Eimear Quinn to release a cappella version of 'The Voice' to mark 25th anniversary of Eurovision win

Celebrating 25 years since Irish singer Eimear Quinn won the Eurovision Song Contest in Oslo, Norway with 'The Voice', composed by Brendan Graham, a new a cappella version of the track is set to be released this Friday, July 16.

'The Voice' scored Ireland its fourth victory at the Eurovision in five years, and remains a beloved song on these shores and beyond. Earlier this month, Prince Charles listed 'The Voice' among his all-time favourite songs, alongside tracks by Diana Ross, Edith Piaf, Barbra Streisand, and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

In the new a cappella version of 'The Voice', the song is stripped of its distinctive Celtic-inspired instrumentation, and is carried solely by Eimear’s remarkable voice.

The Dublin-born singer and composer has forged a career as one of the most distinctive Irish voices of her generation. Over the past 25 years she has toured and performed extensively internationally and has released four albums; her most recent being Ériu – recorded with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and released in 2020.

This year, Quinn's composition ‘In Paradisum’ was voted into the Classic FM Hall of Fame – the world’s biggest poll of classical music tastes. She ranks as one of only five female composers in the 2021 chart, alongside Clara Schumann, Debbie Wiseman, Yoko Shimomura and Phamie Gow.

The new version of 'The Voice' is also featured in the documentary Songs of the Great Hunger, available to watch here.

"'The Voice' had its origins in the early 1990s," Brendan Graham says in the documentary. "It was a time that my songwriting was changing. I had become a lot more interested in our history, in spiritual things, and in the elements.

"I was walking one day in the Wicklow Mountains, and there was a breeze among the trees," he continues. "It seemed to me that there was a voice in that breeze, and that the voice was calling to me. It also struck me that this unidentified voice was a universal voice. It was the voice of the past, the present and the future.

"So the idea came to me about this song. In a way it encapsulated the three areas of my interest. It was the voice of history – blood in the fields, and famine. It also encapsulated the spiritual dimension, because obviously the voice was not a human – it was either interior, or it was across the globe. It was also the voice of the future, because the Troubles in Northern Ireland were still going on. Things were very bad up there. The voice was saying, 'Bring me your peace, and my wounds they will heal'."

The a cappella version of ‘The Voice’ will be available on streaming platforms on Friday, July 16th.