Maxine Gallagher

Born in England and raised in Ireland, Maxine Gallagher is more at home with her Irish roots and yet not particularly connected to anywhere. She has been a serial nomad, living in Dublin, London and Japan, and moving to Germany in 2011. She studied to be an engineer, but was always driven to do something else. Over the years it became clear that this path had to be music and words. Growing up in a musical home, her father had taught her guitar at a young age, and surrounded her with Irish and 60s folk music. She started writing songs nine years ago, initially accompanied with the guitar and, more recently, the piano, to express her feeling of disenchantment with the working world, her growing sense of needing to find the right thing to do, love and loss, and the wrongs she saw around her.

Since then, she’s performed in bars and folk clubs in the UK (her songs having been played on BBC radio) and across the US. Now working as a writer in Berlin, she continues to write songs and perform, and has played in intimate Berlin venues like Café Ici, Café Laika and St Gaudy Café, as well as larger festivals like Melodica in Berlin and Hamburg and Musique Maudite in Moabit.

The music...
Maxine's sparse guitar and piano compositions form a minimalist backdrop for her soft Irish lilt, combining to form haunting songs that feel like being let in on a secret, and that resonate long after the last note. Recently, she has been working at adding new music to old nursery rhymes, recreating the sense of foreboding that many of them were originally infused with, but that has been lost today.

Feeling that she needed time to discover her musical direction, she has been reticent about sharing her music widely. However, now feels she’s found her way, and plans to record an album soon.