Slane date for casey black

Casey Black returns to Ireland this month to promote his new album 'See The Black Sea', which will be released in Europe on 11th September on Tonetoaster Records, and will be followed by a long European tour.

Black is the Nashville-born, Columbia-University-educated, gravel-voiced, literary singer-songwriting son of Charlie Black, NSAI Hall of Fame songwriter of more than a dozen #1 country hits. He wrote his first song at twelve years old, released his first 'record' three years later (a cassette of songs he recorded in his basement on his father's hand-me-down equipment), and signed with EMI Music Publishing Nashville at nineteen, making him one of the youngest staff songwriters on Music Row. 

There he wrote with some of the Row's greatest writers, including his father. While his craft improved, his muse became aloof during his three years at EMI, and so, in order to 'be as poor and lost as other people my age–to have something true to write about,' Black moved to Los Angeles.

In the next five years he made two records–Vacations, and The Glass is Half–the first of which was placed on KCRW Los Angeles deejay Tricia Halloran's top 10 records of 2005; the second having songs placed on ABC's show Greek, and Lifetime's Army Wives. He also cut his live-show teeth, playing some of LA's great singer-songwriter venues, like the House of Blues and Hotel Cafe.

In 2008, in order to finish his degree at Columbia University, Casey Black moved again, this time to New York, and after a school-induced music hiatus, he happened upon a show featuring Niall Connolly, the Irish-born figurehead of Brooklyn's Big City Folk scene. Inspired by the literary and honest approach to songwriting of the scene's players, he threw himself back into music and made his third record, It Shapes Me As It Goes, before playing shows in New England, the South, LA and Ireland.

Drawing a close to a circular decade, Black returned to Tennessee in 2012, where he lives with his wife in a small country house outside of Nashville. He released his fourth album, Lay You In The Loam (CatBeach Records) a year later, and took it on tour to Germany and Ireland, the latter opening for the chart topping Irish singer songwriter, Mick Flannery. The record broke into the top ten on college radio.

Black, who owns more books than he does records, writes a literary lyric in the conversational, storytelling style–songs about optimistic pessimists, about the battles between the brain and the guts–and his deep singing voice is tumbled with gravel. It's a unique and compelling combination, one which may, as KCRW's Tricia Halloran put it, restore one's 'faith in the lost art of damn fine songwriting.'

Casey Black plays Boyles in Slane at 9pm on 15th September with support from E W Harris.