The song also recalls her going to a vigil at the Christian Science Center in Boston a few days after the 2001 World Trade Center attacks and wondering, “Was it the end or the beginning?/All I remember is the singing and the music, trying to drive away the fear.” In the title song, O’Donovan mentions the Taconic Parkway, which runs into upstate New York, and continues, “Go east on 23, past the farms and the festival memories.” She’s citing the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival in Hillsdale, N.Y., along Route 23 at the foot of the Berkshires, where Crooked Still found its first eager audience of folk listeners and the band sold a miraculous 1,000 independent CDs, kick-starting its career. “In the past, I would shade it in a way that would try to make it a little bit more universal. “I’ve never really written so literally before,” she added.
#DONOVAN SONGS FULL#
Unlike her other solo albums, it’s full of specifics: a bus route, a highway, the sense of a historical moment. “It does feel very collaborative, but it also feels just bizarre and futuristic,” O’Donovan said.įor O’Donovan, “Age of Apathy” is her most personal album.
“And to decide, you know, do we need more? How much farther do we take this?”Īmazingly enough, the resulting album sounds cohesive and intuitive. “It allowed me and Aoife the opportunity to really listen to each element as it came in,” Henry said from his home in Maine. They also stretch accepted structures of verse, chorus and bridge and push against genre. “She can find family anywhere via music.”īut O’Donovan has brought her boldest material by far to her solo albums: “Fossils” in 2013, “In the Magic Hour” in 2016, both made with the producer Tucker Martine, and the new “Age of Apathy.” All three open with songs contemplating death, and her other solo songs explore desire, myth, memory and transfiguration: as narrative, as images, as parable. “Aoife finds a way to make the people around her sound better,” Thile said. And along the folk circuit, she found plenty of chances to collaborate onstage and in the studio.
In 2005, O’Donovan also found time to form another group, the folky trio Sometymes Why, which released albums in 20. In Boston in 2001, O’Donovan and some fellow music students started Crooked Still, a string band that offered radical rearrangements of Appalachian-rooted songs and, over the next decade of playing clubs and folk festivals, added some of O’Donovan’s new songs to its repertory.
And one day in May 2020, sequestered at home when she was living in Brooklyn, O’Donovan recorded her own versions of the songs from Bruce Springsteen’s album “Nebraska” she released “Aoife Plays Nebraska” online last year. O’Donovan performed it in October 2021 with the Cincinnati Pops. She has also written for and with her groups Crooked Still, Sometymes Why and I’m With Her (whose “Call My Name” won a Grammy in 2020 as best American roots song) and as a collaborator with the chamber-Americana project Goat Rodeo, which includes Yo-Yo Ma and Thile.ĭuring the pandemic, along with her album, O’Donovan completed two song cycles: “Bull Frog’s Croon,” based on poems by Peter Sears and recorded with a string quartet in 2020, and “America, Come,” a group of orchestral songs drawing on century-old letters and speeches by the women’s suffrage crusader Carrie Chapman Catt. O’Donovan’s three studio albums represent only a fraction of her songwriting. She’s telling us secrets - kind of a secret about the magic in the world that she’s finding.” The mandolinist Chris Thile, who welcomed O’Donovan as a regular performer on his public radio show “Live From Here,” said, “She’s not selling us anything.
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