Hailing from Limerick,Ireland, Siobhán O'Brien has been entertaining audiences with her individual unique voice, and her personal style of songwriting.No newcomer to the entertainment field,Siobhan made her first audio recording at the tender age of six,with an old sea Shanty. Siobhan has roots from four generations in the music industry.Her great grandparents were Travelling Opera Singers.The Bowyer/Westwood Opera company, they came from Blackpool in England. Their only son Stanley played violin in the orchestra pit.They settled in Ireland when Albert Bowyer (Great Grandfather) died in Omagh Co. Tyrone while touring.Most notably, she is the niece of Ireland's Sixtie's music legend, Brendan Bowyer (The Beatles opened for Bowyer 1962 at The Liverpool Empire)
GUEST VOCALIST WITH THE CHIEFTAINS BOSTON SYMPHONY HALL
When Siobhán O'Brien heard that the Frames frontman Glen Hansard had won the Oscar last month for best song for "Falling Slowly," his duet with Markéta Irglová from the film "Once," she was so happy for him that she cried. Her father told her he had heard the company that makes the guitar Hansard favors had seen him playing his battered old instrument at the awards show and offered him a new one.More stories like this"I was going, 'Don't take the guitar, don't take the guitar,' " O'Brien recalls from her home in Limerick. She got her wish. Her father said Hansard had declined.
"That's Glen. I knew he wouldn't take the guitar," says the 38-year-old Irish singer-songwriter. O'Brien seems to need her heroes unsullied and intact; she isn't into the "glitz and the glamour" of success: "I just love doing this," she says of making music.
O'Brien met Hansard 15 years ago when they bonded over a mutual love of Bob Dylan. Around the time, Dylan had invited O'Brien, a plucky girl with a strong, delicately tremulous voice, to sing his song "The Fox" onstage in Dublin with him. That song is just one of many covers - from Harry Chapin's "Shooting Star" to Brian Wilson's "In My Room" - that O'Brien recently recorded for her self-released covers record, "Songs I Grew Up To."
"I never in my life thought I'd do a covers album. Writing was such a huge part of who I was and who I wanted to be seen as. The letting go had to happen," O'Brien says. "I realized I was limiting myself.
Tonight at Symphony Hall, O'Brien will sing some of those cover songs when she appears as a guest of the Chieftains. Tomorrow she headlines the considerably more intimate gathering with her friend and producer Martin O'Malley backing her on guitar. It was O'Malley who was instrumental in O'Brien's "letting go," when he tinkered with some cover songs she had recorded at his studio as a gift for her aunt.
"Martin had put all this lovely guitar and double bass behind them. But she went with it and recorded more songs, inviting more musicians to add parts. One of them, Pete Cummins, asked his friend, the Chieftains uilleann pipes player Paddy Moloney, to play.
Moloney says he was astonished when he heard O'Brien's voice on tape."I was blown away. I thought she's brilliant, you know? I can't understand why she's not at the top," Moloney says. "Maybe she didn't want it? I don't know the full story, but she has a beautiful voice. When you have a voice like that, you should get on with it."
O'Brien's back story includes ties to one of Ireland's biggest pop stars: Her uncle Brendan Bowyer was a show-band superstar in the 1960s before relocating to Las Vegas to become a successful performer there. Over the years, O'Brien has performed as far and wide as the late Tir Na Nog in Somerville and, in 1999, Austin's South by Southwest music conference. She's certainly no shy retiring type and has sought out many of her heroes along the way (on Dylan: "Basically, I ambushed him outside his hotel," she says semi-apologetically). As Moloney puts it, after she tracked him down in Dublin to thank him for working on her record, "She comes right out with it."
LEONARD COHEN heard about Siobhán from a friend of his which prompted him to send a book to her called ' Dance Me To The End Of Love ' with a Henry Matisse painting on each page, as a gesture of encouragement.
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