Marc Carroll

Newly signed to One Little Indian Records, Carroll is readying a brand new album in Los Angeles for his new label, due in 2012, and sees his catalogue re-mastered and re-packaged by the label over the coming months, with the first offering ‘In Silence’ , An introductory of sorts, released on July 25th 2011 and in the US on August 2nd. His albums Ten Of Swords (2003), All Wrongs Reversed  (2004), World On A Wire (2005) and Dust Of Rumour (2009) were much lauded in the likes of Mojo and Uncut and gained widespread critical acclaim. In the past 20 years Marc Carroll has travelled from his native Dublin to London and back and then onto Los Angeles to pursue his musical vision. “I’ve always travelled. I’ll go anywhere that is purposeful to me. The music comes first. It always has and always will. People have suffered because of that, probably me too, but I just can’t help that. I left my family behind, everything and I live with that. It isn’t always easy but that’s just the way it is.” But as a free spirit his knack for consistently finding a striking song writer's perspective to deal with life's wounds, challenges and elations makes him more than the sum of his parts. While covering a wide terrain - from tender pop n folk fired vignettes of ‘Ten Of Swords’, to the raw exposed emotion of ‘World On A Wire’ onto the shimmering transcendence and lustful longing of ‘Dust Of Rumour – He has convincingly synthesized his own indivisible style. “I heard Johnny Rotten and thought my word, I heard Hank Williams and I thought good lord and I heard Bob Dylan and I picked up a guitar. You can’t go back or aspire to any logical or idyllic way of life after that. I had to do something. I had no choice.” His career path has mapped many co-ordinates, its peaks, troughs and occasional curve balls furnishing him with a worldview we might loosely term ‘philosophical.’ “Not much fazes me”, he says, smiling, a reluctant outsider who also happens to have an acute song-writing gift. The path of the music business history is littered with promising careers that have been mishandled and misdirected, mulled over then chewed up and spat out. It takes a certain type of resolve to survive such ordeals with dignity, marbles and, most importantly, talent intact. “I don’t mull over it, there’s been a reason for any so called mishaps or this perceived misfortune which I don’t see myself.  I care about the music, not the business behind it. Pride is a distraction. Achievement brings it’s own rewards.” Along the way he’s gathered famous fans ("I would question that", he says) among some of his key inspirations - Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, - and had a bizarre, but remunerative, liaison with Top US TV show Friends. Bob Mould of Husker Du/Sugar took an earlier incarnation of Carroll's around Europe (search out a blistering version of 'Ticket To Ride' that was performed together on the last night of the tour). Carroll has also played with former Mould cohort and sickeningly under appreciated, and arguably the better tunesmith, Husker Du songwriter/drummmer, Grant Hart. A new album is currently being worked on in Los Angeles, where he resides. It is due for release in 2012. “From a young age I always felt some sort of gravitational pull to be somewhere else and I can’t really explain that….but I needed to be elsewhere so I went to London for a while, and then I travelled to America a few years back….and stayed. There is a relative openness in America, not so many approval tests......or limits to character.” Now signed to One Little Indian (after stints with Rough Trade, Virgin, Evangeline, Universal and High Noon), the legendary and eclectic label set up by Flux Of Pink Indian’s, Derek Birkett in 1985. “Well, Derek sat me down and simply said ‘what do you want to do?’….that’s not something you hear in the music business too often….just straight out, ‘what do you want to do?’…..he’s a kick boxer too and what else do you need in life other than kick boxing and a little bit of freedom.”