The penultimate single in the build up to Christy’s now highly anticipated debut EP, ‘Dancing With Air’, sees the Glaswegian singer-songwriter return to his busking roots in breathtaking style - out 24th July via Made Records.
A slight change in pace to his previous releases, ‘Dancing With Air’ tugs on the heartstrings whilst galloping along with a zealous pace, set by the upbeat, John Martyn influenced, acoustic guitar. The single culminates into a beautiful choir of vocals, cascading piano lines, and soaring lap steel that surrounds Christy’s hair-raising, half broken, vocals that sing “ever since you’ve been gone I've been dancing with air”.
As with the rest of the songs that will make up the EP ‘Homegrown’, ‘Dancing with Air’ was inspired by the break up of a serious relationship from a girl whose family had become his own, after a difficult adolescence.
Talking of the forthcoming EP, Christy said “These songs are everything I have been through in the last few years...My first release needed to be real, genuine – either people like it or they don’t, but at least I have been 100% myself and I’m not sacrificing anything to be a popstar. They are sad songs but I wanted them to sound beautiful.”
At twenty four, Christy O’Donnell has already lived out several unlikely dreams. He’s busked the streets of Glasgow making £400 a day. He’s been in a boy band, acted in a Disney TV series, and even climbed Arthur’s Seat with Rufus Wainwright… But beneath the young Glaswegian’s many incarnations is a serious musician about to unleash his first EP. Though intensely personal, this is not simple, singer-songwriter territory: the effervescent O’Donnell counts Ray Charles, John Martyn and Chet Baker as among his biggest musical influences.
O’Donnell explains that he found his voice as a busker on Glasgow’s famous Buchanan Street as a teenager. He’d always wanted to sound like Jeff Buckley, imitating him in the shower as a child, but in front of the crowds of onlookers as a street musician he learned to let his feelings run wild. “Singing is basically letting out your emotions in a weird wail,” he laughs. “And after all the busking, I know a good wail from a bad one.”
Christy’s debut EP ‘Homegrown’ will be released later this year.