damhnait doyle

Damhnait Doyle at the Rose Theatre Songwriter’s Circle in Brampton, ON – April 7, 2011

dav — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 19:38:38 +0000

Join Damhnait Doyle along with Brooke Miller and Brampton native and multi-time Juno Award nominee Dean McTaggart for the Rose Theatre Songwriter’s Circle. Their unique blend of character and musicality promise to make the night one to remember! More information can be found at : http://www.brampton.ca/sites/Rose-Theatre/en/Events-And-Tickets/Pages/ShowDetails.aspx?ShowID=245&ShowDate=04/07/2011

Songwriter’s Circle : The Rose Theatre in Brampton, ON – April 7, 2011

The Heartbroken

Damhnait Doyle has been hard at work with her new band The Heartbroken (Peter Fusco, Stuart Cameron, Blake Manning ) which has been touring all over Canada in support of their album “Tonight, Tonight”. If you haven’t’ had a chance to check out this wonderful “bandage for bleeding hearts and souls around the world”, then head on over to http://www.theheartbroken.com where you can hear tracks from the album , join them on facebook and read all about them.

The Heartbroken

dav — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 01:32:01 +0000

~ The Heartbroken take on Canada with Tonight Tonight ~

~ i-shoot video for first single, Seventeen ~
Toronto, ON – February 3, 2011 – Whether they’re on guitar, piano, mandolin, drums, banjo, bass or monosynth, it doesn’t matter who’s playing what, they are lungs to heart and heart to blood. The Heartbroken is Stuart Cameron (guitar), Damhnait Doyle (vocals, guitar), Peter Fusco (bass) and Blake Manning (drums, vocals).
They’re a group of people that found a home instead of a house. They make sense together and they make beautiful, heartache, down on your luck, get up off your butt and dust yourself off music. They’ve won over Toronto from the gutter to the spotlight and now they’re leaving the nest of Hogtown with a tour across Western Canada (see dates below). You’re going to want to be one of the people at their first show in your town, instead of lying later and saying that you were there.

“Tonight Tonight” is their beautifully crafted debut album. A bandage for bleeding hearts and souls. It’s a visceral reaction to the blows of life and love, a moment to enjoy being on the ground, because you know you are going to be that much stronger when you get back up. The Heartbroken recorded the album at the Tragically Hip’s famed and maybe haunted studio, The Bathouse, which used to be an old coach house in Bath, Ontario. They walked in the door and didn’t leave until they’d finished nine days later. You can hear it all on the tape, every drop of love. Self-produced, the band invited Stew Crookes (Hawksley Workman and Justin Rutledge) in to engineer and mix the album.

The Heartbroken started playing live with an acoustic residency at The Three Speed in Toronto and then moved on to the legendary Dakota Tavern (owned by Shawn Creamer of The Beauties), where they stood up, plugged in and played so hard they almost fell over. Watch the Dakota Sessions video for The Heartbroken’s Same Mood Today. The band has just finished an i-shoot for the single, Seventeen, with video director Jeth Weinrich. They traveled to the desert in Sante Fe, New Mexico, to get just the right landscape to use as their backdrop.
Watch for the video soon!

Tour Dates:
February 10 – Calgary, AB – The Palomino February 11 – Edmonton, AB – Cook County Saloon February 12 – Grandview, AB – Grandview Stage Resort February 13 – Lethbridge, AB – The Slice February 16 – Jasper, AB – Royal Canadian Legion February 18 – Grande Prairie, AB – Champs February 19 – Grande Prairie, AB -Champs February 21 – Kelowna, BC – The Minstral Café February 22 – Vancouver, BC – Media Club February 26 – Cadillac, SK – Cadillac Hall February 27 – Moose Jaw, SK – Golden Nugget Centre

For music and more information about The Heartbroken visit www.theheartbroken.com

For more information please contact:
Indoor Recess Inc.
Joanne Setterington – ph. 416.703.5217 / e. joanne@indoorrecess.com

