Monroe’s welcomes new open mic night with a twist
By Katie Gallagher
A new songwriter’s open mic night is being run in Galway city, organised by Cathy Shannon, a singer-songwriter based in Headford, Co Galway.
The key difference between this event and other open mic nights is that attendees may only perform their own original music, with one exception: they may also cover a song written by a fellow attendee.
Cathy believes it to be the first of its kind to be run in Galway. She lived in the Netherlands for ten years before moving to Ireland and was inspired by attending the Amsterdam Songwriters’ Guild open mic night there. “The feeling I had on those nights of meeting creative people was really inspiring,”, she explains.
She began organising her first open mic event in a music shop café in The Hague, Netherlands in 2016, which ran weekly for a year. In 2017 she moved to Galway city and found many local open mic nights, especially falling in love with one held in the Róisín Dubh every Sunday night. However, she wasn’t fully satisfied and continued to search for something resembling her nights in Amsterdam. “I remember thinking, ‘I wonder if there’s a songwriter’s one?’ And I looked and looked, but there was nothing, the nearest one was in Dublin, but I wasn’t going to travel.”
The COVID-19 pandemic gave her a new perspective. “I thought, ‘wow, you know what, if we ever get out of this, I will not waste time in trying to get something going’”, she recalls.
She moved to Headford during the pandemic, a place she describes as a “very creative town” and began organising a monthly open mic night in Campbell’s Tavern, feeling that there was no musical outlet for young people there. The open mic in Campbell’s Tavern still takes place on the first Friday of each month and is open to all. After finding success in Headford and with renewed confidence in her idea to organise a songwriter only event, she began approaching venues in Galway and was accepted by Monroe’s Tavern.
The songwriter’s open mic night has been a rousing success with local artists from Galway performing alongside songwriters who travelled from all parts of the country, including Mayo, Tipperary and Kildare. Cathy remarks that they even had an artist from Tennessee perform after he saw the event poster.
She states that all songwriters are welcome to come to the event, and that artists can sign up at 7:30pm on the night. She estimates that the first 22 artists are guaranteed to be given a slot, and others may be given time to perform depending on how much time is remaining. However, she assures anyone considering attending that she will do her best to accommodate everyone, having experienced firsthand the “heartbreak” of not being able to perform.
The Galway Songwriter’s Open Mic Night takes place in the Monroe’s Backstage venue at Monroe’s Tavern on the first Tuesday of every month. The next event will be on December 2nd and entry and sign-up is free. More information is available on their Instagram page @galwaysongwritersopenmic.
