Luka Bloom Writes His 15th Record

On Irish singer-songwriter Luka Bloom’s 15th solo album, Eleven Songs, the music veteran digs deep into his psyche.

On Irish singer-songwriter Luka Bloom’s 15th solo album, Eleven Songs, the music veteran digs deep into his psyche. Bloom, who borrowed “Luka” from the Suzanne Vega song and “Bloom” from Ulysses to create his stage name, (he has a brother, Christy Moore, who’s a famous Irish folk singer, hence the name change)  had some interesting comments about the craft of songwriting in an interview with Vancouver’s Straight.com.

“More and more in my working life I find that the most important act that I can participate in in order to get the good stuff going is to just get out of the way,” he adds, laughing. “If I introduce too much of the deliberate thought process and the thinking and the intellect, the songs don’t come. You need a certain amount of that to make anything that’s remotely interesting, but more often than not it can kind of get in the way.”

“There are two schools of thought on this,” he continues, “and one is that every divorce and every major emotional catastrophe is fodder for the next album. And there’s another school of thought that suggests that maybe a more reflective approach might be more useful. Personally, I don’t really go along with the ‘songwriting and singing as therapy for me’ department. I’m much more interested in resolving my own issues, such as they are, and then I go to write.

“That said, there’s a song on this album, ‘Everyman’, which was an immediate reaction to the death of a friend,”says Bloom. “I mean, literally within an hour of hearing that this guy had died, I wrote that song. And that’s a very poignant and, if I may say so, beautiful example of an emotional reaction in a song. But I tend to avoid rushing to pen in the middle of personal emotional upheaval.”
Read the full article here. Bloom, who’s Eleven Songs is available via Bar None Records, is currently touring the States.