Daily Discovery: Callaghan, "Crazy Beautiful Life"

Videos by American Songwriter

BIRTHDATE: Jan 10

HOMETOWN: Boston, Lincolnshire UK

CURRENT LOCATION: Nashville, TN

AMBITIONS: To keep writing and performing and to share my music with as many people as possible! To visit the four U.S. states that I haven’t been to yet. Once I’ve been to Nebraska, Alaska, North Dakota and Hawaii, I’ll have visited all 50!

TURN-OFFS: People who are rude. It doesn’t take any time to be friendly and makes everyone’s day a lot more pleasant.

TURN-ONS: Ice-cream! I have such a sweet tooth and could quite happily just eat ice-cream three times a day!

DREAM GIG: I visited Red Rocks in Colorado last year on a tour and was blown away by it. I haven’t managed to see a show there yet but I hear from a lot of people it’s pretty spectacular, so for a public show I think that would be a dream gig. Recently I got booked to play a session on the BBC back in the UK on the Bob Harris radio show. I’ve listened to Bob’s show for so many years and remember thinking when I was younger if I ever got to play a session on his show I would have arrived, so that’s a real personal ambition of a dream gig that has now come true!

FAVORITE LYRIC: That’s such a difficult question! There are so many songs I love and so many amazing lyrics to choose from. One that stuck with me recently was from an Oasis song called The Masterplan –

“There’s four and twenty million doors
On life’s endless corridor”

CRAZIEST PERSON I KNOW: Two of my band members, JP and Shannon, are crazy at all the right moments and so much fun to be on the road with. We just filmed a video together for “Crazy Beautiful Life” and I was crying with laughter by the time we’d finished!

SONG I WISH I WROTE: “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” – It’s one of my all-time favorite songs and I love getting to perform it at my live shows. Even though it’s been around for so many years, for me it never loses its magic.

5 PEOPLE I’D MOST LIKE TO HAVE DINNER WITH: This is often a topic that comes up on the long car journeys we’re on during touring – which people we’d invite to a dinner party! Assuming it could be anyone alive or dead, my 5 people would be:

– Freddie Mercury. I’m such a fan of his music and I think he would be a really interesting person to talk to!
– James Corden – I have watched his UK TV series “Gavin and Stacey” several hundred times since moving to the U.S. It really reminds me of home!
– Malcolm Gladwell – I’ve read a lot of his books and I think he would bring up some interesting topics of conversation
– Pink – I think she is an absolutely amazing performer and I want to know how she manages to sing while doing all those acrobatics in her shows!
– Josh Hartnett – no explanation necessary!

MY FAVORITE CONCERT EXPERIENCE: One of my favourite concert experiences was also my first – seeing John Denver live in Manchester UK when I was 5. I knew all the words to every one of his songs and was absolutely mesmorised! More recently, touring with Shawn Mullins and getting to watch him perform each night was amazing. He has an incredible way of telling the stories behind the songs and connecting with his audiences. It was a real inspiration for me getting to tour with him and learn from him each night, and I’ve taken a lot of that same approach with my own headline shows now.

I WROTE THIS SONG: “Crazy Beautiful Life” is the first single from my new album “A History of Now.” This uptempo, happy song is about the sheer exuberance and variety of life. I wanted to capture that feeling of awe and wonder you sometimes get when you take a moment to stop and look at the world around you, and everything that’s happened in your own life.

I got the idea for this song while I was in the Caribbean. I’d been invited to sing a couple of songs at a wedding of some fans – something I don’t often do – but then when they told me it would be in St. Thomas it was very hard to resist! On one of the days I went out on a boat to do some snorkelling. As someone who is pretty terrified of open water, I only lasted about 15 minutes in the sea, then got back on the boat to enjoy the view from a more comfortable distance! As I was lying there in the sun, with blue sky above and a sparkling ocean around me, Jack Johnson came on the radio and I felt so incredibly lucky to be there in that moment.

There are times when you pause for breath and all you can think is, “Wow, how did I end up here?!”

When I got back to Nashville and told that story to Dennis Matkosky – my co-writer and producer – I said I really wanted to write a song that captured that sense of feeling so lucky to be alive. Whatever is happening in life, the good days, the bad days, the joy, the heartache, the mundane, the unpredictability – all of those aspects are what go into making life so fascinating to me.