Mine Road: From Ireland and Ready To Rock Your World

Mine Road: From Ireland and Ready To Rock Your World

Based out of Dublin and ready to rock an entire world, Irish rockers Mine Road has unleashed their amazing debut album Tomorrow’s Sky!  Featuring exhilarating selections such as American Dream and Snowplough, Mine Road is destined to enrapture fans of bands such as Foo Fighters, Shinedown, and Tom Petty!  Highwire Daze recently interviewed lead vocalist Ken Carthy of Mine Road via the magic of Zoom to find out a whole more about this dynamic band on the rise.  Read on…

We’re here with Ken Carthy from Mine Road. First of all, where is the band based out of and what is your overall music scene like there?
Hey, how are you doing, Ken? We are based in Dublin, Ireland. We live just about an hour north of the city, so a lot of our gigs and stuff are in and around Dublin. There’s a healthy live scene going on in Dublin at the moment. Bands are hard to come by, I suppose, in the modern age of music. Most people seem to be doing that themselves, one or two people at a time, so having a band as a bit of a dinosaur thing. But there seems to be plenty of interest around from the launch. We had a great feedback from the launch of the album. So, it’s been good.

Is there any overall story or concept behind the album title and song Tomorrow’s Sky?
Well, there is and there isn’t. Really, there wasn’t one to start out with. We just had written a bunch of songs, and we actually had the title track Tomorrow’s Sky written when we release our last EP which was in 2012. We had the song then, but we could never get it to work. We always knew that when we recorded an album, we wanted it to be called Tomorrow’s Sky. The way the songs unfolded, it just kind of happened to be a bit about looking forward into the unknown and all that brings with life and complications, the good and the bad along with it. So, yeah, the songs’ kind of developed like that unintentionally. Looking back on it now, that’s kind of the way a lot of them came out.

The first song I ever heard by your band was called American Dream and I heard that on the fourth of July, which is a holiday out here.
Yeah, Independence Day. That wasn’t intentional either. It just kind of happens that when we started working with our publicist, he suggested a timeline and the timeline was that the album would be released on the fourth of July and at the last thing will be American Dream released on Sunday. So, a bit of coincidence, but maybe part of his good planning.

Tell me the inspiration behind that song.
That song was written by our drummer, Stephen. He lived in New Jersey for, I’m going to say six or seven years, and moved home just before the Coronavirus outbreak. So, the song is his trials and tribulations in New Jersey and America, and just the idea of the dream not working out the way he really feels it’s going to work out or the way it should have worked out – or the way they tell you it’s going to work out. So, yeah, it’s a lot to do with his times in America.

Why don’t you select any other song on the album and what inspired the lyrics.
Snowplough is the first song on the album, and it’s a song written about the choices you make in life and all of the barriers that get in the way. The lyrics itself, “Can’t erase the morning snow, found a way to hold my head up,” it’s basically the idea of the Snowplough plowing through the snow and distorting your vision and making choices to try and get through that and move on and keep your head up and keep going. I suppose that’s the way it is. And looking at the different parts of life that come your way.

What could one expect from a live Mine Road show?
The live Mine Road show is loud, fast, furious, and full of energy. We pride ourselves on our live show. We tried our hardest to encapsulate what the band was live and on record, and it took us a while, through the mixing and stuff like that. Yeah, the songs on the album are as close to what we feel – we sound as a live band. We’re big guitars, big drums, big vocals. We’re a five-piece band, and we like to play loud, heavy rock and roll.

If Mine Road could open for anybody, either now or from the past, who would it be and why?
Oh, what a question. I think everyone in the band would jump on Metallica purely because we’re all Metallica freaks. Maybe our music doesn’t probably set in with that, but yeah, we’d love to open for someone like that or Alice in Chains or Alter Bridge, or any of the great’s, we’d really like to open for if we had the chance.

If you could participate on a Tom Petty tribute album, and you could pick any song, what song would you choose by Tom Petty and why?
I’ve always wanted to do that one. It’s the called the Honey Bee – the one that Dave Grohl pay drums on Letterman on. That is a really cool song. I’d love to cover that song.

Has Mine Road ever played here in the States, or is that something you’d like to do?
No, we’ve never had the chance to play in the States. We love to, obviously. We’d love to do a little tour, do something all over there. It’d be great if we got the chance to do that. We’d love to, yeah. We’ve never had the chance.

Have you done any touring in Ireland or anywhere in Europe?
Yeah, we’ve toured mainly in Ireland. We were together in 2012, and then Stephen, our drummer, he moved to the states, as I said earlier. Then Stuart, his brother, he’s the rhythm guitarist, he moved to Australia for a couple of years for work. So, we only got back together in 2019, just before the pandemic. We seem to have great timing for these things. We’ve always said we’re so long coming around, we’d roll back into fashion at some stage.

Are you currently involved in any other bands or projects outside of Mine Road?
No, we’re not. No. We’re all committed to Mine Road at the moment.

Ken Carthy of Mine Road via Zoom!

When you look back on that first EP, what do you think of it now in retrospect?
In retrospect, it’s quite naive in the fact that the way we recorded, we kind of approached it as single songs. I think we recorded six or maybe seven tracks for that EP – released 4, but we treated them individually. It made it a lot easier when we went back to record the album as a whole, and it just became this bigger monster on this big learning curve on, actually, how to go in and record an album. It was a huge undertaking compared to that. So yeah, we really love it. We still play two of the songs, California and The Door in our live set there. Most of the songs on that album, I think, are drop D tuning, so we still use that tuning on some of our songs. But they’re totally kind of different music the more, I think, Alter Bridge, that kind of Shinedown thing, which we probably listen to a lot at the time. It might have got taken away on their sound a bit.

What’s up next for Mine Road?
Well, we are currently trying to put together a little mini tour of Ireland, to try and play some of the bigger cities. It may possibly with a couple of bands, friends of ours that are doing the same at the moment. They’re releasing EPs and singles and stuff, so we are trying to piggyback the promotion from the launch of the album, and we should be kind of playing in late probably September, late mid to late September onwards. We changed bass player – our original bass player, Donnacha Neary, left. We have a new bass player called Pete Carroll, who is settling in and getting to grips with all the parts, and he’s ready to rock now.

Do you have any messages for Rock Fans here in the states who are reading this interview right now?
It’ll be great if you got behind the album, the band’s name is Mine Road, and the album’s called Tomorrow’s Sky. It would be great if you guys got behind it and gave it a listen and some thumbs up and commented it on wherever you can get it. It’s on our website, mineroadmusic.com. There’s a MP3 player up there with all the tracks on it. It’s on all the major platforms and YouTube. And, yeah, keep an eye out for our stuff.

Mine Road is:
Stu Cash – Guitar / Backing Vox
Ken Carthy – Lead Vocals
Dave Flood – Guitars
Steve Cash – Drums / Backing Vox

(Interview by Ken Morton)

Mine Road on Instagram