Hi all I have just made a video for a new song called "you in his eyes" the song is based on Milton's paradise Lost poem and has been reviewed in Irish Music Magazine. The video and song can be heard on my site at:

http://www.padraiglalor.com

Here is text of the review plus lyrics:

STORY BEHIND THE SONG

YOU IN HIS EYES

A new song is explained by Sean Laffey (Irish music magazine)

Belfast native Padraig Lalor is a song writer. He writes modern songs in his own way. He launched an album of songs at the Derry Fleadh in August. Unlike many of his contemporaries he grounds his work in historical events and real people caught up in them. He is currently half way through a three album license deal with Proper Record to produce a body of songs that will look at the story of Belfast from the Titanic to the Troubles.

His first album of the trilogy Ismay’s Dream took archive stories from the ill fated White Star liner. He painted a distinctly Irish portrait of the ambitions and frailties of the time. He is now working on two more albums, featuring pieces on heroes such as Alex Higgins and Rinty Monaghan and stories born from the troubles.

This song, You in His Eyes is timely and topical, written with a deep knowledge of Lalor’s own North Belfast turf. He tells his story as a returned exile, searching for peace both of mind and place. Its authenticity is born from an understanding of the emotional geography of the district and the vernacular history of its language.

Lalor’s family moved North during the early 1900’s as internal economic migrants into a city that was the workshop of Ireland. Eighty years later he was one of those young people who emigrated from Belfast during the troubles. He says for a now Middle aged Diaspora and their children, the troubles are their famine, the thing that sent them out of Ireland.

Mirroring the complex history of the area this is a song of many layers; a love song and Requiem, cleverly drawing on Milton’s epic “Paradise Lost”. Milton was a Protestant English Republican who having supported the regicide found himself ultimately questioning its achievements prior to the restoration.

Encouragingly in these difficult times Lalor finds many positive signs as he leads us on this richly symbolic journey.  The urban structures of past conflicts are now just monuments, like the intriguingly quiet  “Millie” (a reference to the Crumlin Rd statue of a Mill worker & a reminder that during the Second World War mills were converted from the production of linen to the manufacture of munitions).

Whilst unwilling to make judgments, the song asks difficult questions about which we must each make up our own mind. With the realisation that the object of his quest is actually peace (the word never appears in the song) comes the responsibility to educate the next generation. The journey starts with the Holy Cross schools dispute and finishes with a child giving up arms on the notorious “Yellow Brick Road.”  In a city full of contradictions it’s not what side of the wall you come from that matter, its how many gates you are prepared to open.

Through a crack in a window, that’s shrouded & torn,

The light hesitates, like another false dawn

Til the room fills with silence, I once heard before

Finding me in my dreams; losing you at my door.

         Through the streets tarred with bloodshed, I’m searching again

The barricades have all gone but the barriers remain

Til I see Model schoolboys helping Holy Girls cross

Crumlin Road where so many childhoods were lost

                        Chorus

It’s been many life times the graves mark the scores

Of those laid to unrest, in the Good Old Cause

Was order through their disorder won?

Do they reign in hell or serve in heav’n?

         I see your name on a wall, or was it the gaol?

Hear your voice as I swing by the old Courthouse rails

And Milly looks on, standing quiet and still

Like the bombs she once made, as I turn to Shankhill.

         The Yellow Brick Road casts its gates open wide

Lost in my thoughts I fall in alongside  

A young boy playing war as he leads out his men

Not seeing the Gates are now closing again.  

         I wake to the cries of a boy left behind

The bars of his cage & the walls in his mind

To the life that I took, instead of my own

And the debt I must pay, for a child left alone.

         There’s no place to hide, & no where to run

For the man of unrest & the boy with his gun

Til he held out his arms, & I knelt by His side

Wiped the tears from his face & found you in his eyes

 Chorus

Now the scars in the churchyard are healing once more

Not wounds of revenge but still green like before

The mind is its own place, thy will be done 

To make a heav’n of hell or a hell of heav’n