| Emily Maguire | |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Emily Lucy Maguire |
| Born | 8 March 1975 |
| Origin | London, UK |
| Genres | Alternative / Acoustic / Indie |
| Occupations | Singer-Songwriter |
| Instruments | singing, acoustic guitar, cello, piano, recorder, flute |
| Years active | 2003-present |
| Labels | Shaktu Records ( Self Released ) |
| Website | Emily Maguire discography at MusicBrainz |
Emily Lucy Maguire (born 8 March 1975 in London) is an independent English singer songwriter. She has released three albums to date which are distributed through Universal by Active Media. All the songs are written and composed by Maguire. She runs her own record label Shaktu Records with her partner Christian Dunham. Her albums have gained her rave album reviews and her thought-provoking lyrics have received widespread acclaim around the world.
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Maguire was born in South London, but most of her childhood was spent in Cambridge, England. She grew up without a TV at home and developed a passion for books and music and learnt to play the cello, piano, flute and recorder from a very early age. Her father initially got her playing the piano which led to a love for classical music. She was raised with the music of Bach and Mozart. At aged 12 Maguire looked destined to become a professional cellist. She played in competitions, attended courses on chamber music, and took a master class with world-famous cellist Paul Tortelier. [1]
Some years later she started to listen to other kinds of music and became obsessed with the songs of Bob Marley. Maguire only discovered she could write songs by a twist of fate. When she was 17, she was involved in a car crash and a whiplash injury triggered fibromyalgia, a condition that affects the nervous system and results in chronic pain. The condition affected her mobility for several years and by the time she was 21 she had to give up her job and was on walking sticks, sometimes completely housebound.[2]
During this difficult period to pass the time and a distraction from the pain she taught herself to play Bob Marley songs on the guitar and started writing her own songs inspired by his music. With her passion for poetry, song writing perfectly cemented her love of words and music and she wrote hundreds of songs in her bedroom and purchased a ProTools Studio to start recording them at home on a computer.[1] By her mid 20s, her health had improved and she moved back to London, and started working again doing office jobs. To begin with, Emily never saw herself as a performer, but then she got up the courage to start singing her songs in open-mic clubs.
In 2003 she received a phone call out of the blue which resulted in a trip to Australia for a four-week holiday to speed her recovery with Maguire’s illness being partly affected by the dull English weather. She went to stay with an old friend on his family’s goat farm situated in the Obi Obi valley up in the hills behind the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. That friend was Christian Dunham who plays bass guitar and was a member of an Australian rock band.[3] He later became her husband and the farm her home. Together they produced her album in a recording studio he had built next to their house, called shack no.2 on the farm. The shack has no heating, just basic electricity and was built from old bits of timber and metal with walls made from rendered potato sacks. The shack is a delicate eco system, it has wild life, with mice, which live in Maguire’s piano and Huntsman spiders living in the bathroom. Maguire dealt with this by giving the creatures names. She overcame a snake phobia by calling a 7 ft python Dudley who moved into the shack from neighbouring farmland.[2]
Together with her Australian husband, producer and bass player Maguire recorded her critically acclaimed debut album Stranger Place over 14 days and nights in an old farmhouse in the middle of a forest in Queensland. They set up their own record label, called Shaktu Records, named after their home.[1] Maguire and her husband took over the family cheese-making business, in between running their record label in order to fund the album independently. Proceeds were raised by the manufacture and selling of goats cheese. Emily's husband encouraged and advised her to go out and play her songs live to promote the album. She then had to learn how to overcome another phobia, stage fright. Reaction to the album and live gigs were very positive. An Australian radio station made it album of the week and press reviews appeared in magazines in Melbourne.
In 2006, after completing another tour of the UK, Emily and Christian returned to Australia to record her second album Keep Walking. In July 2007 they returned to the UK to play the Cambridge Folk Festival and embark on a 3-month tour of pubs and clubs before heading back to life on the farm.
But fate had other plans in store for Maguire. Her big break came when on 9 September 2007 she was featured as a Sunday Spotlight artist on Aled Jones with Good Morning Sunday on BBC Radio 2 and her song Back Home was played from the album Keep Walking. The manager of The Waterboys happened to be listening, he contacted the programme and they passed on her contact details. A week before she was due to fly back to Australia, Maguire got a phone call from him asking if she would be prepared to cancel her ticket back and fly instead to Ireland to start a 16-date tour with American legend Don McLean.
From playing to 50 people in clubs she found herself performing to 2,000 people in some of the biggest concert halls around the UK, cumulating in a show at the Royal Albert Hall which ended the tour. A venue Maguire had previously only visited to watch The Proms from high in the gallery. This newsworthy story lead to several articles appearing in the press including The Guardian on 21 November 2007 titled My Wildlife, The Sydney Morning Herald Thursday 15 November 2007, titled Valley girl seduces London as well as several live radio interviews on National Radio in the UK.
Since then further tours have followed and her music has been played regularly on BBC Radio 2. On 16 October 2008 Maguire played her first major headline gig at The Bush Hall in London performing her songs with an all-girl string trio from The Royal Academy Of Music plus Damon Wilson, the drummer from The Waterboys. Her latest album Believer was released in November 2009. Emily puts her classical training and cello-playing to good use, writing and recording all the string arrangements for all her albums. On her MySpace page she cites Bach, Bob Marley and Buddha as her influences.[4] A practising Buddhist for over 10 years, her 3 albums are all dedicated to her teacher Lama Jampa Thaye [5]
Maguire's self-produced acoustic folk-pop debut album. It contains 12 tracks, ten of which were recorded at Pix Records in Queensland and two at Goldcrest studios in London, it was released in 2004. An album made up of questioning lyrics and musical imagery, with dark tones on album opener "The Real World" to lighter shades on "Stranger Place". On "Falling On My Feet" she sings of devotion and on "I Turned On The News" about the slow decay of society. "The Real World" secured her an invitation to perform at the 2005 Singer-Songwriter Festival at The Borderline in London, where she opened for David Bowie’s renowned bassist Gail Ann Dorsey.
Released in 2007, Maguire's 12 track second album Keep Walking won rave reviews. Remaining passionate for both Bach and Bob Marley the album combines her love of classical music with a passion for beats, bass lines and acoustic guitar.[3] The title track was released as a single and gained a place on the BBC Radio 2 playlist during May and June in 2008.
Maguire's third album was recorded at Kore Studios, Chiswick, London in January 2009 and released on 16 November 2009. This included two new singles "Lighthouse Man" and "I'd Rather Be". Both were playlisted on BBC Radio 2, the former appearing on the "C" list and the latter securing a "B" list placing for 5 weeks. The latest single release is "Anything You Do".
| Year | Single | Peak positions | Album | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Official UK Singles Chart | |||||||||
| 2008 | "Keep Walking" | — | "Keep Walking" | ||||||
| 2009 | "Lighthouse Man" | — | "Believer" | ||||||
| 2010 | "I'd Rather Be" | — | |||||||
| 2010 | "Anything You Do" | — | |||||||
| "—" denotes releases that did not chart | |||||||||