Miles Graham


A song, Bob Dylan once said, is just a thought. Yes, but a song cannot become great if it is built around an ordinary thought. Every great song contains a special kind of thought, the kind that strikes you as having occurred just to you alone, but which, having been uttered, offers confirmation that the heart of another is a little like your own. Great songs unite us around thoughts that are not immediately visible, or already consensual, sometimes even thoughts that seem close to madness. And, of course, a song also has the music, existing in some strange relationship with the words, coloring them, shading them, adding to them another dimension, making them live beyond the level of logic. In its interweaving of words and music – and rhythm and personality – the song goes to another place which is not accessible by other means. Songs, poems and prayers use the same circuits and are held in the same storehouse in the heart. The song emerges from that space in the human heart where the ultimate quality of reason resides, and brings it to life. It is, really, a cry. Perhaps it is becoming the only medium in the modern world, where the most fundamental cry may still be heard.​

The songwriter, then, is a gifted shaman of that modern world. And the singer, the one who sings not just the song, but the thought that is in the song, and therefore the thoughts, the lives, of those who listen and are touched, moved by the song, is someone blessed with a great responsibility as well as a great gift.

Miles Graham is a singer and songwriter, though maybe not quite a singer-songwriter in the sense that this has become a reductive category which sells short both singers and songs. But still, he is, yes, a singer of songs – his own songs.​
His songs come into being as great blurts of understandings given birth by a voice possessed of that rare quality of being vivified by the song as much as it gives life to the song.

Miles Graham’s songs are real, authentic. His songs bring to mind Bono’s idea about ‘eternal melodies’: ‘You can’t imagine that melody not existing’. Miles Graham’s songs are like that.

Or John Lennon’s idea that music and song are really attempts to describe the insides of dreams, attempts to assist a process of verification that by definition is impossible in words alone.

Or Count John McCormack’s concept of the 'yarragh', that mysterious process by which the singer enters a song so completely that the song acquires the life of the singer for itself. The yarragh is really the ultimate distillation of the singer’s life and the art that has touched him: the blues, jazz, poems, words, thoughts, dreams – all channeled into a voice capable of, as the American rock writer Greil Marcus put it, ‘striking a note so exalted you can’t believe a human being is responsible for it, a note so unfinished and unsatisfied you can understand why the eternal seems to be riding on its back’. This is the scale of Miles Graham’s ambition, and the scope of his talent.

Miles was born in Donaghmede, Dublin, Ireland, into a family of 9 siblings, which moved to Clondalkin, Dublin, where he spent most of his childhood and teenage years in various places from Donaghmede to Neilstown. He grew up a thoughtful, musical recluse, penning words and melodies and forging them into things that were greater than their parts. He grew to manhood in a rustic council estate backdrop, not really knowing what to do with these blurts of thoughts which came out of him in the way mere words occur to other people. And when Miles sang those songs of his, the songs became themselves in a way that seemed to be more than the sum of the elements involved.

When Labi Siffre wrote “Something inside so strong” he may as well have written it for Miles Graham. The tall, thoughtful Irishman, with the gift of turning his thoughts into songs and his songs into spells, had something inside that was and is very strong: a warm and magnetic voice that compares to none and a songwriting talent possessed of something of the quality of a younger Van Morrison, or perhaps a slightly older Prince, with the commercial appeal of James Morrison and Ray La Montage.

​It was only when as a young adult, he moved to Co Sligo in the West, spiritual home of W.B. Yeats among others, that it all began to come together. Fast forward down the years of life in the real world, where Miles lived the life that would eventually go into the songs that were more than songs – several occupations, relationships and ups and downs.

More recently, Miles came to the attention of the renowned producer Richard Causon and of Kensaltown Studios in London (home from home to Tom Jones, Ryan Adams and Rufus Wainwright ). The fruits of this three-way collaboration, and with the added inspiration of a world-class band of touring musicians taking time out from working with James Morrison and others, are now ready to be presented to the world.

Today, this special singer/songwriting talent remains based in Sligo, nestling in the landscape that inspired and nourished the genius of Yeats, a region inexorably on the rise to take its rightful place as Ireland's music and creative capital.

Miles Graham nowadays spends a lot of time in London co-writing, recording and honing his craft. Miles was recently invited into the offices of a Dublin based record label, again impressed by his stunning voice plus his quirky, raconteur style lyrics and charismatic, powerful live sound. It should be a very interesting 12 months for the thoughtful, red haired Dubliner, as that “something inside so strong” prepares finally to step outside and grace the world with the fruits of his remarkable gift.