16 Nov 08 @ 2:48 pm
Moley’s Blog: Report to size2shoes

Chilled with the Madso this weekend, Eoin is training for his triathlon, Moley and Eoin wrote a song for a certain philanthropist in a country & western style….

Madso said the Cobalt cafe gig a couple of weeks was the best thing hed ever seen and that we stepped it up a gear.  Good man Madso, we will keep him around!

We love sycophants here at size2shoes as we try to straddle the global music market in our quest for high sales in many territories.

We are having a lads night in in our gaf in Newport, Co. Tipperary.
Why dont you send us something surprising and interesting in the post?

Anything will do, we will report what we recieve:)

All senders of any kind will recieve free entry to any gig they wish that is posted on the website in future!

Hope your weekend was cool.

Love from Limerick.
S2S

06 Nov 08 @ 12:08 am
Eoin’s Blog: The Chieftains

Went into see the Chieftains play at the UL Concert Hall on Sunday night.  Last time I saw them I was in the front-row of the Waterfront hall in wee Belfast last year. Paddy Maloney - of the Chieftains - had called me up a couple of weeks before, asking me if I knew of any bodhran players who could sing.  I wracked my brain as fast as I could, a couple came to mind, I told Paddy I’d make a few calls and get right back to him.  There was one bodhran player on the last Beoga album that I had a suspicion might have sang on some of the tracks, so I called my bro to see if he was home to check out on the album sleeve.  “Hey mo, will you run down to the Kitchen and check if the bodhran player on the Beoga CD sings on any of the tracks.  Paddy Malony - of the Chieftains - they’ve played with the Stones you know - and Sting too - is looking for a singing bodhran player” - “Sure thing”- I hear him skipping down the four steps into the Kitchen, lightly swinging open the door, then, he stops.  There’s a pause. - “Wait a minute”, he says.  “I can sing and play bodhran”.  There’s a beat.  Then I realise,  “I call you back in five minutes”, and I hang up the phone.

Fast-forward to the Waterfront Hall, October 2007.  Moleman smiling out from behind his little frame-drum, the very drum whose skin was cut from the carcus of one of goats we used to have in the front-field, Ba and Ma - we were never sure who was who - right there, up on the stage, beside the boys themselves, The Chietains.  Their opening set finishes to the rapturous applause of a sold-out house of 2,000 bums on seats.  Then my little bro steps up to mic for a little solo song.  You could hear the sound of an angel dancing on the head of pin.  Eventually to the finale, where MC Mole accompanies the lads on the mic doing beat-box.  Is this the first time that such stalwarts of Irish Traditional Music have been fused with elements from the hip-hop movement?  You’d have to address that question to Ireland’s foremost and founding member of Irish Hip-hop Musicological Studies.

eos

30 Oct 08 @ 6:19 pm
Eoin’s blog: Dear Blog

Dear Blog,

It’s been awhile. I hope you haven’t thought me rude, it’s just that… I mean, it’s not you, it’s me.

So much has happened that last two weeks. What a blur. We had an amazing showcase at the Cobalt Cafe last Friday week. We met up with Julie Feeney the night before and went over this little Scots Gallic song. She also played us her new album. She recorded all the tracks with the Irish Chamber Orchestra in the rehearsal studios of the thier new building here at University of Limerick by the Shannon banks, but she recorded all the vocals herself and mixed it too. It sounds really really good. I think it’s going to do really well for her. Critics will gush, but more importantly, people will like it. And the gigs will be amazing.

But enough about her; this blog is supposed to be about me; how size2shoes, from humble beginnings, set out, two brothers against the world, to achieve their childhood dream of going multi-platinum in many territories.

We flew out to Ukraine after Dublin to do a couple of gigs with our mum Noirin at a sacred music festival in Kiev. Great town, and we landed on our feet with the people we met over there. It was wonderful, and also always such a privilege to perform with herself. I also got some lyrics for a new song that I finished last night out of the experience. If you don’t know what does check out www.theosony.com also web-mastered by the brilliant Robbiiii who looks after our site.

