Beside Trawbreaga Bay, in Co. Donegal, on the north coast of Ireland, in an old schoolhouse, with a suitcase full of hired recording gear, Oisin Leech strums gently on an acoustic guitar and watches the tide pull the water away from this ancient inlet. The thickness of Oisin’s voice soothes the old world room as the sound waves bounce around in the land where his ancestors still live and still wander. This is a scene from the makings of Oisin Leech’s first solo album Cold Sea. After a musical history that led Leech from the street punk bands of yesteryear through an ongoing seven-album stint with folk duo The Lost Brothers, he found himself for the first time working on songs to sing alone.
The thought of performing songs with no accompanying harmony and minimal arrangement led Leech to soul-search for new expressions and ways of playing. Throughout the great pause of the pandemic, after his family had gone to bed, Leech sat by the fireplace experimenting with open tunings. The poems of Seamus Heaney and Leech’s own history as a studied playwright inspired the words. In his mind, the songs became imagined vignette films playing behind closed, guitar eyes. After writing nearly 40 new songs in this fashion Leech wrote “October Sun” which would become the foundation for Cold Sea.
