as though my time overseas was unfinished. I returned to Dingle, Western Ireland, with plans to attempt to learn Irish and enroll in Limerick University’s program in Traditional Irish Music Performance the following year.


Feeling a bit aimless, I was delighted when an old college friend contacted me with the news that he’d started a production company and wanted to bring me on board his roster of artists. He encouraged me to take the year to record an album, and suggested I find a producer in Ireland. Word came through the small music scene of Dingle that Donogh Hennessy had purchased a studio, and was producing albums, literally, across the bay. My new manager contacted him, and before I knew it, I had myself a producer in one of the finest guitarists Ireland had to offer.


For the following five months, we recorded my debut album ‘Monongah.’ I careened wildly between ecstasy and despair on a daily basis. Tough my songs aren’t about me, they’re still highly personal. Tey’d always been mine, and mine alone. One of the most difficult adjustments for me was putting them in the hands of a producer, and though I knew he was experienced and able, it took a great deal of trust, and a considerable leap of faith on my end. Luckily, the result was nothing less than extraordinary. Donogh brought on board an all-star cast of Irish musicians: Pauline Scanlon, Trevor Hutchinson, Brendan O’Sullivan, and Aoife Clancy. I found my album conveying the perfect mix of Celtic and Appalachian influences that would thematically lead to the coining of my own genre: ‘Gaelic Americana.’


I followed the release of the album with an intensive radio-campaign that landed ‘Monongah’ on the eighth slot on the American Folk DJ-Charts for the month of July, one slot below Alison Krauss’ new release. I toured the US for three months alongside Cape Breton fiddler Rosie MacKenzie, another artist of Donogh’s who’d hopped on board my album. You can hear her distinctive fiddling on the Gaelic song ‘Gaol ise Gaol i’ and ‘Resurrection’: my own feminist slant on the old Biblical tale. Trough the radio campaign and the tour, my songs ceased to be my own and became independent entities that touched people’s lives. In late August of last year I received a lovely e-mail from a fellow in the Netherlands who has now become a dear friend of mine. He’d heard my album on a European folk show.


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