At 74, Fairhaven’s Eddie Dillon keeps writing, singing

Fairhaven’s Eddie Dillon can’t stop writing songs. At 74, he is about to release his third solo album, “All For a Song.” The 13-song record will be celebrated with a two-set performance at The Shepherd Center for the Performing Arts on Saturday, May 10. 

The show will be Dillon’s third performance at the venue since it opened its doors in 2022. He previously played the room with The Shenanigans in October 2023, and as part of a Songwriters In The Round show with Louie Leeman, Chuck Williams and Mike Laureanno in April 2024. For the May 10 concert he will be performing solo, and the intermission between sets will feature four animated videos created by Glenn Alexander of Providence, set to some of Dillon’s comedy songs. The videos were originally shown at the Co-Creative Center in downtown New Bedford in 2018.

“Eddie is a consummate singer-songwriter with an impressive musical background. He’s a main staple of the South Coast music community,” says Bryon Knight, president of the Shepherd Center. “There’s going to be more going on than just an outstanding musician singing and playing guitar. It’s going to be entertaining.”

Since the age of 14, Dillon has compiled a catalog of original music that exceeds 500 songs. So while his upcoming performance will feature many tunes from “All For a Song,” Dillon will also spruce up the evening with some well-known selections, in addition to a couple of songs devoted to his wife Cindy Locker, and a pair of songs that have never before been played to a live audience.

“All For a Song” will be available on Dillon’s website, as well as most streaming services.

“Eddie’s style is very folk, strong songwriting with a Celtic touch,” says John Mailloux, who mixed and mastered the album at Bongo Beach Productions in Westport. “He’s surrounded himself with some really good musicians. He came in with a lot of energy and great stories about his past. There’s music in him, there’s a spark. We had a lot of magic happening. It was exciting for me to work on this record. I was surprised to find out that he’s in his 70s.”

Foremostly a guitar player, Dillon also plays the keyboard, mandolin, banjo, and bass. On the new album he plays all four instruments, and is joined by a gaggle of accomplished musical friends and acquaintances. 

His previous solo albums are “Things You Wish You’d Said” (1996) and “The Barber’s Lament” (1998). “All For a Song” was recorded primarily in Dillon’s home studio. He describes the music on the album as “Americana” and he says it contains some of the best songs he’s ever written.

His first performance took place at the age of 15, playing at St. Thomas More church in Braintree. In 1969 when he was “a starving college kid,” studying English Literature at UMass-Boston, doing house painting and carpentry, he was also playing as often as possible at the city’s universities, folk venues and Irish bars. Eventually his musical path led to work with one of America’s most popular Irish music outfits of the 1960s, The Clancy Brothers. In addition to touring the Atlantic seaboard and the Midwest with the group, he would also do a pair of tours of Ireland. He has also toured throughout the Northeast as a solo performer with an itinerary of approaches that ranges from ballads to comedy pieces to rousing instrumentals. He says that storytelling is an important element of his performances.

In 1979, Dillon and friend Tom Kennedy formed the regionally heralded Irish band, The Shenanigans. He would go on to appear on two of their albums and tour extensively throughout New England and New York.

Today, Dillon is playing more than a dozen public shows a year, while also performing regularly in nursing homes.

Dillon moved to the South Coast from Braintree in 1976 to take a job as a social worker in New Bedford. Later that year he relocated to Sconticut Neck in Fairhaven, where he has lived ever since. In addition to social work, he has also been employed as a construction supervisor, a designer, and a salesman — jobs that would support him on occasions when he wasn’t performing full time. The work enabled him to purchase more musical instruments and equipment. 

He currently owns five guitars, and says that his favorite is his Taylor 712, which he bought at a Cape Cod music store as he prepared to record “The Barber’s Lament.” He calls his approach to guitar playing “hybrid picking,” a style that combines a flat pick with finger picking, which he taught himself.

Dillon spoke with The Light at his Fairhaven home, joined by his dogs, Rigby and Lucy. In addition to discussing his new album, he also spoke about the origins of his guitar playing and songwriting, his creative inspirations, what he’s learned about performing, the difference between playing in America and Ireland, why he’s still writing songs, and what’s on his musical bucket list.

New Bedford Light: How did you get introduced to music and what was your first instrument?

Eddie Dillon: It’s interesting. The second song on the new album, called “History,” there’s a line in there about my grandmother who was a big part of my early life — she played 13 instruments. 

She would come over, quite often, on Saturday nights. We had a real Irish American family. She was from County Roscommon. They would all just be singing away, and I got my first guitar when I was 12. And they loved it because the first thing they wanted me to do was learn all of the songs that they sang, and I’d back them up. 

