Tag: irish singer/songwriters

Root 66: I Have A Tribe’s Roadside Favorites

Posted on by Amy Reitnouer

Name:  I Have A Tribe
Hometown: Dublin, Ireland
Latest Album: Beneath a Yellow Moon

Record Store: There’s a second-hand record store in Brighton just around North Laine. There are no price tags on the vinyls — you choose a record, bring it to the counter, and listen to it with the owner to check its condition. If it’s perfect, you pay 15; a couple of little scratches or flaws, 10. Or, if it’s fairly worn and you’re only after it for the sleeve, you give him a fiver. I brought Leonard Cohen's Songs of Love and Hate to the counter, fairly broke and kind of hoping for a couple of skips in it to keep it at a tenner. He stuck it on, though, and it was perfect. We settled on 12.

Radio Station: My favourite is an Irish one called Lyric FM, two shows in particular — John Kelly, and Carl Corcoran’s Blue of the Night. Very, very varied and always interesting. I like Flux FM in Germany a lot. Got to visit once and make a little playlist for a show. That was a lovely treat. We had Flux on in the car driving to a gig once and I was trying to learn German by repeating phrases from a hip hop tune they had on. I had no idea what I was saying, but I thought it was sweet because the music under the rap was quite soft and kind of romantic. Turns out, I was learning phrases you wouldn’t repeat in most places. Didn’t go down so well in the petrol station.

Airport: Tempelhof, Berlin. Not sure if this one qualifies because it's not used as an airport anymore. But it’s a magnificent space in Berlin to watch sunrises and sunsets and people learning or mastering skateboarding and kiteboarding on the old runways. I spent a day trying to learn to cycle down the runway with my eyes closed and my arms out wide like birds' wings. Maybe not the safest game to play, but it’s a lovely feeling, if you can balance it.

 

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Highway Stretch: In Ireland, particularly the west, the landscape and the terrain is so unpredictable and unstable and changing. You could never put manners on the wildness of it. I’d be very fond of that. But I found watching the landscape out the window driving through Holland, looking out at this endless, flat terrain where you could see exactly where you were headed, was very calming. Maybe because it was so foreign to me, I was drawn to it — pick the farthest windmill your eye could find in the distance and enjoy inching closer to the thing piece by piece.  Favourite moment on a highway was between Hamburg and Hanover. Traffic came to a total standstill for a couple of hours. It was a beautiful sunny day, and suddenly this little community sprang up all along the highway — folks got out of the cars and wandered about, played music, played football, or walked the dogs up and down in between the unmoving cars. We were all kind of sad when it was time to drive away.

Music Festival: I visited a festival named Sacred Ground Festival, in Brussow, Germany. It’s curated by a lovely DJ named Frank Weidemann. A couple of years back, my brother and I spent a few days together trying to write a few tunes. He brought along some music to get the inspiration going. One of the songs was a mix by Frank, and I wrote a little song, having been moved by his arrangement. In a lovely twist, my song found its way from Dublin to Berlin, through friends of friends; Frank heard it, liked it, remixed it, and we played it together at the festival. It’s a gorgeous place, everything about the festival is warm and welcoming and special. Even the colour that they painted the stage suited perfectly the style of music played on it. Good dancing and good vibes and a good place to make a temporary home for a couple of days. Aptly named, too, a sacred sort of ground with a sacred sort of atmosphere. We visited another place with a similar kind of magic — La Truite Magique, in the Ardennes mountains in Belgium. Arrived just after midnight and pitched a tent beneath the clearest and starriest sky I’ve ever seen. Fell asleep full of Belgian beer and counting falling stars. In the morning,  to get to the stage, we crossed a little river that runs through the centre of the festival grounds, with tables and chairs anchored in the water for folks to sit in the sun and watch the bands with their feet in the cool water. Wonderfully welcoming people and a joy to visit such places.

Tour Hobby: Following the feet. So, when you get to a new city or a new town, go wander. When you get to a junction, you let the feet — and not the head — decide whether you go left or go right or go straight ahead. Sometimes you end up in interesting places. Sometimes I’ll go running before the gig, but my sense of direction is so disastrous, combined with this game of following the feet, that I end up having to restrict myself to running in straight lines beside train tracks so as not to end up entirely lost and late for the gig. Wait, I’m not sure this is a hobby, actually? Getting lost?

 

Love Wins

A photo posted by @ihaveatribe on

Dive Bar: Lola’s, Rue de Maitres, Paris. Good, cheap wine and good, live jazz and good, willful ignorance of any sort of a closing time.

