"The song has been with me since I wrote it at 14, a song about hometown experiences in Dundalk, something I'd sing with friends and no more. A few years later at 20, I sang it in a local taxi & the ensuing video which was uploaded by the driver went viral. To be honest, it gave me a fire in the gut to go out and be taken seriously as a songwriter and I haven't looked back. I was slightly scarred by the viral experience in the sense that I didn't want to be remembered as the kid in the taxi, so I didn't record it or release it until now. I've come full circle, I'm proud of the song and the young man who wrote it, I'm constantly getting sent cover versions of El Paso from people at home and abroad, singing it in clubs, bars, at gatherings. It's become a universal hometown song and I'm excited to finally share it again".
lyrics
El Paso
I was told long ago that you'd learn more on a building site than you would in school, I don't know who's to know in El Paso.
Friday nights the floodlights you'd hear us roar, sing the town till we die then our throats went sore, we have grown on the road to El Paso.
Photographs on your mantelpiece they fade
Sitting at some bus stop in the pouring rain
In your mind things that you've seen
Now the shoe is on the other foot, how does that feel?
If you wanna go I'll take you there, feel the rain on your face in the morning air
Let's go back, take me back to El Paso
You go around with your tie and your briefcase
With a look on your face like I'm a waste of space
Take me back, take me back to El Paso
Oh take a walk, take a walk down the echo road I'll be waiting
don't you know i'll be waiting.
And if you wanna go I'll take you there, feel the rain on your face in the morning air
Take me back, let's go back to El Paso
You go around with your tie and your briefcase
With a look on your face like I'm a waste of space
Take me back, take me back, take me back let's go back
to El Paso, to El Paso, to El Paso, to my El Paso.
cups of tar like tea, smothering my ego and my pride, do you have any loose change for my electric heater, on the banks of the comatose overdose river.
i wish i had the skill to form such eloquence rorybann
how can one have a 'favourite' track, it bends the mind, it is like asking for a single gem amongst Hockney's portfolio, a 'best' short story from among Bennett's 'talking heads' or a greatest dribble from jinky johnstone, 'which song would you save from the waves ?' roy plumley would ask on Desert Island Discs....them all of course. rorybann
Irish singer-songwriter Sarah E. Cullen bares her heart over pastoral folk arrangements enshrouded in a dream-pop haze. Bandcamp New & Notable Apr 29, 2021