Damhnait Doyle - Final Column

dav — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 15:07:35 +0000

I truly believe the universe gives you what you need, when you need it. I also believe that everything happens for a reason, which makes me pretty popular with friends who are looking for a positive outlook on a situation and more than a little irritating to those who prefer to marinate in the negative. So this weekend when I received an email saying this would in fact be the last week of my column for The Telegram, I immediately saw the good side. Truth is there have been so many instances over the years, whether I was traveling in Africa, Afghanistan, or rural Newfoundland where the sheer stress of trying to find an internet connection to meet my deadline nearly killed me. Or the days I had to steal away from a writing or studio session to try and finish my column, only to stare at the computer screen, worrying that I used up all my words for song lyrics. Depending on what was going on in the world and in my life, I have spent as much time trying to edit down wild, novel length thoughts into a 400 word piece, as I have racking my brains trying to come up with something, anything at all that could possibly be mildly interesting to you all. Something that hopefully, I hadn’t already written about! I truly have felt a huge responsibility to those of you who faithfully read my column every week and stopped to ask me if I got my sister’s wedding dress home safely, or if Willie Nelson really is that nice, I simply haven’t wanted to let you down. I will continue to write blogs on my website dav-net.com, but I will do them without a deadline, with less commas (if that’s even possible!) and hopefully with a lot less stress. I remember how excited I was when I was first asked to write for The Evening Telegram and how proud I felt to be a part of its rich history in our province, a pride I will carry with me forever. I am also grateful to this column for giving me the opportunity to have you all in my life, but am even more grateful to you all for choosing me to be a part of yours every week and for that I thank you.

Damhnait Doyle’s Column - February 4, 2010

dav — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:28:47 +0000

I have been in a bit of a tizzy the last few weeks finishing and polishing up songs before my band goes into the studio next week - mostly because I thought they were pretty perfect before we went in there digging around the dirt. Writing a song is a bit like buying a new coat, putting it on and knowing it was made for you. It’s warm, it goes with everything, you feel like a warrior when you put it on and are more than a little sad when you have to take it off. You admire it as it hangs on its hook and wish you’d found it sooner, because it’s the one thing you can put on, that makes you happy. Then out of the blue, you get invited out for the evening, you show up and everyone is dressed to the nines, in suits, dresses and high heels, and there you stand in your winter jacket. Only it doesn’t seem as warm or as beautiful as it did the day before, in fact you can’t help but feel a little embarrassed by it, because all those times you loved it so much and never wanted to take it off, meant you wore it to the dinner table and inadvertently dunked your sleeve into your bowl of pea soup, which has dried into a pronounced crust. It also had a little tear peeking out from under the pocket where you hitched it on the fence when you went ice skating and because you never noticed it before, it has turned into a massive tear from armpit to waist and to top it off, it smells a little like a fire pit ( which was your single favorite smell until someone walked by and turned up their nose). So you take your jacket off, walk around the party and forget about it, you may even in fact admire someone else’s coat and ask where they bought it and wonder if they have any in your size. You have a great time, stay out too late, grab your jacket and put it under your arm planning on putting it on once you grab a cab, only to walk out into the street and find a blizzard waiting for you. The high heeled women with their flimsy wrap eyes your winter jacket like it’s the hope diamond, they’ve been waiting for over an hour in the snow and there are no cabs for miles. So you pick up your jacket, give it a little hug and say you’re sorry, put it on and wave goodbye. You are going to walk home in the blizzard, because you can.

Dav’s Column - January 28, 2010

dav — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 11:53:51 +0000

In the long days since a massive earthquake devastated the country of Haiti, the onslaught of video, stories and pictures of the aftermath have proven to be sickeningly sad. Yet somehow today, something affected me more than anything else I’ve seen, an image of police shooting at ” Looters” in Port Au Prince. I guarantee you, if I lost my family right before my eyes, managed to climb, or get pulled out of a rubble of concrete, had to spend the following week looking up at the sky, praying for the circling planes to land and bring medical supplies to those with festering wounds in the streets, orphanages and nursing homes, where people who don’t believe that help will ever arrive and hope for death to take them soon, I would break a window or two. If I had not eaten for over a week and the only drop of water I put to my lips was riddled with parasites, disease and filth and made me sick instantly, I would grab a stale loaf of bread I could not pay for ( because I lost everything single thing I ever had in the quake), from the store where I broke the window. If journalists were the only foreigners I saw, because the UN was too afraid to come to my neighborhood, claiming it’s too dangerous and my child lay dying in my arms, I would eat the glass from the broken window, if I thought it would help. Now, the same people that are impressionable enough to listen to and believe in Pat Robertson (who last week addressed the American people and said the Haitian people were getting their just desserts after making a pact with the devil centuries ago), have another dirty weapon in their arsenal when questioning why their government is helping a ” lawless” country, instead of lowering taxes. Why some of the aid money isn’t to buy out the stores filled with food, soap, diapers, and toilet paper and to hire security to distribute it, instead of trying to keep them away, is beyond me. The Haitian people are not ” thieves” , they are desperate, starving and thirsty. More importantly they are sons, fathers, daughters, mothers, sisters and brothers and they are doing whatever they can to survive, and survival should never be considered a crime.

