Guitarist and Songwriter David O’Leary
My Story
I was born in Dublin Ireland into a musical family. My father was a classically trained pianist. So I was lucky to grow up listening to a wide range of Baroque, Classical, and Romantic piano and orchestral music. My parents also like jazz, big band, pop, and a wide variety of music styles. On any given day in our house, you might hear Chopin, Mozart, Sinatra, Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and many more. So I was lucky to be exposed at an early age to a wide variety of music.
At the age of 10, I consistently bugged my parents for a guitar because I wanted to be “cool like Jimi Hendrix.” (An impossible task but it seemed possible to a kid.)
That Christmas, I got my first guitar. It was a nylon string guitar with a big neck and bad action (although I had no idea what that was at the time). After 6 months of lessons, and realizing that I was hooked, my parents bought me my first electric guitar, a Honda SG copy. It was similar to Tony Tommi’s guitar from the band Black Sabbath. Instruments were expensive in Ireland so most people could only afford copies and not the real Gibsons or Fenders.
At age 15, I had my first experience in a recording studio and was hooked. Recording studios were magical places to me then and still are today.
After working that summer in a toy factory, I was able to buy my first real Fender Stratocaster. The next three years were spent playing in various bands around Dublin, writing background music for Radio Telefis Eireann (RTE) radio 1 shows, music for folk and country singers, and working in a friends studio. I also started taking classical guitar lessons with the hope of studying music full time.
After high school, I decided to move to America to study music. When I was in Ireland, I always wanted to understand how music was constructed so I could become a better musician. I feel the same way today. There is always something new to learn.
I moved to Boston, with the intent to get a classical guitar performance degree. I studied classical guitar with William Buonocore at Boston Conservatory but switched to Music Composition and Theory. After completing Composition and Theory studies with Larry Thomas Bell at New England Conservatory and John Fitz Rogers at the Longy Conservatory of Music, I spent 2 years studying Audio Production at Boston University’s Center for Digital Arts. I thought it was important to augment the real world studio experience I had with theory and to fill in the missing gaps I had in my knowledge.
After music studies, I started focusing on my career in software development (gotta make a living and pay the bills) and the music stopped. Life gets in the way. Even though I stopped writing and playing music, music still remained a big part of my life. Professionally I’ve been lucky to combine both music and software working at leading audio companies like Izotope and Auto-Tune.
A few years ago, I was in Ireland watching a band play in a pub, when a friend told me I should get up and play with them. I replied: “That ship sailed a long time ago.” At this stage, it was 15-plus years since I had picked up a guitar. When I got back to the US, I bought a new guitar and started practicing again. Soon after, I decided to try and write new music. So I decided to write 4 songs, based on the 70s rock music I grew up on and loved. Those songs constitute the Wish I Could Go Back release.
The hardest part for any musician is releasing new music, because once it’s out there, you have no control over it. You don’t know how people are going to react to it. Releasing new music always comes with a mix of anxiety, trepidation, but also excitement and creative reward.
For me, these feelings were amplified a thousand times over by the fact I had a 20-year hiatus. Did I have anything worthwhile to say after all these years? Do the songs work and make sense? How are the lyrics? Does the instrumentation make sense? Is the guitar playing any good? Is the production good enough? And on and on… Lots of unanswered questions leading to lots of anxiety! However, in the end, I am happy with how the music turned out and I hope that others will agree.