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Maura O'Connell
Naked With Friends
"A lot of people think every singer is someone's puppet," explains Maura O'Connell from her home in Nashville. "That they are not fully invested in the song -- that they are at the whim of a producer or a songwriter or a band. Singing has been denigrated like that for too long." Widely acclaimed throughout her career as a vocalist and interpreter of utmost grace and insight, O'Connell's latest album is a defiant, boldly undiluted statement on art of singing. Naked With Friends consists of thirteen tracks of singing -- and nothing more -- and is decisive evidence that singing is more than enough.
"The idea of doing an album like this has been with me a very long time," O'Connell continues. "In interviews over the years, I'm always being asked why I don't play an instrument to accompany myself, or why don't I write songs. I've gathered the consciousness that singing should be just fine, that it is a viable talent on its own."
Available June 16, 2009 on Sugar Hill Records, Naked With Friends features O'Connell both alone and alongside an array of vocalists representing her wide-ranging musical sensibility. Among the guest singers are Dolly Parton, Alison Krauss, Kate Rusby, Paul Brady, Mary Black, Jerry Douglas, Tim O'Brien, Darrell Scott, Aoife O'Donovan (Crooked Still), Sarah Dugas (The Duhks), Mairéad Ní Mhaorigh, Moya Brennan, Liam Bradley, Declan O'Rourke, and O'Connell's sister, Áine Derrane. "On this album," O'Connell says, "I just wanted to capture the feeling of joy that comes from people singing together."
Unaccompanied singing has been a part of O'Connell's music since her earliest days of performing in the folk clubs of her native Ireland. "When I first started, I had minimal skills on the guitar -- I still do, really," she says, laughing. "So I'd throw in an unaccompanied song. That's when I started singing Joan Armatrading's 'The Weakness In Me.'" Even before she began performing formally, singing was a simple joy for O'Connell, an elemental pleasure that didn't require instrumental accompaniment. "It was just the most natural thing in the world," she reflects. Growing up in a culture with a rich social tradition of unaccompanied singing further freed her, and the vast Irish repertoire is well represented on Naked With Friends.
Still, pursuing an entire project of such performances was something entirely new to O'Connell. "I recorded one a cappella song on an earlier album," she recalls, "and there were moments on other projects where I'd sing a verse or so by myself, and then the band would kick in. Sometimes, in concert, if the audience was especially receptive or if the room had a wonderful sound, or if the power went out, I'd walk out in front of the microphone and sing. But it was always something added-on -- it had not been the central focus, until now."
Captured in the studio by engineer and co-producer Gary Paczosa with riveting clarity and focus, Naked With Friends is a disarmingly intimate experience. In the absence of instrumentation, the usual trappings and signposts that often define a song's style and mood dissolve. It is O'Connell's burnished alto -- a full yet vulnerable and aching sound -- that is charged with conveying everything the song has to say. "My intention," she explains, "was just to sing the song clearly. I just wanted to be there to serve the song, rather than to show off a particular vocal style."
In this unforgiving setting, so much depends on the song. Over two years, O'Connell and the infinitely patient Paczosa recorded over thirty, and were surprised to discover that some very good songs could not survive the transition from a full band setting. "I'd record a song and listen back to it," O'Connell says, "just to see what the song sounded like. I wasn't really listening to me -- I was listening to the song. Once we knew what the material was going to be, the rest wasn't that hard. Once you get the rhythm of the tune into your body, it's really quite easy." Recording in Paczosa's home studio also gave O'Connell the luxury of working away from the clock. "I could just go there when I felt like singing. If I didn't feel like singing, or if I felt like stopping, I wouldn't sing anymore."
Featuring five traditional tunes in both English and Irish alongside songs by such writers as Darrell Scott, Janis Ian, Joan Armatrading, Elvis Costello, and Holly Near, Naked With Friends reflects O'Connell's longstanding commitment to seeking out powerful songwriting, regardless of genre. One of four sisters, O'Connell grew up in a musical household to the strains of her mother's record collection, which consisted mostly of parlor songs and light opera. She began singing in local folk clubs, eventually forming a partnership with guitarist Mike Hanrahan and performing a mix of contemporary folk and American country music. In 1980 she joined the Celtic group De Dannan, and went on to be featured on their breakthrough 1981 album The Star Spangled Molly.
