Mickey's Album "Joined up writing" was released in November 2000.

1. Lambeg Drummer : A Lambeg Drum is a huge drum used during Orange marches and owes more to its ability to intimidate than to its contribution to the musical arts.
   
   
2. Absent Friends :"Absent Friends" marks the end of a song cycle about growing up in the North in the so called Troubles. The first song was "Only Our Rivers Run Free", the second, "Peter Pan and Me", which was the title of my debut album. The songs seek to chart the events of those long and terrible days of conflict.
   
   
3. Boys of the Byline Brigade : A byline in newspaper parlance is when your name appears on a story you have written. This is my genuflection to all of the old time heroes who populated the journalistic days of my youth, and who were badly paid, badly regarded, and who were relegated to working the nightshift - the Doomwatch - at the end of their days.
   
   
4. Follow the Flag : This song tries to show that the more we are different, the more we are the same.
   
   
5. Old Wooden Boats : It seems to be a rite of passage for every songwriter to write about boats.This song is based on a true encounter in Dingle a few years ago and represents perhaps the best advice I have ever been given
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6. Christmas 1914 : This song was composed by my brother Cormac and this represents my interpretation of it. It is based on a true event that happened on the first Christmas of the First World War-the war to end all wars. Grainy newsreel footage still preserves the unforgettable moment.
   
   
7. The First Good Friday : An experimental song. I wrote this to celebrate the wonderful voice of my good friend and drinking companion, Tom Reid of Corofin, Co.Clare. The song is an attempt to recapture what might have been said between two countrymen on a dusty lane near the city where the crucifixion took place on the First Good Friday.
   
   
8. The Little Drummer Boy : In the days before radio communications, great empires used little boys from workhouses and orphanages as drummer boys to control the movement of their armies in the field of battle. It is a point of honour among all soldiers not to harm children and thereby, they sealed their own doom. This is a twist to the story.
   
   
9. Maggie Johnston : Maggie Johnston seeks to talk about the plight of the old, the helpless and the frightened in our towns and our cities. In a sad and creepy coincidence I discovered that on the same night I wrote this song, an old lady was murdered in her small sweetshop, in Listowel, Co.Kerry, a few hundred yards from where I was living at the time.
   
   
10. Angel of Mercy : Based on a late night conversation, this tells of the anger of a young friend who was deserted by his lady when she went off to what she described as "a better life" in the famine fields of Africa. The lyrics reflect his disbelief and hurt.
    
    
11. The Man who drank the Farm : This attempts to get to grips with the mechanics of drinking a farm of land, a practice carried out with great enthusiasm all over Ireland. It was triggered by a late night conversation with a poet during Writers' Week in Listowel. I waited for years for him to write the song, and when he failed, I decided to do it myself.

"Like all great songwriters, Mickey MacConnell not only writes about what he knows, but he also writes as he speaks. Whether he's extolling the virtues of 'Old Wooden Boats' , observing the lonely decline of a journalist on the midnight shift (Boys of the Byline Brigade) or highlighting the often disastrous consequences of blindly following the flag, Mickey Mac Connell writes with an honesty and a passion that I have rarely heard. I cannot recommend this album highly enough. We need more songwriters like Mickey MacConnell." Kieran Goss, Dublin. September 2000

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