Backstage Hang: I supported a band once in a place named Fluxbau, Berlin, connected to that lovely radio station mentioned above. It’s right on the river, so when you sit on the floor level with the window, it’s like being on a little boat waiting for your gig. It was all very serene and I had arrived a little early so I thought I’d have a go at a bit of yoga while I waited. Celtic-style yoga, mind you, so making it up as you go along and not really having a notion what you’re at. Didn’t count on the headline band arriving in the door while I was in my pants midway through some daft attempt at a handstand. Awkward enough.

Car Game: Newspaper Poetry. Get a local paper, pick an article and circle the words that you’re instinctively drawn to. Keep going until you chisel out a little piece of writing or a poem reveals itself. Best one or filthiest one wins.

 

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Driving Album: It’s cool if you can fit the music to the landscape you’re driving through. The best match, I think, was listening to Mogwai albums driving in the twilight in Iceland. Followed by Van Morrison's Astral Weeks when the night rolled in. Oscar Peterson piano music is lovely to drive to. And Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense is another fave.

Coffeehouse: This will sound a little unorthodox, but anyway … I stayed in Jamaica, Queens, New York, for a couple of weeks once, playing music with my friends in a band called Slow Skies. Every time we went into the city, we’d get excited and stay out all night. I kept falling asleep on the subway home and pinging back and forth underground and missing the stop. Eventually, I’d make it back to Roy’s Diner, this little place on the corner of our block. In my head, it was all romantic and straight from a Tom Waits tune with a waitress full of stories and a room full of fairytales. In reality, Roy would pour you a bad coffee and fire a sad-looking egg on a plate across the counter to you. He’d look glumly at it and say, "Sorry dude. Just gimme two bucks or somethin’." So dire it was cheerful in a way.

STREAM: Ben Glover, ‘The Emigrant’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Ben Glover
Hometown: Glenarm, Northern Ireland / Nashville, Tennessee
Album: The Emigrant
Release Date: September 30
Label: Proper Records

In Their Words: “Over the past couple of years, I have been going through the process of getting my U.S. Green Card, so the reality of emigration/immigration was very present in my world. Contemplations like 'What and where is home?' were never far from my thoughts. Around the same time, my interest in Irish roots music and folk ballads was rekindled. My head and heart were back in that musical world. Having to deal with the issues of immigration while going back to the music I grew up playing is how this record was born. The project is my story — it’s who I am at this time in my life.” — Ben Glover

Reacting Melodically: A Conversation with Lisa Hannigan

Posted on by Editor

Lisa Hannigan got her start on the stage with Damien Rice, providing vocals for 2002’s massively successful O and growing more confident in her voice and her words ever since. Hannigan’s 2008 debut, Sea Sew, was met with extensive acclaim and a slew of award nominations in her home country of Ireland, and its 2011 follow-up, Passenger, made for more compelling evidence that Hannigan’s haunting vocals find their best fit at center stage.

It’s been five years since Hannigan released any new music and, while she struggled with the writing process, she’s quick to interject that her latest work, the 11-song collection At Swim, isn’t that depressing, by the way. She’s right — one of the things that makes At Swim such a strong effort is its capacity to soar from stirring highs to paralyzing apathy and back again.

I read in an interview from a couple of years ago that you had a favorite song to play live — “Little Bird” — but that it was originally kind of a struggle for you to play in front of people. What makes any particular song difficult to play in the live setting, and how does it evolve for you over time?

I think some songs feel a little more raw, really. In the most basic sense, they feel a little more exposing or truthful — just bare. That song, when I first wrote it, I felt a bit exposed singing it. But then I kind of began to enjoy that feeling, in a way. [Laughs] I sort of enjoyed feeling the rawness of it. The heart of the song still conjures up the moment that it was written in. But it doesn’t feel quite as … it doesn’t feel quite as sunburnt. [Laughs]

What is it about that feeling that appeals to you?

When I say that I enjoy that feeling, I think that that song, in particular, for me, was a way into a slightly different approach to songwriting than I had done. I really felt the truthfulness to it. It was actually really freeing and really enjoyable, in a way, and I’ve tried to bring that into the songs on the new record — tried to express things in a bit more of a bare way. I don’t know if anyone would hear them in the way that I feel them when I’m singing. I would say there are a few songs on my new record — at least, I’ve only been playing a few recently — that give me that same feeling and that I just love to sing for people. “Prayer for the Dying” is one; “We the Drowned” is another. I tried to bring that sense of rawness to all the songs on the new record, to an extent.

These are really personal songs, but you worked with a new producer. Tell me about working with Aaron Dessner on this record.

