Tag: Irish Love Song

Of London-Irish heritage, Moylan spans a folksy bridge from pub singalong Irish country on the one hand to more considered and complex material on the other. It’s the former that gets The Fool underway musically with the accordion, bodhran and fiddle bouncing ‘Irish Love Song’, though lyrically, while opening with “you were leaning on the corner like/You were Steve McQueen/You said ‘Hey girl, are you out tonight?’/And then you put your arms around me/You said ‘You sure feel good to me’”, carries a more emotional heft as it continues “When you touched my face with love/It was only for yourself/You wanted a kid to keep your darkness down/And when those towers shook to pieces/And the barmaid cried out, man/You didn’t even make a sound/You just drank your Stella slowly/From your fading wooden throne” and ends with “I hardly think about you now/And when I do I kinda smile/And all our places have been long pulled down/Did I ever even cross your mind?/Did you ever think I’d do alright?/To be honest neither did I”.

That note of rejection and hurt continues to sound on the slower, moodier, quaveringly warbled ‘Burn Me Blue’ (“Here I stand untouched, unclaimed/Strategically left on words I saved/Don’t talk in case I move/What becomes of nobody’s child?/Well, we learn how to keep our visions alive/In our tiny hands and tiny flames”). It’s back then to an accordion sway with ‘Winter Nights’ but the loss still hangs (“I put that old red dress on/But all the colour’s gone/You don’t know what it’s like/Without your light”).

Phil Beer on fiddle with nervy piano and muted drums, ‘Shadowboxing’ vocally conjures Baez thoughts on a song that speaks of social issues (“Hey, little boy, don’t you cry/There’s a police car waiting right outside for you/Men of God have got some space for you and your brother too/There’s a river rising in you but it won’t make the shore/‘cause that tempest that they placed in you will rage forevermore”) and their fallout (“These days you spend your time/Roaming in your mind behind these walls/Like a thousand other men, each one of them with a bag of pain/On a silent sea of what could have been”), offering received wisdom about getting to the root of the problems in the lines “I met the man whose records we used to play/And I wrote the lyrics on that tea-stained inlay/He told me “If you want an apple, you don’t go to the barrel/You go to the tree”.

It’s back to accordion and brushed drums with ‘Hide Me London’, the musical jauntiness masking the darker shadows of the lyrics (“take me on a night bus ride/Where the drunks and the lonely they sing out of time… I’ve crossed all your bridges and I’ve become the fool…I’ve sat with your sons as they start to cry/And I’ve ran with your daughters to your stations in the night/And I’m a long way from home”).

The pace reins in and things get stripped down with ‘Roaming’, a stark piano-led number remembering things gone in the path of progress (“Land she had, it’s gone too/They tore it up you see/She calls from the hills and bracken tilts/And tells me of all the earth they spilled… Man down the road, he’s gone too/No more will you hear his come-all-ye tunes/And gates he guarded they’ve all come asunder/Now they move inside that lonely thunder”) with only the songs remaining. Rebecca Mileham on violin, a similar theme enfolds the steady walking rhythm ‘Dutch Houses’ (“She paints Dutch houses/From her memories, how things used to be/A faded postcard/On the mantelpiece, it brings her peace/Oh, and it doesn’t decay”) with its feeling of listlessness (“She reads French novels/She buys from the second-hand stall/She reads herself alive/It stops her from feeling so small”) and memories of what once was as we fade with time (“She sings Spanish love songs/And imagines him at her side/When he said she was pretty/Maybe he lied/Oh, we slowly decay”).

Hjördis Moon Badford on cajon, the same holds true for the disconsolate music box waltzing ‘Little I Have’ (“The room is cold, the wick is low…Your effigy returns to me/Demanding pride of place/The best of you has all been spent/While I’ve been rooting/In the earth, the earth, the earth/Now you come knocking for the little, the little I have”) with its allusion to the Fool in the tarot deck (new beginnings) and mention of the Fisher King (the Arthurian guardian of the holy grail).

Violin and cajon lift the tempo for ‘Venus In The Dirt’, a slinky, cabaret infused high rise, hard scrabble kitchen sink romance (“A few sticks of furniture is all we need/Paid off on the bed just last week/Laying here beneath our coats/We don’t even feel the cold/We’ve got the sacred heart above us burning bright”) with knock offs of Elvis and the Mona Lisa rescued from the skip as icons of hope.

The last of the original material, complete with co-producer/writer Ian Montague on mandola and brandy glass, ‘Ancient Truth’, her voice sounding old beyond her years, she describes as “a timeless true tale of love and loneliness wrapped up in a little metaphysical tale”, he alone and adrift with just “the bare-bulb light of his tomb” as, “from the shadows of his staying place”, his mind unconsciously conjures up the Earth Mother of his land who brings the tenderness he needs as, through the timeless incarnations, he remembers how he once was loved and “”the many times he’d known her hands/And bathed beneath her stare”.

She ends The Fool, accompanied by just Montague on electric guitar, with her slow waltzing, no frills take on Eric Bogle’s much covered ‘The Green Fields Of France’, a perfect coda to her own songs of lost and lonely souls broken and buried by those who do not care. A self-assured album that bristles with her confidence in her voice and words, it really is about time she was reverently spoken about in the same Celtic folk pantheon as Mary Black, Lisa Hannigan and Eleanor McEvoy.

Mike Davies

Artist’s website: www.lindamoylan.co.uk

‘Irish Love Song’ – official lyric video: