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almost like a cartoon image of someone’s head being hit by a hammer. Tincian can also mean ‘to resonate’. It’s like the bell of your memories, the sound in your mind that awakens to things forgotten. It would have also been used in sentences like ‘ma na rhyw dincian ymhlith y bobol’ (‘there is a murmur amongst the people’). That kind of whisper, that fear or excitement of a (bad) report amongst the people like a wave of noise.”
But it’s not just stories of home that provide the emotional inspiration for her writing. Plentyn (Child) is an angry, painful song about ‘The Stolen Generation’ of aboriginal children in Australia. On it, Lisa’s soul sisters Lou Bennett and Shellie Morris from the Black Arm Band provide simple vocal overdubs, evocative voices from the red dust.
“The hardest song on the album for me to sing live is Plentyn, an imagined story about a mother and child and what happens when the white man comes and takes the child away – the mother falling to the floor, the child’s face pressed against the car window trying to get out. It’s inspired by someone’s real story. There’s a song by Archie Roach (from the Black Arm Band) called Took The Children Away which I listened to quite a lot when I was in Australia, and also to people’s first- hand experiences of being affected by that ‘scheme’. Those hidden stories… it was still happening in the ’70s! Why don’t we know enough about that at home? I discovered I wanted to sing about this. I’m not really interested in singing about love or heartbreak or heartache, but when I heard these stories I thought, holy shit, I’ve got to write about this, in Welsh. This is story I need to tell. That was the birth of my songwriting in a way. I’ve got some- thing to sing about!”
M
any of the other songs are the product of Lisa’s fertile imagination. Babi’r Eirlys (Snowdrop Baby) is inspired by her reading of Jerry
Hunter’s Gwreiddyn Chwerw (Bitter Root) about a Victorian mother’s defiance of her husband’s demands to put her physi- cally-disabled newborn under the bed to die before morning. Asterei Mou (My Star) is a simple love song, written in Greek, Lisa’s third language (“I am not fluent by any means but I am learning”), and inspired by her own Greek family connections; Llwynog (Fox) is a fantastical tale in which the wily creature, running in the wilderness of the Carneddau, outwits a farmer and his dog.
Mart’s Welsh is far more proficient than it was on the first album: “Now I understand what the songs are about I can convey that in the music! Like in Llwynog, I can see that fox when we get that bass line rumbling.”
Lliwiau (Colours) compares the experi- ence of giving birth to the rush of coming up on Ecstasy; Wedi Torri (It’s Broken) is about the helplessness of seeing someone you love being broken; Llwybrau (Paths) sees a lost soul, wandering lonely along paths and old haunts, no longer feeling they belong in this world. The subject range is wide, but all of the songs relate to “raw human experience”, as Mart puts it: “the folk songs of 2014!”. There is an inevitable universality in such themes, one conveyed in the emotion of the music, even if the lyrics are not accessible to non- Welsh speakers.
In one of our several panad sessions, Lisa, Mart and I ruminate on the signifi- cance of language, recalling a moment of casual racism from the time we met at Folk
Alliance in Toronto, in which a festival organiser asked if they would be willing to sing in English. Not, I’m sure, a question they’d have asked of Julie Fowlis or Mariza or Baaba Maal.
Lisa: “Welsh is my first language. My creative brain and ideas swim in the small streams that run in to the crystal clear lakes – Llyn Idwal, Llyn Ogwen, the Ogwen Valley – I can’t escape that. Lan- guage comes hand in hand with the land- scape, your culture and the stories you tell. It comes out in the music. It will inevitably make it different to English music or other music. I don’t feel our music ‘sounds’ particularly Welsh on this album, but it is specific to here because that’s where it’s from!”
“I remember listening to Baaba Maal when all my mates were into New Kids On The Block. I didn’t understand what he was singing about, but the more pain and longing and hiraeth in the songs, the bet- ter. If that’s what you relate to, then you’re connecting with the music. I want to feel moved by music, whether it’s that pain, or just enjoying a boogie. As a teenager, all angsty, I wanted to listen to music with that voice – to connect with.”
The irony is not lost on us that, in the next room, one of their young daughters is requesting a continual re-run of a section, featuring her favourite song, from Dis- ney’s Frozen on the TV – but in Mandarin.
Lisa: “She’s so moved by it. I’ve
offered to record it in Welsh, but she just wants to listen in Mandarin… or Span- ish… or Greek!”
Tincian is out on Real World on 12th
May, with UK tour dates kicking off at Galeri Caernarfon on 15th.
www.9bach.com F
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