Dav’s Column - January 21, 2010

dav — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 00:09:34 +0000

Tonight is a big night for the Doyles, a big night for the Private Investigating industry in Canada and a big night for Newfoundland. I have lived my whole life with people getting in my face and asking me ” your name is what?” or ” How do you say that for God’s sake? Damanit, Damanah, Damnbrat?” and when they do attempt to spell it, a swear word is jammed in the middle, or at the very least a ph. So outside of the island and even though it too has been mispronounced, I have clung on to my last name as some sort of personal ID, like a life preserver. I should at this point disclose that after twenty years of pronouncing my name ” Davnet” , I learned from a friend of my mothers that my first name is actually pronounced “Downith” and that in Ireland, ” Damhnait” is the patron saint of mentally ill people. Doyle, however is a name that means a lot of things, it means family, good times, occasional brushes with the law and a bucket load of love. So I am proud to see it plastered over every single bus shelter, billboard, television station and website in this country and I for one cannot wait until tonight to tune into ” Republic Of Doyle” on CBC. To see the culmination of months and months of hard work by the best film crews and actors in the country and to know it’s as pure, true and 100 % Newfoundland as Purity biscuits, is spectacular. By this point it’s safe to say that after seeing him get punched in the face eight million times in the trailer for ROD that everybody knows who Allan Hawco is, but besides for being the creator and lead actor of the show, he is someone who gets the impossible done. Like anybody who has ever met him, I know that the only thing that has ever truly mattered to him is family, friends and of course Newfoundland and to see someone go after their dreams and slam-dunk it, is inspiring beyond belief. I am buttering up the popcorn, cracking a beer, sitting down on the couch and turning on the TV and I can’t wait to watch with you all.

Dav’s Column - January 14, 2010

dav — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:10:45 +0000

I don’t have any idea where all the time has gone this Christmas. I do however know exactly where the food has gone and that would be on a direct flight to my stomach. There are so many things like Mount Scio dressing and peas pudding that I can’t seem to put down at this time of year and that’s even before I take the first bite of the addiction forming substance known as casserole, which has just the right combination of vegetable and fat to glue an artery permanently shut. I guess that’s why they are known as special occasion dishes, because even though a green bean or broccoli casserole “sounds” healthy, anyone who has ever made one or witnessed it’s creation knows it’s pure sin on a dish and I for one love it more than winning a brand new car in a lotto draw. I have also loved being able to sleep in so late, so late that I actually found myself having to lie about it on a couple of occasions to my friends who happen to have kids. I felt like telling them the truth of how much sleep I was getting would be like a slap in the face, especially after they would tell me how happy they were that their child slept until six (in the morning! ). I have loved every minute of catching up with my family and friends ( except for the lying about the sleeping), so much so I even loved losing at Cranium, loved almost getting blown off the side of Fort Amherst by a rogue gust of wind and I loved having to walk halfway home from downtown in high heeled boots at three in the morning because we could not get a cab. In fact I have loved every Christmas this decade and am completely shocked that it’s going to be 2010, It seems like only yesterday we were all gathered for the millennium celebrations in St John’s harbour. So here’s to a new year, to peace, joy, love and hope and maybe if we are really lucky a guilt free recipe for green bean casserole.

Dav’s Column - January 7, 2010

dav — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 13:03:31 +0000

There is something about traveling during the holidays that launches a pure panic in me. Any other time of the year the stress threshold of flying is manageable, but get close to Christmas and all of a sudden walking into the airport feels like waltzing into the eye of a storm. I have been in a self inflicted tailspin all day, trying to cram everything I said I was going to do over the last three months into just a few hours and it turns out I wasn’t the only one. Driving to the airport I had to count to ten over and over again, reminding myself to breathe, as I silently but deafeningly repeated “It really doesn’t matter that I forgot my winter boots, cell phone charger and the present for my secret Santa because I am running late, will probably miss my plane and have to turn around and head back home anyway. I can grab the stuff I forgot just as soon as I rebook my flight. ” At which point all my previous and incredibly scarring experiences of rebooking flights to Newfoundland after Christmas snowstorms came flooding back as did the realization that changing my flight would be as difficult as skating up Signal Hill in the rain. We may be known as the nicest people in the world but Newfoundlanders flying home for Christmas thinking they might be stranded is another story entirely. Not for love nor money would a Newfoundlander ever give up their spot on a flight home, sure the mother from “Home Alone” might be begging for someone to give them her seat so she could get home to her stranded eight year old son about to be set upon by robbers. She could offer her house, her car, her jewellery but I guarantee you she wouldn’t have any takers. So with a very real terror, we drove a lot faster and screamed up to the gate, where miraculously there was no one in front of me in line. Not only that, the bags I thought were overweight were under, I got an isle seat on a full plane, and because my flight was delayed an hour I even had time to go to Swiss Chalet ( talk about a Christmas memory). If I didn’t believe in Santa Claus before, I do now, so, so happy to be home.

