Heard A Long Gone Song, Lisa O’Neill’s fourth album was released in October and is her first for Rough Trade imprint River Lea Records. Co-produced with Dave Odlumin Blackbox Studios it sees O’Neill folding in musicians such as Cormac Begley, Christophe Capewell, Libby McCroha and Radie Peat, to achieve a compelling coalescing of traditional songs and original compositions, and in doing so, she creates a musical universe that is clearly in the service of something greater.

The record is a radiant document of an artist who feels surer of her place in the world than ever before, while still retaining a sense of frailty, something she has been creating a dialogue around since her 2009 debut Has an Album, to 2013’s Same Cloth, and 2016’s Pothole in the Sky. O’Neill consistently asks difficult questions of herself and the audience.

You can read the full Hot Press review of the LP here.

The title of the record comes from Shane McGowan’s Lullaby of London, a song she turns inside out, rooting around in its earthy poetry, and the folk impulses that the song possesses, the tension between the rural and the urban, and thoughts of the ‘lonesome corncrake’s cry’ amid ‘the cars/ and the shouts from the bars’, which brings O’Neill full circle - a perfect closing song for the record. It is a distillation of many conceits; folk, with a punk sensibility, poetry, tradition, and history - a story of living.

A story of broken dreams and hidden desires, of hope and curiosity. There is a thread throughout the record suggesting that we should use anger constructively, that we should never forget, and never be complacent. Adrienne Rich wrote: “Poetry isn’t revolution, but a way of knowing why it must come”, O’Neill’s brilliant new work is accordingly, a fitting testament to that, and her best record to date.

Lisa O’ Neill plays Liberty Hall, Dublin, Saturday February 23, 2019. Tickets cost €25.00 inclusive of booking fee and go on sale Thursday, December 6 at 9AM.