It’s all happening for Sean Murphy

It’s been an eventful year for Cork musician Sean Murphy, aka All The Queen’s Horses.

Since February 2020, the Monkstown native has taken up songwriting, written an album, won a top prize at the Nashville International Songwriting Competition, snagged a record deal, released two singles and become a father.

Not bad for a fella who says a career in the music industry was never really on his radar before now.

Taking advantage of the spare time granted to him by the arrival of Covid last year, Sean got busy learning the craft of songwriting and soon found himself under the tutelage of none other than John Spillane.

“I was always a fan of John Spillane. He put up an ad one day for a song writing class. He was very good to me. I was making all these abstract, Radiohead-esque songs and he was like, ‘come down to earth now boy and write something specific’. I came in the next week with a specific, non-abstract song.’ That song was ‘Jocelyn’, a historical tribute to Irish emigration which tells the true story of a young Irish woman struggling to find her way in New York in the 1960s.

Selected by a jury including Tom Waits, Coldplay, Bastille and Fleet Foxes, the song took third place out of 26,000 entries at the Nashville International Songwriting Competition.

Two of Sean’s other songs also made the finals of the competition, reaching the final one per cent.

“Mick Flannery won it a few years back and Tom Waits was a judge back then as well and I'm a big Mick Flannery fan. When I made the songs, I thought I might as well just throw them in to the competition, but I didn't expect anything,” says Sean.

Taking influence from the likes of Leonard Cohen, Radiohead and Cork’s own Mick Flannery, Sean’s style is poetic and emotionally heavy, dealing in darkness, drugs, suicide, religious parlance, sex, debauchery, death, violence, infidelity, recklessness, resilience, wrong roads and dark roads.

“I have about six artists that would be top of my list and naturally enough their styles come out in me a bit, so you'd hear Mick Flannery, you'd probably hear bits of Bright Eyes, Leonard Cohen, Damien Rice, maybe even a bit of Radiohead, Ryan Adams,” he says.

Sean is now signed with independent record label Motor Music, joining names like Thom York, The Delorentos and The Editors to name just a few.

“Covid happened and I made about 35 songs in a very short space of time and picked the best ones. I sent it out on a platform called SubmitHub where you can get your music reviewed, but there's generally a low acceptance rate so I didn't expect anything. This guy rang me back a few hours after I'd submitted it wanting to invest. Me and my wife were in the kitchen cooking and we were like, 'What the hell?'. We have fairly simple lives like – we didn't think it was real. The next day they sent over a contract with a lump sum of money,” recalls Sean.

With so much having happened in such a short space of time, you’d forgive Sean if he got a little ahead of himself, but the level-headed Corkman insists he will remain at his job and work on his music in his spare time.

“I work for Google in Dublin full time and I don't think I'm going to be changing that any time soon, but I'm also doing this full time, so it's like having two full time jobs. So, am I going to go hell for leather at music? Yes. Will I keep my existing job? Also yes.”

Sean’s latest single ‘Jocelyn’ is released tomorrow (Friday) and will run on RTÉ’s recommended playlist. See allthequeenshorsesmusic.com for more.