Of course, I was a total ham. I still am. And I really enjoyed singing it. The highlight of those nights was when, at the end of the night, my grandmother would sing a song that my grandfather had written in 1917, called “The Shamrock Green.” And we knew that when she sang that song it was getting close to the end of the night. My aunts would all have tears in their eyes. It was a wonderful thing.

This was the beginning of my interest but also what really helped was my next door neighbor in Braintree, John Queenan. He was a fantastic guitarist. He was the one who really taught me how to play guitar.

NBL: Do you remember the first song you wrote?

ED: The very first song, it’s a funny story. I was probably in the second grade and I’m in the shower and it’s the summertime, and the shower at our house back then had a window. All those old houses did. I’m in there and I’m making up songs, singing in the shower about my teachers at my elementary school. I was going on and on, probably at the top of my lungs, and I remember this like it was yesterday because it turned into a traumatic situation for a little boy. I turned off the shower and about six or seven kids in the neighborhood had been walking through my back yard and listened to my whole song. I didn’t hear the end of it until the sixth grade.

NBL: Was there a moment when you realized, “Hey, I’m pretty good at this.”?

ED: I think I started really writing seriously when I was probably 14 and I actually have those songs in a file someplace. I would get support from my family and my sisters, and I had my first real gig when I was 15. By that time I had enough songs so that I could perform a show of my own songs. It was probably a very terrifying 30 minutes.

NBL: Not everybody can get onstage and share their creativity with an audience. How did you build your confidence? Where did it come from?

ED: After quite a long time of failure, it was just doing it over and over again. In high school and college I was actually playing around the folk music world in Boston. There were a bunch of prominent folk clubs around Boston and I used to play at the open mics they had back then. I had some paying gigs at a couple of places up there when I was in college. In fact, the highlight of my career when I was 19 and a sophomore in college, I played at the John Hancock Hall opening up for a guy named Jaime Brockett. He was a big deal for a couple of years. He was a Columbia Records artist. Columbia Records had a billboard of Jaime Brockett in Kenmore Square for two or three years. They soaked a lot of money into this dude. The hilarious part was I was hired to open up for him at the John Hancock Hall and the opening act for the whole show was Bill Staines. 

Bill Staines had written a few minor hits around the folk music world, including “Inch By Inch.” He was a folk luminary, I think he’s still around. In terms of the folk thing that I was in, with the trajectory of my career, it was a pretty big thing at the time to play this gig. 

Then, within the next year or two, in the early ’70s, all these clubs closed around Boston, and there were very few places to play. And a friend gave me a call — and I was a starving college kid — and he said, “If we learn some songs off this Clancy Brothers’ record, there’s a lot of Irish bars opening up and we can play at them.” So I started listening more intently. We had Clancy Brothers albums at our house. But I started learning them, thinking, “Hey, if I can get $25 or $50 playing in bars and getting free drinks, Oh my God!”

NBL: On May 10 you’ll be playing a lot of songs that are on the new record. But with more than 500 songs in your catalog, how in the world do you decide what you’re going to perform?

ED: It’s a lot of head scratching, let me tell you. I have my sets for the show already organized but I’m changing it daily and I’m redoing some old songs because there are some people coming who have seen me a million times, or at least twice. And so I’m going to be doing at least two songs that no one has ever heard before.

I’m rehearsing these sets a lot so that I’ll have them nailed down. This is something I learned from the Clancy Brothers. I’m not going to do it as structured as they do, but it’s going to be a well-rehearsed show that’s hopefully pleasing. This is where a thousand years of being onstage comes into play. I know that no matter what I write down, I’m probably going to change what I present according to how the audience is doing and what’s going on. You may have a ballad coming up but the audience seems a little low, so you can play either a rousing instrumental or one of my comedy songs.

NBL: On the new album, “All For a Song,” how did you choose the musicians who played with you on it?

ED: There’s some definite long-term friends. Tom Kennedy is doing some tin whistle and some singing on a song I actually recorded 20 years ago. The late Chuck Croteau is on one song. A guy named Bruce Foley, who used to be one of the original Shenanigans, played tin whistle on one particular song. So basically a lot of friends. Aoife Clancy is singing some backup vocals. 

There’s some acquaintances — Mark Russell, a violinist who plays a lot with Neal McCarthy, he’s one of the premier violinists. He’s from Australia but he lives up in Cambridge. I had seen him play with Neal in Dartmouth at the Black Bass and as soon as I heard him play five notes I thought, “Oh my God. I’ve got to start following this guy.”

