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Beginning at the end of this new collaborative offering from Nuala Kennedy & Eamon O’ Leary, Liffeyside, Hydra’s final track, is everything you could conceivably ask for in an interpretation from two consummate (Irish) folk artists of a beautiful traditional love song. Featuring the simplest of melodies, the music warmly encases the song and the disarmingly exquisite harmonies are further enriched by a star-studded chorus. Nuala Kennedy takes the lead vocal, singing the verses, Eamon O’Leary, on guitar, adds harmony to the choruses, with a brief instrumental interlude of Nuala’s flute and strings from fiddle player Liz Knowles before the third and final verse, the chorus then sung a number of times with the glorious addition of Liffeyside Chorus members Cathal McConnell (The Boys of the Lough), Anaïs Mitchell and Will Oldham aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy (Oldham duetted with Nuala on The Waves of the Silvery Tide on her 2010 album Tune In).
Nuala learned Liffeyside from her ‘musical mentor’, singer, song collector, flute and whistle player Cathal McConnell. He recorded it as ‘Liffey’s Side’ on I Have Travelled This Country (2011) and ‘Liffey Side’ with the Boys Of The Lough on The New Line (2014). Cathal, in turn, learned it from a 78 rpm recording of Irish singer Delia Murphy. Delia recorded it as ‘From Liffey’s Side’, with just piano accompaniment. During World War II, while her husband was an Irish diplomat to the Vatican, Delia helped a Vatican official to hide Jews and escaped Allied soldiers from the Nazis. In Cathal’s, and the original version, there is no chorus; here, what was the last two lines of each verse has been changed to “make a sing-along chorus”, which makes for a beautiful variation, and, though with far fewer voices, sounds not unlike the breath-taking chorus on the song There’s The Day on Cathal’s album Long Expectant Comes At Last (2000).
The album was recorded on the beautiful small Greek island of Hydra, from which it takes its name. The island has also attracted the likes of Henry Miller, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Lawrence Durrell, and Leonard Cohen. Cars are prohibited on the island, and the main mode of transport is by donkey or by foot. The album was recorded in an eighteenth-century carpet factory whose large open windows overlook the port, and the location’s relaxed calmness and simplicity permeate the album.
Kennedy and O’Leary, hailing from Dundalk and Dublin, are longstanding, highly respected traditional Irish musicians. Together with guitarist John Doyle, they also play in The Alt, making their eponymous album in 2014 and Day Is Come in 2022, and Eamon played on three tracks on Nuala’s 2015 Behave The Bravest. Last year, Nuala released Shorelines – “cohesive, compelling storytelling, refreshingly seen from the woman’s viewpoint” (review here) and before that, in 2019, the Snowflakes Trio’s Sun Dogs album – “a thing of gorgeous, stirring variation” (review here). After traditional albums with fiddle player Patrick Ourceau and with guitarist Jefferson Hamer (who made the outstanding Child Ballads album with Anaïs Mitchell), Eamon’s solo output has highlighted his excellent song writing, more recently All Souls in 2018 and The Silver Sun in 2020.
The album opens with I Will Hang My Harp on a Willow Tree, a song the pair learned from Newfoundland singer Anita Best. After Nuala’s declamatory trumpet-like flute introduction, the joy of her and Eamon’s duet harmony singing is heard immediately in the first verse. The other three verses then alternate between Nuala’s solo and duet harmony. The track has that incongruous quality of evoking joy amid a melancholic song of heartbreak. The Dark-Eyed Gypsy finds Eamon leading with his charming, melodic singing, Nuala adding almost imperceptibly hushed harmony to the last few lines of each verse, their guitar and flute and Liz Knowles strings combining flawlessly in between verses. They took the words from the version recorded, as ‘The Gypsies’, by Cathal McConnell (on Long Expectant Comes At Last) and set it to a melody from Sam Henry’s Songs of the People. Cathal got his version from Len Graham, who we might reasonably assume got it from Joe Holmes, as Joe’s singing of it (solo) appeared on Chaste Muses, Bards and Sages, a 1975 collaborative with Len, the sleeve notes of which shared that Joe learnt it from his mother. Others who have recorded it include Michelle Burke, The Furrow Collective and Lankum.
Ag Bruach Dhún Réimhe is a delightful old, make that very old, song which sees Nuala further explore music from the Oriel region (Nuala’s native area in North East Ireland), which she was part of interpreting with the band Oirialla with Gerry O’Connor (fiddle) Giles le Bigot (guitar) and Martin Quinn (accordion) on their self-titled 2012 album. The song was composed by the famous South East Ulster poet Art MacCumhaigh (1738–1773). He wrote the poem while sheltering from a storm in the ruins of the Ó Néill Chieftain Castle on the shores of Lake Glasdrumman in South Armagh and addresses his lament to a nearby song thrush. It is very much Nuala’s song, everything about it unfussy and a little haunting, Eamon adding minimal harmony to just a few lines, his guitar joined by measured mandolin played by Brían Mac Gloinn (Ye Vagabonds) and Nuala’s flute. Nuala’s version was inspired by the exceptional (individual) singing of the Oriel sisters, Eithne and Pádraigín Ní Úallacháin.
The only self-composed song on Hydra is As We Rove Out, written by Eamon. It has a gorgeous melody, which feels instantly familiar; you can imagine it being introduced and sung as a tradition in the future. With Naula’s harmonies and Brían Mac Gloinn’s mandolin, it sounds not entirely unlike an early Richard and Linda Thompson song with echoes of the song What Will We Do?, albeit much livelier.
Hydra has a couple of sets of very well-played tunes, as you would expect from two musicians steeped in traditional music. The first, with Eamon on bouzouki, features two jigs: Mary of Inisturk from the Petrie collection and Road to Tully, composed by Martin Quinn; the second, with Eamon on guitar this time, features Porz kloz, composed by Patrick Molard, and two reels, Patsy Touhey’s and The Eel in the Sink. Nuala’s flute playing is rich in tone and flows elegantly throughout.
Much of what can be said about Liffeyside, the last track, can be said of Hydra. You couldn’t ask for more from two renowned Irish musicians on an excellent selection of superbly sung songs and handsome melodies. The understated accompaniment quietly carries each song with apt, highly adept musicianship, and the harmonies are subtle and magnificent. As pairings of musicians go, Nuala Kennedy and Eamon O’Leary are compatibility personified; it doesn’t get much better.
Hydra (21st August 2024) Under The Arch Records.
Order Hydra: https://nualakennedyandeamonoleary.bandcamp.com/album/hydra