O'Connell's restless muse could not be safely contained under the banner of Celtic music, and she soon discovered both an interest in and affinity for progressive American roots music. Following her self-titled solo debut in 1983, she collaborated with Béla Fleck (then of the NewGrass Revival) on 1988's Just In Time, which inaugurated a string of albums marked by O'Connell's tasteful, moving interpretations of songs spanning many traditions and authors. She recorded three acclaimed albums for Warner Bros. (including the Grammy-nominated Helpless Heart), before moving to Joe Boyd's Hannibal imprint and then to Sugar Hill, for whom she made the rattling, guitar driven Walls and Windows (produced by Ray Kennedy) and the more introspective Don't I Know, the fourth O'Connell album to produced by dobro maverick Jerry Douglas.
Douglas returns for a rare vocal performance on Naked With Friends, singing a forceful accompaniment to O'Connell on the Irish-language "Mo Sheamuseen," which Douglas learned phonetically. "I was complaining to Jerry that no one would sing the Irish song with me." Maura recalls. "I played it for him, and he immediately said 'I'll do it.'"
O'Connell traveled back to Ireland to record several tracks, including the duet with Paul Brady, "Anach Cuain," a lament inspired by a boatwreck in Ireland. The trip also enabled the contribution of O'Connell's sister Áine Derrane, on Holly Near's "Hay Una Mujer Desapercida." "That was easy for me," O'Connell says, smiling, "as I've been singing and fighting with my sister since I was born."
"A lot of the more traditional songs on this album I first learned when I was in a choir in Ireland," she continues. "At first I was a bit leery of doing 'Maidín i M'Béarra,' the song that has the same melody as 'Danny Boy,' which I learned at school. Yet it always struck me as being very beautiful. It is from the point of view of someone living in the city yearning for the quiet and calm that he can't get back to. The melody turns beautifully..."
"The Blacksmith" was among the very last songs recorded for Naked With Friends, and was ingeniously arranged as a duet with Tim O'Brien. "Songs like 'The Blacksmiths' are part of bones," she says, wistfully. "I learned it long ago, but this may be the first time it is done as it duet, as a dialog. I always thought it was a conversation."
The newer material provokes a similarly profound reaction from O'Connell. "I knew when I heard Darrell Scott's song 'This Beggar's Heart,' that I had to sing it," she explains. "I later found out that he had written it when he and I were touring with Tim O'Brien to promote Tim's record The Crossing. I would sing 'The Water Is Wide' in those shows, and Darrell loosely based 'This Beggar's Heart' on that song." Scott, alongside the Settles Connection choir, is featured on Elvis Costello's haunting, ominous "Shipbuilding." "I always thought that was a magnificent song," O'Connell says, "with a strong anti-war sentiment that is unfortunately still relevant." The Settles Connection are augmented by Dolly Parton and Kate Rusby for the opening track "Bright Blue Rose." "I've always loved Kate's singing," O'Connell adds, "and I knew Dolly would add that beautiful sparkle to the top."
"I've learned an awful lot making this record," O'Connell reflects. "The experience has taught me so much about the value and the power of a great song. Even without everything that tells the listener 'this is what kind of song this is.' On its own, a good song has power, poetry, and tragedy in it." Naked With Friends is a provocative, powerful exercise in pure singing that challenges a lot of preconceptions about vocalists and their role in shaping a song. "I may be trying to create a new idea," she concludes. "Because of the way the industry is set up, you have to be one kind of singer or another -- country, pop, whatever. But I think there is a role for singers that should not be defined.
Singers don't have to be tied to a particular style. They aren't bound to anything but the song."
Maura O'Connell
Don't I Know
For a while there, Maura O'Connell's website brandished the subtitle "Just a Singer," but that ironic tag has evolved into an ever-changing set of comments from the cheeky (and accurate) "Just a Wonder" to the very sensible, lower-key suggestion that we "Just Listen."
From her first recorded appearance as a lead vocalist with the celebrated traditional Celtic group DeDanaan in 1981, to her tenth and latest solo disc, Don't I Know, O'Connell has married an unmistakable deep, rich, flexible voice and her signature talent for finding what's most potent in the work of a select but broad array of genre-jumping songwriters, to pull the listener right along with her--to the heart of a song.
