This is more of a suggestion than an order. James D. Irwin introduces Fireflies on Mars, fronted by Meg Burrows— a recently featured poet and frequent contributor to the magazine.

I have known Meg since the second week of our first year at university, and we have always been good friends and occasional Trivial Pursuit adversaries. Despite this, it was only quite recently that Meg revealed to me her enviable singing talent with her song Paper Birds. She is now in a band, Fireflies of Mars, with Jason Noble and Jonathon Coy.

Included here are three songs from their SoundCloud page, and a few words on the band from Meg herself.

We formed the band at the end of June/beginning of July 2012 after writing the song ‘Something we’ll always do’ (I call it our ‘Jack Johnson’ song.) We’ve known each other for a long time ( I went to Primary School with Jay and I’ve known him for a long time before the band as he is good friends with my brother and Jonathan, who we call JC, has known us since the final years of high school/sixth form.) However, it wasn’t until I asked JC to help me record my song ‘Paper Birds’ for a Uni assignment that we played music together – before that I had watched JC as part of a band that a mutual friend sang for called Sonic Funk. It was then a year later that I asked JC to jam again and I decided to invite Jason along as I knew of his love for music ( before Fireflies on Mars, he was in a band at high school called Steel Phantom – consisting of a lot of our mutual friends – and more recently a band called With Winters at Uni.) Something clicked and we started meeting up more regularly to play but in all honesty it was intended to be just a bit of fun – its taken us by pleasant surprise how we have developed a good dynamic as a band of acoustic, soulful, bluesy ‘ness’. We already have so many songs, half of which we haven’t yet recorded and lyrics and bits of music coming out of our ears. We started getting involved in the music scene here at home in Ipswich and are currently organising gigs around Suffolk but hope to branch out further a field in good time. It’s a treat when I leave the mic on at rehearsals as the boys come out with some gems of statements in between songs… We love a good cup of tea (especially with some whiskey in it) and my dog Murphy seems to have become the band mascot.

Hopefully we will be in Winchester in the future to play