Speaker 1: Welcome everybody to Matt Connorton Unleashed, and we are live
from the studios of wm NH ninety five point three
FM and Glorious Manchester, New Ympshire. Of course, you can
stream the show live from anywhere. Go to Matt connorton
dot com slash live for all your streaming options, social
media links, contact info, show archives, et cetera, et cetera.
If you are listening to the show live, today is Saturday,
January twenty four, twenty twenty six. We have an exciting
show for you today. In a few minutes, we're gonna
hear some world radio premieres. We get a bunch of
new music to share with you. But the track we
just heard that is called Pushing thirty. To open up
this week's show, the artist is and I'm gonna bring
him in a moment. I'm gonna as him if I'm
saying his name correctly, because it's not a name I'm
used to saying. Ca hal Fits, I don't. I don't
know if I'm saying that right. Let's go ahead and
bring him in though he's joining us via Microsoft Teams.
Speaker 2: Hello are you there?
Speaker 3: I'm there, my friend, har are you you did a
very very good stob of my name.
Speaker 4: I must say, I'm very very impressed.
Speaker 2: Well, I had to look it up.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: It's amazing.
Speaker 1: You can go on YouTube and just type in how
to pronounce, and just put in whatever name you're looking for,
and someone's inevitably posted a video explaining that.
Speaker 2: But you know, and I should know, I am.
Speaker 1: Of Irish descent myself, so I should have had I
should have had a clue, but I really didn't until
I actually looked it up.
Speaker 4: Do you have any idea where your Irish descendants come from?
Speaker 1: I do not.
Speaker 2: I do not. I need to research that. I haven't.
Speaker 1: I just know that I've got some Irish in me,
not only because my you know, my dad was of
Irish descent, but also if I go out into the
sun in the summer without sunscreen, I burn immediately. So
I'm definitely I'm definitely Irish.
Speaker 3: You become one of those red and white sweets that
we have over here. You red. Yeah, we're very close.
That's the tell tale sign that you've Irished genetics. That
you don't do the sun very well. And we also
don't do the rain very well. It always rains here
and no one ever has any proper rain gear, so
we're just kind of stuck in this middle of people
wearing shorts in December.
Speaker 4: And so yeah, it's good fun though. It's a lovely
place that's interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I love the song Pushing thirty, although as
someone who pushed thirty quite a while ago, it makes
me feel a little well, we'll talk about that, but
it is a great song.
Speaker 2: Can you tell us about it.
Speaker 1: I know that this came out in November, but you're
getting a lot of traction with this single.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like it's doing well, and I suppose a lot
of my songs in general, like I started writing music
in July twenty twenty four. I used to be a
personal trainer. I left that job to start writing music.
I just had some sort of away thing where I
was like, this is what I want to do. And
most of my songs, and especially Pushing thirty was a
reflection of people around me and also myself that I
think because of everything the way the world has gone,
that I think people in their late twenties and early
like they still feel like teenagers, you know, and we're
still kind of stuck in these routes that a lot
of us in Ireland can't get houses.
Speaker 4: We can't, you know, like everything's.
Speaker 3: Expensive, and I think you can if you're living without purpose,
you can get caught in that rut of you know,
let's go out and number selves the weekend and let's
adhere to social peer pressure of you know, the latest
trendy close or the latest exposed, and you just get.
Speaker 4: Stuck in the row.
Speaker 3: And I suppose I saw that in myself, and I
saw that in people around me. And I'm very lucky
that since I started doing this that I have the
most amazing support network of producers and managers and everything
that it's.
Speaker 4: All kind of falling into place.
Speaker 3: But yeah, it's a special song and it took me
four or five minutes to write and it's having good impact,
which is what I want from my music, just for
someone to listen to it and no matter how old
they after pushing sixty, you or pushing thirty, say, I
like that. It feels familiar and it feels relatable.
Speaker 2: Just for the record, I'm not pushing sixty.