Don't I Know, produced by her long-time collaborator, the dobro master Jerry Douglas, may be the most eclectic O'Connell collection yet, as it ventures from a contemplative turn on rising new singer-songwriter Mindy Smith's "Goin' Down in Flames" to a surprising, surging rock take on Nashville hit-maker Hillary Lindsey's "Spinning Wheel."
"This one does mark another transition," O'Connell says of her second Sugar Hill release, the follow-up to 2001's Walls and Windows. "I wanted to develop the area of singing harder, a little edgier, and with guitars. Still,for me, the song is always the main deal--rather than the style."
If the songs Maura O'Connell renders so affectingly vary across genres, from occasional tones of old Ireland to sparkling new jazz or pop, from revisited classics by Van Morrison or Lennon and McCartney to songs of new American songwriters unheard till she's found them, there is at least one recognizable pattern in most all of them -- lyrics that set the stage for the song, laying down a context, in surroundings, or mood, or the passing of time, then home in on a very specific vignette of love and life. (The title of one of the new songs "Love You in the Middle," pretty much nails the theme.)
O'Connell inhabits the song's situation; seeing the songs as drama, has led her repeatedly to certain writers, such as Patty Griffin, precisely because of their "ability to create characters" in swift strokes.
So maybe it's no surprise that Martin Scorsese cast Maura, scruffed up for the role, as an Irish migrant street singer in his recent 19th century epic The Gangs of New York. It's less known that the marriage of music and narrative was part of O'Connell's world almost from the beginning.
Born and raised in County Clare, Ireland, she was the third of four singing sisters, but it wasn't ancient Celt folk tunes in which that household was drenched--but their singing mother's collection of light opera, opera, and parlor song records.
"I'm sure that those have something to do with how I approach singing," O'Connell says now. "I was aware of singing as an art form in itself." With that awareness, and her focus on singing, she has always been most interested in tunes "that haven't been performed by other people." That was a key reason her first public role as lead singer with the tradition-oriented DeDannan never felt entirely comfortable, and the reason why, in the midst of that folk success, she was so attracted to the experimental roots music of America's New Grass Revival when the bands' paths crossed.
"They were instrumentalists who were not bound by the history of their instruments, from a generation who grew up listening to bluegrass, and the Beatles, and jazz. They brought all of that along, and pushed the envelope really far. There was an exciting feeling of creativity there--and a complete disregard for what anyone thought!"
She would follow that sound to America--and to Nashville, Tennessee. Newgrass masters such as banjoist Bela Fleck and Jerry Douglas (who's appeared on all of O'Connell's discs but one) and a floating contingent of adventurous Nashville hands have provided back-up and production for most of her recorded work--including the Grammy-nominated Helpless Heart and Blue is the Color of Hope for Warner Brothers, Stories and the Irish-oriented Wandering Home for Hannibal/Rykodisc, and the two Sugar Hill discs. The very flexible--and ace--Bryan Sutton and Jonathan Trebing (on acoustic and electric guitars), Viktor Krauss (on bass) and Shannon Forest (on drums) are the core backing band on Don't I Know--with musical textures added by everything from fiddles, to clavinets, to lap steel and B-3 organ.
If today her songs are often from the pens of unclassifiable Nashville mavericks--Jim Lauderdale, Kim Richey and Tim O'Brien are three on the new one--it's only natural; O'Connell has made her home in Music City U.S.A. for some 18 years now. "I'm a product of my environment, I suppose; when I was in Ireland, I knew many people from that scene; most of the songs I hear now, I hear here! People here know what I'm like;I've kind of grown up, and my point of view has changed, with life circumstances much different now than they were when I recorded my first album in '83. Changes have come, people have died, which happens as you get older. In fact, I'm looking forward to going out with the new songs on this record. I don't get out as much, since I've had a son--who's just turned eight."
There's a sense of the passing of time and the losses that come along with it in Maura's music now--and certainly, a higher percentage of tunes that look at the perplexities of life. But even that tone sends her back to the song as song. "Songwriters become more lyrical and poetic, more ruminative, and more in touch with the world's soul, when they're nice and depressed and pondering about it, O'Connell laughs.
If her broad musical interests have been essentially consistent over the 20-plus years of her recording career, the more mature Maura O'Connell is also sounding more self-assured than ever before, utterly ready to take us on that voyage to the center of the song one more time.
And by now, we're assured that she'll get us there. Just listen.
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