root salad f20 Aoife O’Donovan
American by birth but Celtic by blood, this singer/ songwriter impresses the heck out of Tony Montague.
Briar Rose, one of the most mysterious
songs of Fossils, is O’Donovan’s riff on a story by the late feminist writer and poet Ann Sexton. “She wrote this collection of poems called Transformations where she re-imagined fairy tales. I was inspired by her use of the Sleeping Beauty character as a victim, and I took that and brought it back a little into the folk tradition.”
O L
ife on the road seems to energise rather then exhaust Aoife O’Donovan – best known as the founder and leading songwriter of
progressive New England stringband Crooked Still. The morning after travelling for 17 hours and performing the opening show of her first West Coast solo tour she’s up at dawn to run nine miles around Vancouver’s seawall in sub- zero temperatures, before checking out of her hotel room to sit in the lobby at noon for an interview.
Crooked Still took a hiatus two years ago for members to pursue other projects, and O’Donovan recently released an extraordinarily fine solo album Fossils. It mixes and matches an unusually rich diversity of genres – jazz, bluegrass, old- time, ’60s-era folk, Irish, country, and snarling metal-edged rock – in songs that are characterised by unusual shifts of melody and rhythm, smartly ambiguous and sensual lyrics, and breathy, warm, and understated vocals. O’Donovan’s timing and phrasing are impeccable, and she varies the volume cleverly to provide an additional rhythmic dimension.
Born in Boston to parents from Ireland at the heart of the music scene in the city,
O’Donovan attended the New England Conservatory and started Crooked Still in 2001. “The band plays mostly traditional music, so I put my original songs on the back-burner, but I wrote my first song at twelve and have written from then on.”
As a lyricist O’Donovan, who moved to
New York City several years ago, draws inspiration not only from fellow songwriters – such as Tim O’Brien, Paul Brady, and Gillian Welch – but American poets and novelists. “I’m an avid reader. I love character-driven novels, and I’m really into Southern Gothic and writers like Flannery O’Connor and Cor- mac McCarthy – just getting into characters and making stories from that.”
O’Donovan opened her Vancouver show with the spine-tingling a cappella Troubled All About My Soul – recorded by Alan Lomax – which segued into Lay My Burden Down, a song made popular by singer Alison Krauss on her 2011 album Paper Airplane. Hearing it from the song’s writer brings out new depths in the edgily passionate words: “Darling, can't you hear me cry /my bones are broke, my tongue is tied / the moon is swaying back and forth against the navy sky/ it’s all that I can see, my body’s trembling on my knees / just have a little mercy on me, run away and hide.”
Thursday’s Child opens with a soft fan- fare of horns, courtesy of New York jazz great Dave Douglas, and builds moodily into a tipsy waltz-time love song, with bright electric and pedal steel guitars intertwining. The words evoke yearning and desire, such as the chorus: “Oh my tyranny’s gonna crumble / And so sit next to me and fumble with the buttons on my dress / What do you want to be, I want to be a plumber / To get down on my knees and unplug your drain / I feel an ache in my bones every time that it rains.” The song – destined to become a favourite with amateur plumbers and handypersons everywhere – builds to a rocky, jangly, and reverberating close.
n the evidence of such strong writing it seems odd that O’Donovan waited so long to put out a collection of her songs. “I
didn’t want to make a solo album and have it as a side project from Crooked Still. I wanted to focus on it 100 percent. I have such a crazy back-catalogue of songs that didn’t make it onto Fossils.”
According to O’Donovan, half the songs on the album were written several years ago, the rest in the year leading up to the recording sessions. The twisting and twining of genres and moods is expertly handled by O’Donovan and Oregon-based producer Tucker Martine, drawing on a strong group of musicians – pedal steel guitarist Charlie Rose, electric guitarist Ryan Scott, bassist Jacob Silver on bass, and drummer Robin McMillan.
O’Donovan confesses that she some- times finds it difficult touring alone and being the only musician on stage after spending so much time with Crooked Still and working with the band for Fossils. “You just have to let go of hearing the bass and electric guitar and drums in your head. Of course it sounds bigger with all of those things, but bigger isn’t necessari- ly better, it’s just different. It’s a good test to work on my guitar playing. As for tour- ing, what I’ve learned in my decade on the road is that everything is a wave – sometimes you’re up, sometimes you’re down. As long as you still love music, how bad can it be?”
aoifeodonovan.com F
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