root salad Cathy Jordan
The Dervish singer has wanted to make a solo album forever. Colin Irwin hears how she did it.
“T
he thing is,” says Cathy Jordan, in that impossibly engaging and incorrigibly gossipy over-the-garden-wall
manner of hers, “I’ve always wanted to make a solo record. Ever since I can remember.”
Well Cathy, you tell her, emboldened by her infectious animation, you took your bloody time about it! How long have you been singer and main focal point of Dervish now? 21 years or more? That’s a long rehearsal for a solo album…
“It has been gestating for a long while,” she concedes with a throaty laugh. “The thing is I didn’t want to make a Dervish album without Dervish if you know what I mean. That would be pointless…”
So you can be assured that Carthy
Jordan’s first solo album All The Way Home isn’t Dervish without Dervish. Nei- ther is it Cathy expressing her inner rock chick in leather and chains; nor is she experimenting with techno, jazz, dub- step, cabaret or weirdlore.
Nope, All The Way Home is the sound of one of Ireland’s finest and most charis- matic singers divesting herself of all the trimmings to dive headlong back into her heritage, drawing on the music indelibly locked into her upbringing as the youngest of seven children among numer- ous animals on a farm in Scramogue, Co Roscommon. Music was an integral ele- ment of that childhood and it’s one she celebrates fully on what is an unusually intimate and deeply personal collection that brings a different perception to even well-worn material like Sliabh Gallion Braes, The Bold Fenian Men, The Lark In The Clear Air and The Banks Of The Foyle.
“The older I get the more these songs resonate with me. As the people who sang them died the louder they demanded to be heard. Then I was left with a dilemma because some of them are very well- known and there are a lot of versions already out there and there’s probably people saying ‘I can’t bear to hear yet another version of those songs.’ But they still pull on my heartstrings so I decided to do them anyway …I just had to find a way of making them sound new and fresh.”
She did it by calling in Roger Tallroth, Swedish producer, composer and multi- instrumentalist with Väsen to help her with the production, arrangements and playing.
“He’d never heard those songs, so it was bound to be fresh. Like Bold Fenian Men. There isn’t a person in Ireland who doesn’t know that song, but it has such a beautiful air and is a snapshot of life then for me. It reminds me of my mother singing
while she was making dinner or sweeping the floor. Those songs bring back so many memories – it’s a homage to the great childhood I had when I had music instilled in me. We were so lucky growing up when we did. We worked the land on the farm but when the social occasion arose other people would visit and there was always plenty of music, especially when relatives would come back to visit from America. You go through life and the years gallop by so it’s an album that means an awful lot to me and is poignant to us all.”
She also has a little help from her friends, both from Sweden (Gustav Ljung- gren, Olov Johansson, Lars Andreas Haug) and Ireland (Seamie O’Dowd, Michael McGoldrick, Liam Kelly, Andy Irvine, Rick Epping) plus Scotswoman Eddi Reader, who duets movingly with Jordan on one of the album’s most memorable tracks, Eileen McMahon.
It also finds her add another skill to her CV – that of songwriter – with a composing hand on three well-rounded songs pursu- ing the theme of nostal- gia, The Road I Go, In Cur- raghroe and the anthemic title track, in addition to the dreamy instrumental, River Field Waltz.
“I actually write quite a lot of songs but I don’t often finish them. I start one and then I get an idea for something else and do that instead. I have a lot of unfinished songs lying around…”
Recounting memo- ries of leaving home for the first time, The Road I Go was a collaboration with old friend, Brendan Graham – “a masterclass in songwriting” as she describes it. “We tweezed away at the idea…he’s such a perfec- tionist, he can labour for days over a word or sen- tence and tweezes it out as far as it can go.
“I love writing songs. I find the melody side of it effortless and work up tunes in my head, but lyrics are more difficult. I just don’t have the patience for that kind of thing and I find it easier to co-write with someone else. “
T
he idea of a solo album had been mooted before but frenetic Dervish activity – nine studio albums, headlining festival appearances, regular US tours, Eurovision Song Contest entry et al) - always precluded it. With all this, not to mention her other splinter group The Unwanted (with Seamie O’Dowd and Rick Epping) exploring Irish- American music, is she on her way out of Dervish to pursue the solo dream?
“Oh no! No way. I think the two can co- exist amicably and the boys have all been very supportive of this project. There’s enough time to do both. I’m a big believer in not doing something in life until you’re good and ready and not before and it’s taken this long for the time to be right. The lads in the band have families to rear, but music is my baby and I’m loving it.”
www.cathyjordan.com F 17 f
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100