Well, I had been having a bit of a hard time trying to write songs for this record. I finally got off tour from the second record, and I just kind of felt empty or something. I don’t know why, but I didn’t have the feeling that I usually have when I want to write songs. I was feeling a bit down about the whole situation. [Songwriting] is what I do, so when I don’t do it, I feel a bit confused about my purpose in the world. But then I got this email, completely out of the blue, from Aaron, saying just, "My name’s Aaron. I’m in a band called the National." [Laughs] Which I already knew. But it was just this really sweet email saying, "If you want to write together, or you need someone to produce your next record, or whatever — just if you want to get in touch, please do." So we started this lovely correspondence and became musical pen pals. He would send me all these beautiful pieces of music, and I would try to react to them melodically or lyrically or in any way. It was really fun, and it kind of brought back the fun of songwriting that I had so much squashed down with all of my trying so hard and being down about the whole she-bang. It was really a breath of fresh air in the whole slightly stale situation that I had found myself in.

One of the first songs that he sent that I found easy to write to was the song “Aura” on the record. He sent it and it was very fleshed out — this beautiful, rolling piano chord structure. It had this really beautiful feeling of oars and water. It had this calling sensation to it. I remember vividly: I was just folding the washing at home, and I always have my phone recording whatever humming I would be doing. For “Aura,” I just immediately started singing the melody as it ends up, really. It just felt so natural, and the words and everything felt very natural for that piece of music. Every once in a while with me and Aaron, we would have that situation — where it would just be very immediate and sudden, the connection. So that ends up being on the record and the heart of it being very similar to what we hit on initially. I had a sort of kinetic energy, to keep it whole. We kept it pretty much how it was.

It’s so interesting to hear you talk about this because, so often in the past, you’ve worked with other musicians as the outside collaborator coming in and contributing to their records.

In any situation, you always want to serve the song, be it my song or somebody else’s. You’re always trying to find a way of recording a song or approaching a song which kind of leaves it in its wholest form. I don’t think you should mess with things too much. You should kind of let them be what they want to be.

What was really interesting to me about Aaron and the way he wrote is that I would always want to put kind of a lot of lyrical, melodic things [into songs], kind of intertwining. His approach for this record, he says, was that he wanted it to be kind of austere in a way that it would be very, very rich and textured, but melodically somewhat austere. I thought that was a really interesting approach, and I learned a huge amount from him just in the way that he heard things like that. I think you always learn from people when you collaborate, I think, but I learned a huge amount from Aaron. I’m not sure how much he learned from me. [Laughs] Probably very little!

[Laughs] I’m sure that’s not true. Can you tell me about “We the Drowned”? That song jumped out at me from the record.

That song was one of the early ones that I wrote, when I was feeling so lost. Everything I was doing to myself was not in my best interest. I just couldn’t bring myself to set myself right, you know? Even in terms of reading or everything. I just found myself falling into the rabbit hole of not nourishing my brain as much as I wanted to, or should have. I felt really stuck and sad, you know? I felt really down. I started writing a song, the melody, and the words … they were sort of all very much about the idea of self-sabotage and blindly making decisions and doing things without ever seeming to take the wheel — even when you know the wheel is right there. I feel like that is part of being a human being, where you’re approaching life, and you know so much of what we do, and we shy away from people who make us feel uncomfortable and we sort of make decisions that don’t seem to come from a higher part of our brain at all. I was trying to express that sort of blind marching toward the abyss.

Now that you look back at the song and the record, is there a particular aspect or moment you feel you did take the wheel — that you feel most proud of?

I love all of the songs on the record. I think I’m going to sound terrible, because it was such a difficult process for me that, in a way, I’ve never experienced before. I’m really just proud that there’s a record at the end that I love. There were so many times in the process that I just thought, "I don’t think I’m going to make another record. This has been quite painful." I really felt desperately down. The record isn’t that depressing, by the way! It’s not as depressing as I’m making it sound! But the process was very difficult. Every once in a billion, I would write and I would say, "I love that song!" But then, for months, I would not enjoy anything that I was doing. So I really feel proud that, at the end of all of that difficulty, I feel like I’ve learned to keep going. There is a light at the end of the tunnel.

 

For more on the creative process, read our interview with Lori McKenna.

Photo credit: Rich Gilligan

MIXTAPE: Ben Glover’s Irish Heritage

Posted on by Editor

The prospect of putting together a collection of my favourite Irish songs was somewhat daunting, as this geographically small land has given birth to such a monumental catalogue of music. So, in order to quell my anxiety levels, I restricted my choices to songs from the northern part of the country — the part of the country where I was born and raised. (I’m including County Donegal, too.)

