JANET DOWD: SAILING AWAY – Blue Cow Records

Sailing AwayIt’s a brave soul who chooses to record a serious version of ‘Danny Boy’ on a serious album. Whalebone did so and I regarded it as their one lapse of taste but in Janet Dowd’s hands it seems to link her Irish heritage with her taste for Americana – it is arguably more popular across the Atlantic than it is here.

Janet is from Co. Armagh and has been in the business for more than two decades. For all that her solo debut, an album of traditional songs, only came in 2010. Sailing Away is her second album with three of her own songs and seven covers plus ‘Danny Boy’. I get the feeling that Janet records songs just because she likes them which is as good a reason as any. The opening ‘Appalachian Rain’ by John Smith and Buddy Mondlock is a beautiful country-lite song of separation followed in a similar vein by Tim O’Brien’s ‘Lost Little Children’ and the record looks like settling down to be a real tear-jerker. But then Janet switches tack with Richard Thompson’s ‘Farewell, Farewell’.

The accompaniments are all handled with the lightest of touches. There are Dobro, fiddle and mandolin to give a country feel but nothing as crude as pedal steel and there’s a button accordion when something more European is suggested. Janet has a strong clear voice which doesn’t need to push against the instrumentation but I’d love to hear her tackle a song with a bit more edge. Having written and sung ‘Leaving The Blasket’, a song of her own part in the Irish diaspora, there are plenty more to choose from.

Sailing Away is doing well in Ireland right now and I’m sure it appeals to Irish misty-eyed sentimentality (now tell me that’s a myth) but I can drift away to it with the rest.

Dai Jeffries


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