Then headed out to London town to see a brilliant play by a really good friend of mine. The theatre that commissioned it only has one stipulation - it had to completely in the dark. It was such a freaky experience to be sitting in a room full of people all listening in the dark to real actors! If you ever have the chance to see anything like…

So, just back on Monday, and now we’re off again with Noirin to Waterford tomorrow to do a workshop and a gig on Friday night in the Cathedral there. I think that’s Halloween night? Spooky shit.

Was up till four last working on a new song on the bauld computer. It’s called “(there’s gonna be a) Showdown”; cheesey I know, but you really have to hear it; t’would rock the balls off ya.

The first-draft of the artwork for the album should be with us by the end of this week. It’s all happening.

And you have to check out the review that Barry Egan gave our showcase! It’s unbelievable. He loved it!

Stay good.

eos

30 Oct 08 @ 5:59 pm
Sunday Independent Article

Sunday October 19 2008

They are fairly lively, these two young men. In fact, the synergy between Eoin and Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin on North Great George’s Street, Dublin, on Friday puts you in mind of Simon & Garfunkel or Steely Dan unplugged. Or even a harmonic early Sixties Mick and Keith undrugged.

The sons of acclaimed Irish musicians and singers Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin and Nóirín Ní Riain, Eoin and Mícheál (he calls himself Moley from The Wind in The Willows) play as size2shoes. Their acoustic performance at the Cobalt Cafe was a revelation of note-perfect harmonies (Temper Temper among them) and improvisation (Moley does Snoop Dogg in a Limerick accent while Eoin does an angsty Nick Drake).

Galway chanteuse Julie Feeney, whose new album will be out next February, joined the brothers on stage for a mesmeric and dreamlike Celtic hymn that owed as much to Van Morrison in his meditative mode as it did to the spirit world.

After the swooping vocal dynamics of their show, Eoin and Moley unwound over a drink with yours truly. Moley waxed lyrical about being Ireland’s foremost academic in rap performance practice in the south west of Ireland. (He has an MA in ethno-musicology at UL.)

He listened to a lot of gangsta rap in the dormitories of boarding school while his older brother Eoin started writing in troubadour guitar style. “We combined our creative forces to form size2shoes in 2002,” says Eoin adding that they have just recorded a self-titled album on the label that their father created.

Eoin says that size2shoes was inspired by “an American girl that Moley was kind of seeing and she was very small”.

“She was one inch off being a dwarf,” Moley says. “We never got beyond the kissing. I didn’t want to unleash the madness!”

Speaking of madness, movie star Russell Crowe played with them in a pub in Limerick two years ago.

After the show they became firm friends over strong spirits. They were supposed to reconvene in Los Angeles but Moley somehow “got the dates wrong”.

Russell blanked out a few days off American Gangster, remembers Moley, “so he could go on the piss with us for the weekend and he said he would get some creative types to come with him and we would all hang out together.

“So he rang us to tell us he was staying as Mr Black in the Presidential Suite in the Beverly Hills Hilton. We had to tell him that we were still in Ireland. ‘Oh, I better call off the troops then.’ We haven’t spoken to him since.”

- Barry Egan

26 Oct 08 @ 7:49 pm
Moley’s Blog: Tell me I’m the only one Barry

Well lads, hows it going?

Me and Eoin were in Kiev, Ukraine, for the last week, back into the swing of things now. Had an amazing time in Kiev singing with Noirin and had a great gig last wednesday.

You may have seen the article in last Sunday’s Sindo after our Size2shoes gig in the Cobalt Cafe, which also went down real well. The review said that Size2shoes is kinda like Steely Dan (So fine…so young…tell me im the only one Barry…) or that me and Eoin are like a modern day keith richards and mick Jagger except without the drugs! I have often marvelled at the on stage chemistry of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards as they jiggle their wrinkly bits around the stadia of the world…so fine…not so young…

A good review all the same, Julie Feeney sang with us at the same gig, she is some cool dude,we did a great song together, a little scots gallic number, really enjoyed hangin out with her, met lots of interesting people at the Cobalt cafe for Dr. Paul Burkes going away do, we will miss you!

Next Size2shoes gig is December 7th in the Belltable arts centre, Luimneach.
Fully acoustic show, no mics or amps in a tiny little venue downstairs, will be magic!
How are you?
Your looking well:)
Moley