I’m very fortunate to come from a place that has some of the most strikingly beautiful, rugged, and raw landscapes on the planet, and I know this has a large influence on the music that is created here. I’m a big believer that the outer environment greatly influences our inner worlds, and this is very apparent in the songs that are written by Irish artists. The traditions, the ancient spirit embedded in the soil, the wildness of the water, and the troubled history of this country have given the Irish a unique sense of melody and a haunted poetry that often seeps into our songwriters’ work. We can be magnificiently melancholy without slipping into complete darkness. There is such a depth of talent in this country that it’s impossible to make the definitive playlist but this Mixtape contains some of my very favourite tracks from northern Irish songwriters. As these songs and singers continue to inspire me, I hope too that they will make make an impact on your ears, heart, and soul. Enjoy. — Ben Glover

Van Morrison — “Into the Mystic”

This is definitive, Celtic soul and, in my opinion, one of the best songs ever written. It’s Van at his best — capturing mysticism and longing — and I know no other song to have such a timeless and beautiful spirit. Van’s the man.

Paul Brady — “The Island”

One of the great, most powerful anti-war songs which contrasts serenity and intimacy with the hypocrisy of political/religious leaders. It uses the troubles of Northern Ireland and the Lebanese Civil War as a backdrop. This track confirms Paul Brady as a master songwriter.

Four Men and a Dog (Kevin Doherty) — “The Greengrocer’s Daughter”

The members of trad/folk band Four Men and a Dog are from all over Ireland, but their singer/songwriter, Kevin Doherty, is from Buncrana in County Donegal, and so qualifies as being geographically from up north. Kevin has been an influence on me ever since I was a teenager starting to write songs. “The Greengrocer’s Daughter” has a very simple and straightforward lyric, but still is extremely captivating (the hardest kind of song to write). He’s the Irish Leonard Cohen.

Brendan Murphy — “Into Your Arms”

This melody, along with Brendan’s vocal delivery, makes this song plunge straight into one’s heart. Brendan’s band, the Four of Us, have been making great music for over 25 years, but I’m also a big fan of when he strips it all back acoustically. The sparseness and simplicity of this song makes it truly wonderful — a real beauty.

The Plea — “Windchime”

I grew up playing music in the bars of Donegal and, later on, in Boston with Dermot and Denny Doherty, the two brothers at the core of the Plea. They have the ability to write raw, gut-wrenching, folky songs but also make wonderful, big-sounding, indie records like “Windchime.” The song has a dreamy, cinematic sadness that’s as big as the Atlantic Ocean that crashes on the coastline of Donegal, the area where the Plea come from.

Bap Kennedy — “Shimnavale”

Here’s Bap poignantly displaying his shipwrecked heart and conjuring up some Celtic high-lonesome magic. The fiddle wonderfully adds to the haunted atmosphere of the song and, once again, (like in “Into The Mystic”) the deep sense of longing in the song is very powerful.

Gareth Dunlop — “How Far This Road Goes”

Gareth has been on a similar journey to me over the past few years, as he spends a great deal of time writing in Nashville. As well as being a fantastic writer, his is one of the best voices to come out of Northern Ireland over the past few years. He’s the essence of Belfast soul.

Anthony Toner — “The Duke of Oklahoma”

What makes Anthony stand out from a lot of writers is his delicate attention to the details of the characters in his songs mixed with a great musicality. In “The Duke of Oklahoma,” he wears his Dylan influence proudly on his sleeve, but still makes it identifiably Toner-esque with his wonderful narrative and turn of phrase.

Matt McGinn — “What Happens”

Matt and I went to college together and so have been making noise together for quite a few years. He’s a brilliant musician who captures a real elegance in his songs. Matt comes from the heart of the Mourne Mountains, and I can always hear something of the splendor of that environment in his songs — particularly in “What Happens.”

Malojian — “It Ain’t Easy”

Malojian (aka Stevie Scullion) has that rare, powerful gift of being able to knock you over with an almost brittle vocal, in the way Neil Young does. The lyrics of this one intrigue me. I can’t help but get a sense of the 1970s West Coast singer/songwriter in a lot of Malojian’s stuff. He should be on everyone’s alt-folk playlists.

Ben Glover — “Melodies of Midnight”

I couldn’t resist throwing one of my own on here … This is an older song, but I still like the sound of this record.

Cara Dillion — “The Parting Glass”

Cara’s voice is one the purest sounds in the world. She is my favourite Irish female singer, and her version of this old song is the best I know. This vocal performance of Cara’s is completely arresting and stirs up up so many emotions for me. It’s the record I go to when I’m feeling a distance from home.

Photo credit: Jim DeMain