Speaker 1: That's not what I meant, just to clarify, no, But
so I'm curious, like, was there a specific moment that
kind of sparked the song, or was this something that
was kind of building up in you over time, or
because it sounds like it sounds like you haven't been
necessarily actively pursuing music for very long, or maybe you have,
but from what you said, it kind of sounded like
or at least on this level, this is kind of new.
Speaker 3: No, It's like, like July twenty twenty four, I quit
my job to do pub covers, like literally just playing
a few covers in a few wo in a few pubs,
you know. And then last January, my missus was saying
to me, She's like, you know, you're too good and
too talented to be a pub singer, so you need
to push yourself. So I released my first song last January,
and since then, I've like I've wrote, I've written fourteen
songs or something. In the last two three weeks, I've
another twenty twenty five recorded, and it's just flowing out
of me. And I just cannot tell you how much
I love it, Like I just I've never again I
picked up a guitar like again a year and a
half ago, having not played it. I used to strumgle
my bedroom at home four or five chords. But I've
just found something that for the first time in my life,
I've haven't given up on. Yeah, and like you know,
I've bounced around loads of different jobs. I'm kind of
like that typical Australian man with a hyvas jacket. You'd
think of doing anything that used to be me, you
know really, but I found I found music and that
song in particular is almost just a flow consciousness. I
sit down with the guitar five time minutes later the
song written.
Speaker 4: It's not like that all the time.
Speaker 3: Like I've got a few weeks where you know, you
just you don't have anything to say. But I found
that I've channeled music into the craziness in my head
and the thoughts I have. It gives me a platform
to allow me to say what I need to say
to myself and maybe to the world. And if someone
gets something from it, then that's a bonus too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's fantastic. You mentioned too. You know.
Speaker 1: The miss is it's great that you have a supportive
partner who encourages you to do that, because that that
makes a huge difference, you know obviously. I mean, and
I'm sure you don't take that for granted because that's
I'm sure you know, she's very proud of you.
Speaker 3: No, she's she's incredible. She's actually inside now minding the
small fellow with my mum. So shout out to my
mum as well. So I looked away for ten minutes
from parenting Judies to.
Speaker 4: Take my world famous rocks.
Speaker 3: There prem here of pushing thirty, you know, but no, look,
it's almost like it's all meant to happen.
Speaker 4: That, you know, my partner.
Speaker 3: My parents are very supportive, and my dad was that
typical kind of Irish dad where you know, you get
a job now and you stay here and you you
have security. And when I told him I was going
to be a musician, he was a bit like Aaron Jesus,
I don't know about that. No, that's that's not very
secure as this, but he kind of sees that it's
you know, it's it's going somewhere like I'm talking to
a radio station in the US and he's kind of like,
jee's fair play.
Speaker 4: Tore that's brilliant.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's cool, it's cool, and yeah it's supportive people.
My producer like, I've met all these people very organically
in the last year and a half a producer, videographer, manager,
and they're almost like the perfect team for me to
be around.
Speaker 4: So I know I'm meant to be doing this and
based on just keep around me.
Speaker 2: Oh, that's fantastic.
Speaker 1: Do you feel any kind of you know, because I
know there's sort of this Irish storytelling tradition and music.
I mean, is that something that you're you're conscious of
and your your approach to because you as you mentioned,
you're you know, you're writing a lot of songs.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So like I think I actually went back to
native languages, guelgap, so it's I went back to study
that about two years ago, so I'm kind of learning that.
And the Irishness is a very very particular character.
Speaker 4: We love to tell stories.
Speaker 3: If you asked us for directions, right, the shot could
be up on the right. We'll tell you on the
way to the shop about that tree that's been there
for ten thousand years and that was once you know,
And that's kind of part of our charm and part
of our imprint on the world. And what we have
to offer is is kind of this unique way of
looking at things. And I think as my songs progress
in terms of my songwriting, the last few songs have
written are a bit more metaphorical, a bit more imagery based,
a bit more trying to tell a story. And I'm
trying to channel into that. I'm trying to lean into that.
Like we're called the Lands of Saints and Scholars. You know,
we've some of the most amazing English writers ever, you know,
James Joyce and Seamus Heaney, all these amazing poets and
scholars that have gone before me. And I feel like
I have almost values uphols. You know, I'm very proud
to be Irish. A lot of people will know that
about me. You know, I learned this, I learned the language,
and I love where I'm from. In particular, Cork is
where I'm from, and everyone from Cork loves being from Cork.
That's just kind of you know, we have very special
connection to the land. We have a very special connection
to storytelling. And you know, over the last few hundred years,
we weren't allowed to speak our language because of things
that had gone on, and we had a very unique
way of preserving that, which was keeping the you know,
the spoken word alive and exaggerating stories to try and
make it seem magical, you know, and that's kind of
even what I'm doing now, the gift of the gap,
you know.
Speaker 2: Right right exactly.
Speaker 1: And so so this track Pushing thirty that we played
that came out in November, and then you've got another
single which we're going to play at the end of
our conversation called Enemy of Love, which is also a
great song. But I'm curious, now, what what are kind
of your plans in terms of releasing music are you
Are you going to do continue to do singles, do
you have an EP in mind or an album or
what's what's kind of the forward trajectory for you?
Speaker 3: See, I'm kind of stuck in a bit of a
crossroads at the moment because the way music is in
the industry is you know yourself that it's very dependent
on algorithms and dependent on a single getting picked up.
So I have loads of songs ready to go and written.
My next song is coming out hopefully in the next
four or five weeks. Will have to submit it to
Spotify and do all those bits.
Speaker 4: But I'm also I wrote, as.
Speaker 3: I said, maybe twelve eleven, thirteen, fourteen songs, which I'm
not exactly sure which ones are going to make it
to production. But I wrote a good chunk of those
in the last kind of three weeks, and I think
I have a kind of calling in me to I
have two studio dates booked in February, and I want
to record them live, completely live, Yeah, because I think
the way AI is going at the moment in synthetic music,
I think people are crying out for that authenticity and
that wrongness, and even if a chord gets wrong when
you're recording it, it's almost like magic now. Imperfection is
almost perfection now. So I'm kind of leaning towards getting
those A songs recorded. I feel the very strong we'd
record them live, and I may go against the arms
and just push it as an album, because I think
that's the music should be. If you're releasing single by single,
the story of what music is supposed to be gets lost,
Whereas if you have eight songs together, there's a whole narrative.
There's a whole world to get engrossed in and feed
into for eight songs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, That's something that comes up a lot on the show,
because you know, everyone kind of approaches it differently, and
there's so many different you know, I'm old enough to
remember when I was growing up, it was, you know,
an artist would release an album. Well, actually, first single
would go to radio six to eight weeks before the
album came out. Then the album comes out, and then
if all goes according to plan, you know, maybe there's
a second single. If things go really well, there's a third,
et cetera. But that was kind of the set way
of doing it. Now there's so many different ways to
release music. You can, you know, you can release singles,
you can do an EP, you can do an album,
you can do a series of singles that eventually coalesce
into an EP or an album, kind of.
Speaker 2: The inverse of what it used to be.
Speaker 1: And but but it's so interesting, And then that's why
ask those questions, because I'm always really curious, you know,
what everyone I talked to, what their thought process is
in terms of how they approach releasing music, because there
are so many ways to do it now. Yeah, the
other thing that oh yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 3: No, Like I think for me with that, and you're
very it's very interesting as well. I look at everyone
else as of an artist, and I see what they're doing.
And for me, I've had plenty conversations with my manager
and I think I've decided, not in a very hippy,
nonchalant way, but the right thing will will provide itself
when when the right moment arrives. So if an album
feels right, I'll do that. And I think the way
my songs are written and the message and the meaning
for me about my music is, you know, I wasn't
supposed to be doing this, or maybe I was, and
I don't really know where I am, and I'm just
releasing music and having fun. And if it means doing singles, great,
If it means to an album, I just think the
right thing will come along. But for me, like the
first album I ever listened to was an Irish artist
called Damien Rice, and the album is Oh, and it
was the most it's it's it's still a masterpiece.
Speaker 4: And when I think of.
Speaker 3: Releasing music, that's the standard I want to hold myself to.
I want someone to listen to a full album and think, well,
there's so much in that, there's so much to take
on that you have to keep listening to it, and
then you find your favorite song and then you say, oh,
I love coming up to this part because it's three
songs here which are really strong, and yeah, it's just
a it's a whole, it's a whole other universe of
looking at music.
Speaker 2: You know, is he your biggest influence? Would you say
Damien Rice?
Speaker 3: I think Damien Rice. I think Damien Rice. I think
Tom Waits is another one. I absolutely love Tom Waits,
Johnny Cash.
Speaker 4: When I was growing up as well.
Speaker 3: I'm very lucky that my parents, my mom and dad,
had these CDs and tapes that would play on the car.
They were older music, and I just I love that.
I think I think Damien Rice and Tom Waits definitely
as well. Would be would be two that I you know,
if I had to have a dinner in the morning
or a breakfast in the morning and to.
Speaker 4: Invite two people to be would be the two of them?
You know?
Speaker 2: That would that would be interesting?
Speaker 1: Tom Wait is uh what would be uh fascinating to
uh to sit down with?
Speaker 2: Although probably probably a little hard to understand them at times.
Speaker 1: But I'm curious too because you did mention AI and
that's another subject that, as you can imagine, comes up
a lot on the show and its impact on music.
Speaker 2: And I'm curious.
Speaker 1: I mean, is that something you're you're concerned about or
you sounded you struck Uh, I felt like kind of
an optimistic tone about it when you said, you know,
it's almost like music that is made entirely by humans.
If it's got little flaws in it, that's okay because
that's what people really want. They want the humanity of it,
and not sort of you know, just completely synthetic music.
But I'm curious if you can expand on that a
little bit, and how concerned are you about AI and music?
Speaker 3: Like I think if you if you had say, thirty
years ago artists and you know about synthetic drums and
synthetic you know, like synthesizers or like using you know,
to say even laptops or computers for card music said no,
we've our eight tracks and right, so, like, I can't
remember who said it, but I was listened to a
video the other day and it was really really interesting.
They were talk about AI music and your man asked them.
He was like, you know, how worried are you about
people you know, gravitating towards.
Speaker 4: AI music and are getting lost?
Speaker 3: And he said, well, you can go to a supermarket
and you can buy organic, fair trade bananas, and you
can buy five's bananas that are grown you know, in
a greenhouse down the road.
Speaker 4: It's your choice, you know.
Speaker 3: And I suppose I would probably lean into the market
that I would want to make music for the people
who want to buy the organic, fair trade bananas. And
I think there's always going to be a market for that.
I think there's always going to be a market for
imperfection for you know, seeing someone live and all the
different instruments and even someone making a bum note and
everyone in the crowd laughing because it's just, you know,
that's what music is. It's a gathering, it's a celebration.
It's someone that you know, you look up to who
is able to speak words that you may not able
to speak yourself, but you can listen to them say
it and it hits something with you, you know. And
if that and even my opinion is is that if
AI music does that for you, then you know, at
least you're conceiving music. It may not be the music
I enjoy or may not be the music I'd like
to make, but and there's I think again, like there's
tools you can take from AI. You know, I actually
use it for like I'll say to chat GBT, can
you make me a two week calendar for my content ideas.
You know, I'll ever use it for music directly, but
I think there's ways that we can't. If you duck
your head in the sand and say it's not happening,
it's not happening, then you're going to get lost behind.
Speaker 4: And I just think if you can use certain tools.
Speaker 3: You know, there's a great book by Cal Newpoort called
Digital Minimalism, and it's like, you know, use technology to
your advantage, you know, make it work for you.
Speaker 4: So you know, I don't really care too.
Speaker 3: Much, to be honest, I'll go and play shows to
twenty people and they pay twenty quid for a ticket
and I'll be laughing, you know, I know it doesn't
really you know, people will always want to hear what
you want to hear if you're saying the right thing, right.
Speaker 1: Right, I agree, and I fundamentally agree with what you said,
you know, And it's not like you can't hold back
technology anyway. You know that toothpaste is already all the
way out of the tube. It's here, and you know,
and it's been with us longer than people realize too.
I mean, you know, every major recording studio that is
you know, sort of technologically up to date, shall we say,
is already using AI and a lot of its software
and you don't necessarily realize it, but you know, you've
got programs that can, you know, pitch correct, and you
got all kinds of AI already happening.
Speaker 2: Anyway.
Speaker 1: Of course, now you can go on some of these
apps and just create songs out of whole cloth, not
even whole cloth. You put in a prompt, you tell
what you want, and it spits out something that in
some cases is actually very high quality.
Speaker 4: I tell you a phonny story.
Speaker 3: I was actually on holidays or Alcante no Albaferra this year,
and we were start down and having a cup of
tea and someone was playing music and a speaker next
to me, and I says, well, that sounds like Mumfort
and Sons or something that's incredible.
Speaker 4: And I went up to them and I was like,
who's that.
Speaker 3: They're like, oh, it's our friend. He's her neighbor. He
makes music. And I was like wow and he was.
They were like, yeah, it's all done through AI. And
I was like, oh, I've been caught. I've been caught,
but look, yeah, just look it's something's sounds sonically great
on our ears, and you know there's a niche that
needs to be scratched there too, So you know, I
kind of had to I kind of had to take
take the eld there as the as the young kids
would say, and yeah, I was like, you know, sure, look,
it's it's it's it's happening.
Speaker 4: It's here. We can embrace it, we can use it.
We cannot use it.
Speaker 3: You can complain about it, but you know, at the
end of the day, there's a message.
Speaker 4: Out there, which I feel what music.
Speaker 3: Is supposed to do, and you know, just let it happen,
Let it happen, lean into it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree with you. I absolutely agree with you.
Speaker 1: And by the way, so you mentioned playing live. Are
you doing a lot of shows?
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I'm kind of in this weird position where I
do cover gigs most nights of the week, and I'm
really lucky that I'm really busy, you know, and that
finances bills and like the studio time and everything. And
I got signed with a manager just before Christmas, which
was really cool considering it's been like, you know, say,
it was ten months since I had started releating music,
and then I got picked up by a manager and
even last year I played countless support slots to quite
big artists in Ireland and we're Yeah, I'm currently organizing
an Irish and kind of UK tour which is going
to be starting in April, hopefully myself a manager in
close contact doing all of that. And I just I
love performing, like I'll always be someone that just I
love performing two people in a room and like, you know,
my ambitions from music is you know, obviously there's a
nice monetary reward down the line when you put in
the graph, but as long as I'm just playing music
to people who want to hear for the rest of
my life and I'm able to you know, live comfortably
and have a roof over my head, I really am happy,
you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I just I love performing.
Speaker 3: I Like the first gig I ever did, I got
a buzz from people, you know, it was actually in
a restaurant, you know, it like a lunchtime slot in
a restaurant, and people's you know, turned around put down
the knighte from four for a minute and watched me
and I was like, wow, I have that impact with
my voice, and you know, so, yeah, I just love
performing live. I constantly just pick up the guitar at
home and then, like each cover gig I do, I
try my best to make it seem like it's my
last gig.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you never know, and you know, you know,
I could be paralyse smart and not be able to
play the guitar again, and I'd be kicking myself if
I didn't, even if I.
Speaker 4: Was playing a pub.
Speaker 3: Just just give people in there something to remember because
you never know who's watching, you know, that.
Speaker 2: Is absolutely true, absolutely one. No, that's great. That's great.
Speaker 1: So where's uh, where should people go online? Where's the
best place to go online to keep up with everything
that you're doing, Like.
Speaker 4: There's just the usual.
Speaker 3: If there's Instagram, cahole fits music, Spotify, cahole fits, TikTok,
cahole fits, you know, the usual stuff.
Speaker 4: You you'll find me somewhere.
Speaker 3: If you do a Google start cahol fits music, You'll
find me somewhere. And if people have been listening to
this and they're like, you know what I have to
say and they like the music, send me a message,
connect and have a chat, and you know, it's all
it's all gravy, it's all gravy.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, you should spell your name too for our Americans
who have no idea how to have no idea how
to spell that.
Speaker 3: So it's C A T H A L F I
t Z. You'll find me there somewhere.
Speaker 2: Excellent, excellent.
Speaker 1: Well, so in a moment, we're going to play this
track enemy of Love after we let you go. It's
been wonderful speaking with you. What should we know about
this song? Is this the I know this is the
previous single right right before pushing thirty.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like this was like I would consider myself mostly
kind of The stuff that I'm writing now is quite
a bit more folky and a bit more stripped back.
But again, I didn't want to tie myself to one
genre because I think some people get to focus that
I'm a focus singer, and I'm like, yeah, fantastic.
Speaker 4: But I went into the studio with a song.
Speaker 3: That had been fingerpicking at home with my guitar and
my producer. I have to give him a shout out.
His name is Keel, and Kenny is a magician. He's
just he's so incredibly talented. And I went into him
and I said, let's just make the funnest song possible
we could out of what we have here. Yeah, and
you know, he put down he got a drummer in.
We put down some drums in it. I had never
had drums on a song before, and I was like, interesting.
He put some funky guitar on it, some funky mandolin,
which is an Irish instrument that we use here, mandolin,
And I just said, I went into the studio and said,
the people, the session musicians, listen to the song once,
whatever comes to you naturally, let's track it down and
let's just make something fun.
Speaker 4: And it turned out quite well. Like it.
Speaker 3: It's a little bit different to what the direction I
kind of have normally for songs. But again, I think
if you tie yourself to one genre too much, you'll
become closed off to different types of music. Like I
started listening to like rap again, you know. And it's
not that I'm a rapper, but I think music there's
so many different genres, but it all.
Speaker 4: Says the same thing. It's expression, you know.
Speaker 3: So I just said, you know, let's just make this fun,
let's make it different, and you know it's it's done
quite well locally, and like all this has happened really
in the last year, so I'm not as happy with
it as other songs, but I can also I'm so
lucky that I was open minded enough to say, let's
just go a little bit of a different route and
see what happens.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, I love it.
Speaker 1: I think it's a great song. We're gonna play that
for everybody in a moment call fits. Thank you so
much for joining us today. This has been wonderful. Oh,
by the way, are you where you do?
Speaker 2: You have a show tonight? Are you playing anywhere tonight?
Speaker 3: I'm playing again. It's a kind of local pub in Cork.
It's called the Hideout. Probably not many Irish listeners here,
but yeah, just my local, one of the local pubs
in Cork. I'm very lucky that we're I live in
particular like in Ireland, that there's live music like seven
nights a week in multiple different locations, so there's no
shortage of work. So I just bounced around the different
pubs and small live music venues, excellent tunes, get some.
Speaker 4: Money and go home.
Speaker 1: That's fantastic. That's the way to do it, my friend,
very very good. Well listen, thank you so much. We
will definitely do this again in the future. Especially it
sounds like you've got you've got a lot of new
music coming, so we will. We'll have you on again,
and you know, and we'd love to as you're releasing
new music, we'd love to continue to kind of be
your your conduit into the American radio market here.
Speaker 4: So I really appreciate that.
Speaker 3: In Ireland, in Irish we have a phrase which says
gir of Mela mahagods, which means one hundred thousand thank
yous to you. So it's been an absolute pleasure to
have to speak to you as well, So I really
appreciate the time and opportunity.
Speaker 2: Oh wonderful. All right, very very good.
Speaker 1: We're gonna hit this track Enemy of Love and we'll
let you go call Hall Fits again.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon. You
got it. Bye bye,