Irish Singer Karan Casey at Oak Bay Recreation Theatre
Ireland's Karan Casey Returns to Celebrate New Album
Sunday, June 17, 7:30 pm
Oak Bay Recreation Theatre - Upstairs Lounge
1975 Bee Street, Victoria
Karan Casey, one of Ireland’s finest singer-songwriters - and a leading advocate for gender balance in the Irish folk and traditional music scene - will return to the US in March to tour in support of her new album Nine Apples of Gold, which has topped the Irish and US folk charts. Together with album collaborators Niamh Dunne (fiddle, vocals) and guitarist Sean Og Graham (guitar), Casey will premiere new material from her new album, themed around the telling of Irish women's stories. The songs draw inspiration from a wide range of sources from the personal to the historical and political, touching on themes of family, loss, love, the empowerment of women and Irish revolutionary struggle.
On this new album, Casey teams up with long-time collaborator and friend Seán Óg Graham to create a dynamic and enchanting album of songs that speaks to healing, camaraderie in times of strife, finding enrichment and new life in campaigning for women and of course, death. This is an ode to the natural world featuring the songbirds of Portglenone, the moon, conversations from the grave, returning to the wild, listening for the cuckoo as she sleeps. The empowerment of women is front and center of Casey's concerns as she gives voice to the notion that songs can sing what we cannot say. Her defiance, her vulnerabilities and her feminist heart bellow through these songs. Adding their unique vocals to the album are: Niamh Dunne on a duet song "Sister I Am Here for You"; Pauline Scanlon on a searing feminist overlook of Ireland in a song entitled "I Live in a Country"; and Ríoghnach Connolly on "Daughter Dear," a tender hearted song between a mother and daughter. Also joined by Conor McCreanor, John McCullough, Hannah Hiemstra and Kate Ellis among others, this is Casey's 12th album and displays her fine poetic voice where she has taken traditional symbolism and shaken it by the neck to create an ode to mother nature and a poignant cry for change.
A Waterford native, Casey was among the vanguard of the Irish music revival’s “third wave” of the early 1990s, a founding member of the seminal Irish American band Solas before launching her solo career in 1999, and going on to record 11 albums. Though steeped early on in Irish traditional and folk music, Casey has long followed an eclectic path, whether studying classical music (she is a talented pianist), fronting jazz bands or working with Frank Harte, a much-revered folk/traditional singer from Dublin. The list of artists she’s performed with is similarly diverse: James Taylor, Maura O’Connell, Karen Matheson, the Boston Pops Orchestra, Tim O’Brien, The Chieftains, The Dubliners, and Béla Fleck, among others.
For more about Karan Casey, please visit www.karancasey.com.