arla O Lionaird wears a coat of many colours, none of them pastel. His music trawls the darkness within, while at the same time his larynx can elevate the most morbid of lyrics to stratospheric heights. Martin Hayes calls this intangible experience the lonesome touch and O Lionaird has it by the bucketload. Thing is, though, he doesn t quite see it like that . . .
I don t think that my voice is necessarily a primal thing, he avers, but I suppose that the voice is potentially the primal thing. Only the other day I was listening to Maria Callas who is pretty damn primal to her own. It s her soul, her heart that you hear, and to unearth and to articulate and explore regions of the person that instrumentalists, unless they re extremely inspired, can t quite reach. Because it s coming from within.
This plumbing of the depths is not all flimsy and ethereal either. The voice can soar or plummet for a number of reasons, not all of them spiritual or soulful, according to O Lionaird.
There are lots of reasons not just spiritual ones but tangible reasons, depending on whether you re feeling well, whether you re feeling down or feeling strong. The character of the delivery will be affected by the place you re in and the people around you.
O Lionaird s been singing into a microphone for over 20 years now, his larynx having been discovered down in Czil Aodha, the cradle of Sean O Riada country. And the two decades of experience have taught him much about the vagaries and intricacies of the voice. So much so that he refuses to take its shape, its timbre, its resonance for granted.
I would say that I don t adhere to the storyline of songs at all, he admits, in what sound like distinctively confessional tones. I don t enforce them as the absolute in terms of telling me what expression to give a song. Other people would say that a sean nss singer should do that, but I have a different approach. I believe the emotion is a transporting thing in itself and I try all my life to give myself up to it. That s what my goal will always be.
His idiosyncratic approach to the music can be seen at its most tangible in his choice of producer for his debut solo album, Seacht gCoisciim na Trscaire (The Seven Steps To Mercy). Michael Brook might not have been on first name terms with the music of Padraig O Keefe or the Caherlistrane landscape that s moulded the voices of Rita and Sarah Keane, but he certainly knows how to create tensions and moods that compliment rather than conflict with the music.
Michael is such a pioneer in the way he works, O Lionaird declares. I mean, his cohorts in the business are Brian Eno and Dan Lanois, so it was great. He was just what I wanted. I had been summoned to Realworld during the recording of The Afro Celts album and they said they d like to offer me a deal. So they asked me to account for myself, to tell them what I wanted to do with these songs I d been singing for so long.
And my answer was very simple and very plum. I told them that I hear these things when I m singing. I ve never been able to share them with anybody. They were cold, unusual sounds and the nearest thing I came to finding them was working with Michael Brook.
With just one of the ten tracks on the album penned by O Lionaird himself ( Seacht ), it seems that original material, as might be expected, is not a high priority in the world of sean nss singing. After all, there s a well and a wealth of unrecorded material awaiting the imprimatur of the studio.
I don t even know if I ve contributed to the genre either! he laughs. But all I wanted to do was write a beautiful song. That was the goal; it was a purely aesthetic one. No more low-minded nor high-minded than that.
This Corkman s cadences steadily rise and rise as he gets more animated in recalling the creative process, and the path that has brought him to the brink of a solo career in the unlikeliest (and probably, thus far at least, the unsexiest) of traditional genres. Indeed he s suffered the brunt of many of a dismissive remark because of his commitment to the rigorous demands of the voice.
Sean nss singing is very solitary, you know, he observes. Most people considered me to be an extremely aloof character for years. Particularly when you re noticed as a child. I had to put up with the usual accusations: that I was big-headed, but I really think that they were unfair. I struggled very hard to sing. It s not easy to stand up and sing in front of people. It s an emotional struggle and a personal struggle, and it s even moreso when it s an obscure art form.
Iarla O Lionaird is under few illusions either about the marginalised status of sean nss singing, despite the general rehabilitation of so many facets of Irish music over the past few years.
It is the only component of the traditional scene that hasn t been incorporated into the party machine, he maintains I think it posed difficulties; it required a level of commitment and imagination that wasn t really around in the 80s. A tremendous democratisation has occurred in music in the last five years, in my opinion. It s as if any prophetic statements made by the likes of John Cage and Brian Eno later on have come true. Music is seen now as an assemblage of amazing sounds that can make an emotional message, as opposed to this genre, and that genre and the other.
The clichid notion of barriers breaking down in the 80s was: let s fuse this art form with that art form, but that s all hokum now because what you have now is everybody taking sounds and doing whatever they want with them. It ll still either be a good performance or a bad performance, and I m quite at home with that, I must say.
The 90s has certainly proven to be a far more productive decade for O Lionaird, signalling as it does, his return to the musical fray, when at one point he considered it an impossible dream.
I was fortunate to come across Realworld, he admits, because they had a very well-informed set of principles, when it came to older artforms, particularly vocal ones. To them, listening to me was a case of: not where I m from, but one of we know it s old. Do we like it or don t we? . Whereas I felt like I d hit my head off the ceiling in Ireland.
I m not taking issue with any of the producers or record companies here. They just didn t have the objectivity required for them to free themselves from a preconceived set of ideas about what one could do with what I do. I mean, somebody once laughed to my face when I suggested that I d like to work with Dan Lanois. It was an audacious thing to say, I suppose. I mean, he had just produced an album for U2, but I thought: why not? . I didn t see a philosophical barrier. The only barrier I saw was an attitudinal one.
The album s title, Seacht gCoisciim Na Trscaire, is a
weighty one, a potentially frightening one for listeners unaccustomed to his singing. Where did it come from?
Yes, I know it s quite a meaty title, he nods, but I liked it when I came upon it. It was something that Tony McMahon said to me one time when he was going to a funeral that I couldn t go to because I was away. He said: caitheann tz seacht gcoisciim na trscaire a dhianamh s am go ciile you have to do the seven steps to mercy from time to time and I had it written down before he finished it. It comes from a tradition whereby, if you meet a funeral, no matter what direction you re going, you walk with it for seven steps.
It s everything I wanted to say about paying homage to something, being respectful, and also listening out for the unexpected thing that might teach you something. And it s redemptive as well: there have been times in my life over the last few years when I had bad relationships with people, when I didn t acquit myself as well as I might have, and it s an indirect message of I m sorry to everybody too.
I heard a Neil Young song a few years ago that said: I burnt all the bridges that he ever crossed . Well, I m sure that I burnt some bridges as well. The only way one can redeem oneself is to give something back to people and that s what I wanted to do to give something back. n