Tag: Mike McGoldrick

Her music pretty much defined by the name of her record label (to which she returns after a brief sojourn on Riverboat), Vermont-based Carey calls her sound Gaelic Americana, mixing songs sung in both Scottish Gaelic (more properly Gàidhlig) and English. Produced by Kai Welch, who plays piano and accordion, with contributions from guitarist Anthony DaCosta, Christian Sedelmeyer on fiddle, Sam Howard’s upright bass, percussionist Jamie Dick, Mike McGoldrick on whistle and flute with James Graham and Ruth Moody on backing vocals, The Last Bough opens with the lilting sway of the title track with its fiddle and bodhran, the song rooted in her and Italian philosopher husband Carmine Colajezzi’s (ultimately successful) struggle to have a baby (“Toss your name in a top hat, put your luck on the draw, stain the dice with your lipstick, leave with nothing at all …pin your hopes to a pipe dream, keep your douser cast low, in a drought of indifference, there’s still refuge in hope”) and sparked by an image of a family tree in a Bible, captured in the closing line “Sift the leaves in your teacup, scatter runes on the hearth, trace a tree in your bible, leave the last bough unmarked”.

The first of four sung in Gaelic, she’s joined by Graham for a duet on the swaying whistle and percussion dappled ‘Latha Bha an Ridire Ag Òl’, an ancient traditional waulking song in which a knight dies and is buried after cutting his finger in a tavern, the second, apparently unconnected section, referencing Fionn, Conan, Conn and Bran in the Fenian cycle of Irish mythology narrated by Ossian in James Macpherson’s cycle of epic poems.

Taken at an equally gentle pace, inspired by both a pandemic winter in New Hampshire and Robert Frost’s poem ‘After Apple-Picking’, ‘Theia’s Gaze’ captures the end of an affair (“Call a final waltz, ‘cross the weary oak, of Cleary’s old dance hall… once we wet our lips, in that early autumn twilight/the orchard went unpicked/Now the cellar hole’s filled with every wish, we’ve yet to see fulfilled/By the frosts of late September, we’d left the rows untilled”) and explores themes of nature, paganism and the divine feminine, Theia being the Greek goddess of sight and divine light.

By way of a swerve from either Gaelic or English, written by the late singer-songwriter Fabrizio De Andrè, the light pizzicato strings, accordion and piano dancing femme fatale ‘Via Del Campo’ is sung in Italian. Heavier thematic notes are sounded with ‘The Sere Wind’, a piano-based number sung from the perspective of an Irish woman who drowns her newborn, daughter believing it to be a changeling switched by the faeries (“Barley’s moon, saw her snatched, by the sere wind’s silvery laugh/What remained, no child of mine, sickly, pale and dark of eye”), drawing on her own postpartum psychosis and inspired by Christy Moore’s version of ‘The Well Below The Valley’ and Kate Bush’s ‘The Kick Inside’.
Moody again on bodhran, evocative of Clannad, the second Gàidhlig number, she first heard ‘Nach Muladach, Muladach Duine Leis Fhèin’, another song about a woman left lonely, performed by Cape Breton band Còig with whose fiddler, Rachel Davis, she once toured, and the number’s part of her continuing homage to the island.

A slow, atmospheric track with a fiddle solo from Sedelmeyer, she describes ‘Eden’s Grief’ as a “gothic parable inspired by greed, materialism and our futile quest for immortality”, the narrative following the fictional story of a sculptor, Ezra Wright, the angel headstone carved for one Harlan Grant, corruption rank in “ the rot, within the copper drainpipes, of high street’s bathroom stalls/Tarnish sterling’s shine, palm the bread and skim the wine”, and references to the Georgia/Illinois city of Decatur and Maryland community bank Cecil Bank.

From the sour, she turns to the sweet with the traditional ‘Bà i ù o hò’, the first song in Gàidhlig she learnt to sing when she began her study of the language on the Isle of Skye and which she sang as a lullaby to her son, adding three nature-inspired verses of her (“The moon will come for you, with a small star in her hair/The gentle cuckoo in her nest, keeps her eggs warm/The frog swimming in the stream, sings lullabies for you”) his ultrasound heartbeat woven throughout the track as a mother and child duet.

Sketching the Underground Railway, an escape route for runaway slaves (“Take a hymn book for the footpath/sing ‘em low, and sing ‘em sweet when you hear that hound a baying let your prayers lull him to sleep”) and nodding to Greek mythology (“Take a token for the ferry/Iron chains to burnished gold, dropping swiftly in the shallows, where the damned absolve their souls”), the spare, piano-accompanied ‘For Your Journey’ has echoes of Stephen Foster. Finally, it closes with the steady walking rhythmed and background synth swirls of ‘Amour’s Mystique’, a New England childhood memory of an old-fashioned mechanical fortune telling machine, here offering the forsaken and heart-rent promises of hope and salvation (“By silver comes redemption, by nickel comes delight …. By copper comes salvation, there’s not a cent I’ll waste… Won’t you, sashay up to fortune’s window/tip the glint of autumn’s crown/Though your sash grows ever tighter, she who’s lost can yet be found”), but ultimately cautioning “Heed the chill of autumn’s closing, by the frost upon my glass/Angels revel in our parting, heaven knows it’s not our last”.

Sports fans may know there’s another Kyle Carey, a hotshot basketball player. Like him, this album sees her score a real slam dunk.

Mike Davies

Artist’s website:www.kyleannecarey.com/

‘Bà i ù o hò’ – official video: