Who am I?

I’ll tell you now, who I think I am, and some of the events that I got me to here. Other people will have their opinions and their versions, but this one will have less “Colin is the best singer since the invention of the voice” type lines. (Except that one.)


I was born in Dublin, Ireland, in the decade of AM radio to Leo and Monica Smith, two beautiful singers. I was a pretty late arrival, my brother and sister were in their teens. The result of which being that there was a pretty developed musical environment ready for me. My parents had met through singing competitions in Dublin called Feis Ceoil, and their passions were Opera, Musicals and the like. As a child, I got the passion, emotion and drama and the discipline it took to deliver also. My brother and sister’s music was Thin Lizzy, ELO, Yes, Stevie Wonder to mention a few. No matter the genre, though, I experienced all of it intensely and loved the same things, threaded through all good music. Music made me imagine. Colours. Stories. Characters. I love imagery in music. It’s everything.

So I sang as soon as I could, and have been singing ever since. I loved Michael Jackson. I learned every bar of Thriller and Off The Wall. Tried the dancing. Through the Jackson 5, I discovered all the other Motown artists. By 12, I was fully into Iron Maiden. I broke my toe in my bedroom rocking out to The Trooper. I was on my own at the time. Yeah. High school, meant new kids with a lot more music. We shared. REM, Depeche Mode, The Pixies, you know, stuff for teenage brooding boys to make sense of it all.

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It was at this time that I met, my cousins, the O Malleys. Music went into overdrive then. Aran, Oisin and Emmett were all incredible musicians, and they were my age, and that blew me away. And they had friends just like them. So we made bands and jammed and covered and composed. It was a revelation. Out of all the outfits we came up with, MRNORTH was the one that lasted, and still does. The band was born when Emmett, Oisin and I, joined with their dynamic drumming neighbor, Adrian Mordaunt. Our love for playing was insatiable. Thank God, because if we were more discerning than eager at the time, we might not have continued — the material was questionable.

However that eagerness and that raw ability, started to take us places. We moved to Italy. We Wrote and recorded in a studio, 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, for 3 months. It was a huge learning curve. The following year we started playing bars and clubs to pay the rent. There was a lot of covers, but it was fun and we weren’t starving anymore. We kept writing and kept playing live, and got better and better at both. We never made a record, though. We wanted to hold out till we got signed, and did it 'the proper way'. Ha!

So we came to the states, and after an intense year and a half of playing and the hard work of our wonderful manager, Matt Schuster, we had a Warner Chappell publishing deal, a major record deal with RCA and a big name producer in Jerry Harrison to make that first record. And make it, we did. Made it, we had. Or so we thought.

Mergers happen, staff gets cut and bands get dropped. We had Barbara Skydel at William Morris, though. A legend in the booking business, and the most ardent and loyal of supporters of our cause, Barabara got us on the road.

Because of Barbara, I got to see for real all the things that I dreamt of as a kid, imagining what it was like to be a rock star. The big stages. The big crowds. We played Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo, and so many other festivals. We got on tours with huge and legendary acts, including The Who, Van Halen, Sheryl Crow, Bryan Adams (no, not Ryan, and I really enjoyed it ... there I said it), Evanessence, OAR (whose record Stories Of A Stranger, I sang on- Jerry Harrison produced it), Gavin DeGraw (a friend of mine from the bar days) and so many others. We played the whole country. We played its bars, sometimes to 6 people and sometimes to 200. We played its arenas, up to 12,000 people. I loved it. I still do.


Thus far I have made two studio records with MRNORTH, Lifesize with Jerry and Fear & Desire with Steve Lyon (Depeche mode, The Cure et al). We have a live record too, that we made with the help of a 50 piece orchestra and U2’s monitor guy, Dave Skaff. That was a huge undertaking for an independent band, both musically and in the event itself, and the result could not be more satisfying.

During one of the tours, in the parking lot of a motel in a dry county in Florida, I wrote a song. It was a song of yearning. I felt adrift after a recent break-up, and I was looking for a different musical voice. The song was Love and it was a turning point for me. I knew I wanted to create something in a different way with some different results.

In a short period after, I had a few extreme experiences, and that was enough to spawn the rest of the songs for my solo album The Wilderness. I had never written like that before. I wasn’t trying, and it was just coming. This is what I love about these songs, it’s the purest expression of myself, my heart, my soul and my mind I have ever had. It’s hard for me to say lines like that and not cringe, or make a joke immediately after, but it’s true.

So now, with the help of my amazing friends I have made that album that I wanted, and it’s just as I imagined. The Wilderness. *sigh, smiles reflectively*.

So that’s it. I’m a singer. I love singing. I lose myself in it. That’s who I am.