So I had a notion.
A few of you have been asking, for actual YEARS now, if there's anywhere on the site you can just HEAR me sing the thing instead of reading the words off a page like it's a tax form. And I always say "ah I will, I will, leave it with me," which is Clare for "I have no intention of doing that." But the other Tuesday I was sat at the kitchen table with the good notebook and a cup of tea gone cold beside me, and I thought, right. Tonight. I'll do the bog. Just the first verse, nice and clean, so people can hear how it's MEANT to lilt.
I have a microphone. It's not a fancy one. It's a little USB yoke our Mick gave me when he was on his podcasting kick (that lasted about three weeks, God love him). It sits on a wee tripod the height of a salt cellar. I had it set up on the table, the laptop open, the cat asleep on the windowsill across the room. Conditions were, I want to stress this, PERFECT.
Take one. I got about as far as "high-ho the rattlin' bog" and I hear this soft thump behind me. You know the thump. The thump of a cat hitting the floor with intent. I didn't turn around. Rookie error. I kept singing — the bog down in the valley-o — and by the time I got to "in the bog there was a tree" there was a large grey gentleman SITTING on the microphone. Not beside it. On it. He'd reversed onto it like a lorry parking. The whole take is me singing, then a long mechanical scrape, then a sound I can only describe as a cat getting comfortable, then me going "Rattlin', no — RATTLIN'." Ruined.
Take two I was smarter. I put him out in the hall and shut the door. Felt very professional about it. Sat back down, cleared the throat, hit record, and got a genuinely lovely run at it — I'd say the best I've sung the first verse in a decade, no word of a lie, the kind of take where you surprise yourself. And the WHOLE WAY THROUGH, underneath my voice, there's this rhythmic scratching at the door. Scratch scratch scratch. Pause. A single mournful "mrrrow." Scratch scratch scratch. He kept perfect time. He's a better metronome than half the lads I've played with (don't tell festival_fiddle_fiona I said that, she's sound but she'd take it personal).
I sat there listening back to take two and I genuinely considered keeping it. The door-scratch was almost in tempo. But no, I thought, people will think the site is haunted, and we have ENOUGH of that going on lately, let's not add to it.
Take three is where I gave up the fight.
I let him back in. Decided I'd just work around him. He came over, did the figure-eight around the tripod legs, head-butted the laptop screen the way he does, and then — and this is the bit — he climbed up onto my lap, turned around twice, and settled. And went off like a small diesel engine. And I just. I left it. I hit record with this enormous purring cat on my lap and I sang the first verse of the Rattlin' Bog into a little USB microphone in my kitchen in Ennis at half eleven at night, and the whole time there's this warm rumble underneath every line.
And lads. It's the best one.
I've listened to it maybe forty times now. The two "clean" takes are grand, they're correct, they're what I THOUGHT I wanted. But this one has the cat in it. There's a place in the second line where I'm clearly half-laughing because he'd just shifted his weight and dug a claw in, and you can hear it, the laugh's right there in the recording, and I wouldn't take it out for love nor money. That's the song, isn't it. That's the whole thing. Nothing's separate from anything else. The bog has a tree, the tree has a branch, the lap has a cat, the cat has an opinion. It all rattles along together.
I wrote a whole earnest thing a while back about why this song lasts — it's over in listen to the bog if you've a notion — about accumulation, about how everything builds on everything, nothing lost. And here I am proving it by accident with a tomcat asleep on my legs. The song teaches itself. The cat teaches the song. I'm just the eejit holding the microphone.
If you want the actual WORDS while you wait for me to figure out how to put audio on this antique website (I'm not a young man and the hosting situation is a saga), they're all laid out for you over on the lyrics page. Sing it yourself. You don't need me. Though you might want a cat.
I'll get the audio up properly one of these days. I keep saying that. But when I do, it's take three or nothing. The purring stays.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — I weighed him after, out of curiosity, on the kitchen scales with the bowl trick. Six kilos. SIX. No wonder the microphone never stood a chance. He's been the same weight, mind you, since roughly the year I started this site, which is a long time for a cat, but sure, he's grand, eats like a horse, ruins everything. Wouldn't change him.
P.P.S. — Mick wants his microphone back. He does not want the cat back. Funny that.