Dav’s Column - January 1, 2010

dav — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 15:00:29 +0000

I am pretty sure that when you are unable to sleep at night and lay awake staring at the ceiling because you feel so awful about something you saw on TV, that you should probably stop watching the offending show. Last night I sat down to watch the season finale of Dexter, the only thing I have watched with any regularity all year and for someone with such a huge aversion to all things blood and guts, a commercial free hour devoted to the lives of a serial killer and his family has a very strange and strong appeal. So at the end of the show when something extremely traumatic happened to Dexter (I don’t want to spoil it just in case you haven’t seen it and after this article you still have some kind of sick desire to) I went into a slight state of shock, as if it had happened to me. After my initial reaction of not being able to breath, my first question was “Am I desensitized or overly sensitized by the media and TV, that I can feel such a kinship with a serial killer?”. My automatic justification of these hyper empathetic feelings was “Yes he is a serial killer, but he only kills other serial killers!”, so I guess the answer is both. In my humble opinion and in no way excusing his philandering ways (of which I am uncomfortable knowing to be truthful) but that in essence is Tiger wood’s big PR problem. Tiger’s entire life and business to this point has been moulded around him being perfect, being the best at everything, without failings or faults. Even as a child he was groomed to be a machine, a veritable golf factory. We humans know that all machines have glitches and people for the most part are greater after learning from our mistakes and in Tiger’s case the lights shone as bright as the sun until all the power went out in an instant and the generator exploded. In so many grown up child star’s behaviour you see sad little kids searching for boundaries, craving discipline, and by the thirteen women (that we know about) that he choose to confide in ,Tiger Woods wanted to be caught. Everyone knows how hard it is to keep your partner happy and couple that with marriage! Imagine adding the stress of an affair, where you have to keep an extra whole being happy, the lies, the double lives, the expectations. Then imagine a life where you have thirteen women demanding your time, your attention and not to mention your physical stamina. Honestly, the man is truly lucky to be alive.

Dav’s Column - December 17, 2009

dav — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 20:12:54 +0000

Anybody who knows me in the slightest shouldn’t be surprised that the thing that affected me the most about Rwanda (besides of course for the traveler’s sickness which lasted twelve days and borrowed five pounds) was the children. The choruses of kids running and shouting “Muzungu, Muzungo” ( white person) as we drove down the two lane highway or walked along the red dirt roads was at times deafening. To some of these children in the more remote villages we were the first white people they had ever laid eyes on and they stared at us as if we were in fact aliens. When the initial shock wore off they would practice their english on us, always leading strong with ” My name is…” and becoming shy by the time it came to say their actual names, they held our hands, sang for us and listened to us sing in our strange sounding language with wide eyed excitement. The last day when we were filming in the church where a significant part of the genocide occurred I struggled to keep composure, a few of us wandered outside to sit and grab a breath of fresh air and within minutes a group of about twenty kids gathered and circled us. I remember sitting there thinking ” If only I could speak Kinyarwanda then I could ask just for a hug, because after what I saw today, I really could use one”. At that point I really didn’t care if I looked like a crazy, alien lady, I just opened up my arms and smiled and waited. First a little teeny tiny girl in a faded red dress stepped forward and though tentative at first she cuddled right into me when I squeezed her, then as if on cue the whole front row jumped on line and a few came in for seconds and thirds. I spent the next twenty minutes hugging these kids, deliriously happy and oblivious to the sorrow I had felt so heavily just half an hour before. Without a doubt that moment was the highlight of my trip, even though as I got up to go back inside I was unable to shut my eyes to the visual reminders of the beast inside mankind, I had something with me infinitely more powerful, the endless gift of children’s love and innocence.