Anyway, COVID hit, and once music started back up again I went to see them play and I started a chat with him and I got his number. He actually recorded on two or three tracks. He’s a phenomenal player. He actually did the recording remotely at his place in Cambridge. Aoife did her tracks down in North Carolina, over the internet. One of my bassists, Mark Fitzpatrick, did his bass tracks in Florida. Joe Sajak from the Shenanigans came in and recorded here at my home studio. 

Just recently I have four tracks that I did a digital cello on. I did those parts myself, but I wanted to get a live cellist in there. I thought it could be better. So John Mailloux found a cellist for me from Rhode Island, Cathy Clasper-Torch. What she added to this was immeasurable. We did the recording at Bongo Beach Studios in Westport, and it was a beautiful, beautiful sounding cello. I was in tears listening to her.

So there’s a real mix of friends and acquaintances. It’s all about joy, it’s all about love – love of the craft and sharing the experience with people.

NBL: Where does your songwriting inspiration come from and how has it evolved over the years?

ED: I can tell you exactly where it came from initially. I have a processing disorder and sometimes I have a hard time understanding people when they’re talking to me, especially with people who are talking really fast. Or if the music is loud in a place, I can’t really understand anything. 

But when I was a kid, I was listening to the radio and thought I was understanding the words. And then I’d be singing with my friends, when I started learning to play guitar, and I had all these words that were, like, just what I thought the words were supposed to be. And they were completely wrong! But I thought they were really great. I said, “Oh boy, if I can come up with these really great words that fit into these songs, why can’t I just write my own songs?” I took off from there and never looked back.

For me, I’ve always been, in general, a very creative person. So I write in all sorts of media. I have poetry and some of my poems have been published. Some of my songs have been recorded by other artists. I also have written an autobiography, a novella, and I wrote a musical. If I wasn’t playing music I’d be creating something else in some other medium.

NBL: What is the songwriting process like for you?

ED: I could sit at my keyboard and write a song in 10 minutes. But I was talking with a friend who was sad that he hadn’t written a song in a while. And I said to him that the number one thing that I do — and you can do this too because we all have cell phones with us and they all have those voice recorders. On the voice recorder on my phone, I have, I would guess, more than 200 ideas for songs that I review every once in a while. I think with all creative people, you come up with an idea and that idea is very fluid in your head. For me, it could be a melody or it could just be a line or a phrase that someone said or I just made up. But I have to record it right away because once it’s gone, it’s gone.

In that category of putting your songs on your cell phone, I have me waking up at two in the morning, trying not to wake up my wife, trying to sing into the cell phone in the corner of the bed. Or driving down the road trying not to get into an accident.

NBL: How does it feel when you’re in the creative process?

ED: I always feel like I’m letting go of something. It was interesting. I have a loose leaf notebook with a bunch of songs that I’m working on. The most important thing is generating the idea of the song — the hook and the chorus. Once you have that, any competent songwriter could take it and run with it. So I have probably 25 or 30 pages of various stages of songs.

NBL: What does the title of the album, “All For a Song” mean to you? How did you choose the title?

ED: The first song on the album is called “Money and Water.” I’d gone through a bunch of iterations of what the general title should be and then I realized that the song “Money and Water” is a songwriter’s statement, really. 

The second stanza in “Money and Water” is “Tried to make the living anyway I could, don’t you believe it. If it had six strings and made of wood, you know I’d play it. Played it in New York and up in Boston too, every single night I sang right through. A fight in the club, a fight with the band, double-booked gig, you’re on again. It’s dawn when you’re home, got a job in the day. You want to make a living but there’s not enough pay. It’s all for a song, you just don’t care. It’s words and music that fill your air.”

NBL: How have you selected the songs you’re going to play on May 10 that aren’t on the album?

ED: To be honest with you, I was being kind of selfish. What I said to myself was, at this time of my life, you get to a certain point at this age where you’ve had some loved ones pass away, people get in accidents, and life will do what it does. And I said to myself, “When I put this album out I want an album that I want to listen to.” That was my benchmark. I just want songs that I want to listen to. If anybody else wants to listen to them, and I hope that a lot of people do, there were no “shoulds,” just stuff that I thought was really poignant and good. A couple of the tunes I wrote in college.

NBL: What goes into a good performance for you? What have you learned about performing well?

ED: That’s really interesting, because when I play around at nursing homes there are people who are at all different stages of their life. I was talking to a woman the other day who was 93 and you would have thought she was a 25-year-old babe. Seriously, she was full of life. There were people sitting beside her that weren’t all there. But what I’ve learned about performing is reaching people. I do this in the nursing homes all the time — I never look at lyrics, I’m always looking at people’s eyes. I really feel that performance is about connecting with people. With the Clancy Brothers we played on a lot of stages where you couldn’t see people, but you were still there, pretending that you were looking at people. You can’t see anybody on those stages.

When I’m at the nursing homes, I’m not thinking about being a singer-songwriter, I’m thinking about what’s going to reach people. 

The really interesting thing though, is that I was playing at this big, beautiful place up in Quincy, and when I’m in this facility it’s literally about 500 yards from where my father grew up. It’s about 1,000 yards from where my grandmother, Bridget Harte, is buried. The YMCA where I went as a little boy is 800 yards in the opposite direction. It’s my history that I’m standing in at this place.

I’ve played at this place many times and one time my wife had come up with me. We were doing something afterwards, so she was there in the audience. When I finished and I was putting my stuff away, she was talking to two women who live at the facility and are almost friends of mine. Cindy had been telling them about the song, “Bridget Harte,” and they were just thrilled. They said, “When the album comes out please tell us.” 

So I thought, “Why don’t I take my guitar out and I’ll play this song right now.” Everyone had left, it was just these two women, my wife and myself, and I sang “Bridget Harte” for them. They were just blown away and mesmerized, totally touched. So what I’m saying is, even though I don’t want to push my songwriting self out at nursing homes, I just think that would be selfish. But when I had the chance to share something — this song has a lot of references to a lot of sights around Quincy — it’s all about just reaching out to people and knowing when to do your song.

NBL: Generally speaking, do you usually work off of a set list or do you read the room?

ED: I always read the room. When I performed with Aoife recently at the Unitarian Church (in New Bedford) we used a set list that we sort of followed, but that’s a different kind of thing. When you’re working with someone else you have to be more organized. When I play on my own, it’s reading the room.

NBL: You’ve played the entire East Coast and Midwest of America and you’ve done two tours of Ireland. Is there a difference between playing in the states and playing in the Emerald Isle?

ED: That’s really a great question. It’s interesting because the Clancy Brothers were better recognized in the states in many instances than in Ireland. Back in the ’60s, the Clancy Brothers played at the Royal Albert Hall in London, and they played all the big concert halls around Ireland. But they really achieved their fame over here first and then brought it back with them to Ireland and it was very successful for them.

But in terms of the audiences, I’d have to say no. I did two different tours — I played with the Clancy Brothers for several shows on one tour, and then after Paddy (Clancy) died, me, Bobby Clancy and Finbarr Clancy did some touring on our own as The Clancy Brothers and Eddie Dillon. People would come out because they wanted to hear Clancy Brothers music. It was good.

The thing you got in America with a Clancy Brothers show is you get more people. They were so famous here in the Irish music world, that when we played out at the Milwaukee Irish Festival 25,000 people were there.

NBL: Storytelling is important to Irish culture. How important is storytelling to your music?

ED: On stage there’s two aspects to that. One is the songs themselves, I have a lot of songs that are story songs — they speak for themselves. In terms of my connection to the audience, I think that human beings are genetically programmed to respond to a story. It’s through story that we find meaning in life, really. So for me, when I’m presenting, even if they’re short little paragraphs of a story, I try to weave it into my performances just as a way to connect with the audience.

I actually have several monologues that are just all story, but in terms of my musical performances the story is woven into the performance as a means of tying the show together.

NBL: You’ve played at “The Shep” twice. What do you think of it?

ED: It’s the perfect size for a small performing arts center. What really thrills me is the attitude of the people who run it and work there. It’s very welcoming to people of all different talents. They bring in a lot of really cool musicians and shows. It’s really a fantastic place.

NBL: Why do you continue to write new songs? It’s remarkable that at the age of 74 you’re still creating new music.

ED: I never really had a choice about being a songwriter. Melodies, lyrics and poems — I wake up in the middle of the night with a melody, a phrase or whatever. It’s a driving force in my psyche. I’m delighted I’ve still got it, and some of the best songs I’ve ever written were in the past few years.

NBL: Do you have anything on your musical bucket list? Things you want to achieve in music?

ED: I just came up with an idea a little while ago. I wrote, about 10 years ago, a musical called “Rise.” I put a lot of work into it. There’s 12 or 15 songs in it, and I always thought it had some legs to it. And I just came up with this idea lately. I’m going to do a podcast of that production. It’s going to be performed by this time next year. John Mailloux inspired me, he told me he did a podcast with some people recently, and I thought, “Oh my God, what a great idea!” So I could actually produce this and get it out there. Wherever it goes, it goes.

Sean McCarthy is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to The New Bedford Light.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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