Sun" and the nearly nine-minute "Hold Tight," Geary's songwriting and delivery recall such top contemporary practitioners as Ron Sexsmith. "Ghosts" also evokes Van Morrison, particularly his early-1970s
era. Perhaps most satisfying about the album is that such a project can be released in 2005 at all—apart from occasional drum programming, these are fully organic, natural-sounding recordings; vocoder, synthesizers and other sound manipulators need not apply. "Ghosts" is a collection of superb songs delivered
with a quiet intensity that will endear itself to listeners.—CW - Billboard.Biz