TLDR: John Dog is a Galway-born outsider musician, a self-taught singer/songwriter and DIY recording artist who also makes his own videos. A lifelong student of the popular song, Dog's compositions are often wordy, hopefully tuneful and usually short.
About John Dog
John Dog is a self-taught singer/songwriter who trades in songs that aim to be melodic, literate, funny and affecting. The songs are new, but written and sung the old-fashioned way. And they’re usually short. Wherever possible, the songs are short.
Raised in a house where the radio played all day and surrounded by a Catholic quantity of siblings, music was a constant in the young Dog’s life.
Aged eighteen, Dog lucked into a band, The Kathleens, and began to write. Smiled upon by national radio institution The Rock Show, which played all their demos and granted them two in-studio sessions, the band nonetheless called it quits in 1997. The one album The Kathleens recorded remains lost to this day, but one of the few writers to hear it declared it one of the best Irish albums of all time.
A solo EP for Secret Records followed, The Waking Dream EP. Overseen by Secret’s Pat Neary and produced by Paul Brennan, Waking Dream was exponentially improved by the playing of some of Galway’s finest musicians, including The Stunning’s Cormac Dunne, Cane 141’s Michael Smalle and former-Kathleens-guitarist-turned-session-ace Fergal McDonogh.
Dog moved to London and kept writing, recording, and playing. During that time he acquired a recording machine and, like a lot of people in the 00s, learned how to make tracks at home. That period yielded a number of releases, including 2012’s The Random Walk.
Dog relocated to Ireland in 2018. After decades of trying to combine music with day jobs, Dog concluded the latter were very likely going to kill him and, in 2021, finally turned “pro”.
Since then, Dog effectively re-learned his trade by performing live regularly. He released a string of new recordings, each with a video made by himself, leading to streams and airplay in Ireland and beyond. His jokey karaoke rewrite of “New York On Sunday” became the theme song for a call-in show on legendary New Jersey station WFMU. The Grierson and Leitch podcast used a Dog arrangement of its theme for its annual end-of-year round-up for the past two years. And in 2023, Ireland's Arts Council awarded Dog funding from the Agility Award to continue his work.
Which he does, writing, recording and releasing new work while playing live whenever possible around Galway. His latest release is the album “Always in Trouble”.
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