Watching Lisa O’Neill bossing proceedings in the intimate surrounds of the century old Town Hall Cavan, there is a clear sense that we are in the hands of a master songwriter, a magnetic performer and a natural successor to Patrick Kavanagh. The onstage retro lamps, Persian rugs and an invitation at the interval for tea, coffee and soft drinks conjures a cozy living room feel and Lisa chats to us, plays banjo and sings ‘Lagan Love’ like we were sat in her homeplace of Ballyhaise a few miles north of here.

In a recent Abbey Talks Series, O’Neill recalls hearing about Patrick Kavanagh when she was a child and that ‘On Raglan Road’ was the first tune she ever learned. In 2021, she staged a performance of The Great Hunger at the Irish Museum of Modern Art - grabbing Kavanagh’s direction that rural farmers have depth, magic and mystery and are as conflicted as the artist; she penned the title track to the album which she launches tonight - All Of This Is Chance.

Kavanagh had spent the early Forties eking out an existence as a freelance writer in Dublin, carousing on evenings at The Palace bar, with the likes of Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain, replacing Yeatsian idealism with a ribald, disillusioned realism. The apex of which is arguably 'The Great Hunger' - 759 lines of genius make for one of the greatest long form poems ever written - telling of Patrick Maguire – a celibate, lonely farmer, who toils all day and into the night, in his scattering of Monaghan fields.

Lisa suggests that if people wish to read the poem, “you’d need an hour” and tells us of Kavanagh intimately knowing every corner of his fields - “farmers will know this”, she says, to knowing burrs of assent from the audience. In her work, O’Neill has often channeled historical figures, for example on her last album, Heard A Long Gone Song, she sang about Violet Gibson, the Irish woman who shot Mussolini. However, with Kavanagh she goes beyond mere research – they are almost collaborators. In that same interview, she spoke of weaving her art with his, sweetly asking him was her interpretation of his work, okay? Was she doing alright? Lighting a candle for him every evening, she felt the spirit of him surround her.

When Lisa listened to Kavanagh ruminate on recordings, his hums and haws reminded her of the cadence of Crossdoney in Cavan. Hearing him look at and ponder himself, she trusted that she didn’t need to change herself and just be who she is. Tonight, she recites Kavanagh and invites us to “come with me, Imagination, into this iron house/And we will watch from the doorway the years run back.” And with the ease of Kavanagh’s manifesting of Monaghan, O’Neill conjures Cavan. She’s been doing so a long time, going all the way back to her debut album and the Pat McCabe cowboy twang of ‘I’m Gonna Get Me to the Road’ and the intuitive ‘Chris’, containing a Kavanagh type character, who buys a puppet and uses him as a dummy in his ventriloquist act, saying things he can’t say, thus creating a split identity; as Francie Brady of The Butcher Boy or Patrick Pussy Braden of Breakfast on Pluto. On 2013’s Same Cloth or Not, O’Neill gives voice to an unplayed piano – “I am a piano, I don’t need bananas, but I go bananas sometimes/I need to be played to stay alive”. With the inanimate coming alive and split identities, O’Neill is firmly cast in the mould of Kavanagh & McCabe.

Hailing from Ballyhaise village, in the parish of Castletara amongst the drumlins on the banks of the Annalee River, Lisa stands with feet apart on the Cavan Town Hall stage, holding her guitar Dylan style, her band (Colm Mac Iomaire, Joe Doyle, Ruth O’Mahony Brady, Bryan Leech and Mick Geraghty), fanned out in a hemisphere around her. She introduces her superb new single ‘Silver Seed’ – telling us that although known as the money plant, the lunaria plant is too honest for that handle, it possesses too much female energy. She says all plants, all animals, all people are created by mothers and dedicates the song to her Auntie Sadie - “a mother of many” who last week celebrated her 80th birthday.

Observing the universe through the minutiae of nature and realising the importance of the people that surround us – form a philosophy of thought for O’Neill. On ‘Rock the Machine’, she sings of mechanisation chomping up the work of the stevedores on Spencer Dock, concentrating on one docker who summons the cormorant to take his troubles away. Her song ‘The Globe’ describes her as an innocent child, spinning a globe, wondering how to get into it, later as an adult, the question still remains the same. O’Neill feels that she always remains outside of the world, stands at a strange angle to it, the audience, many already emotional, nod and wipe away the odd tear. Before ‘Pothole in the Sky’ she asks “how are you all doing? So far, so good?” and people cry out, she has us in the palm of her hand, standing like a crane, on a solitary right, short trousered leg, singing of a parachute jump where she fell for six minutes landing on “my bum in a field in Longford”.

It is a mesmeric performance, her band easing their way in and around the songs that O’Neill sculpts, producing a purring drone that captures the audience in a trance. Introducing, ‘Birdy From Another Realm’ she tells of the hours long mating dance that the peacock performs, rattling his train of feathers as a drummer would and relates of the crafty cuckoo sneaking her egg into the nest of the duped meadow pipit, who then rears the cuckoo chick as their own. With her watching of birds and realising our own behaviour in them, O’Neill is reminiscent of the poetry of Dermot Healy, a painting of whom hangs in the lobby of Town Hall Cavan.

Through compelling flamenco pirouettes on ‘If I Was A Painter’, O’Neill sings about the importance of diversity in nature, in plants, in minds across a song influenced by the tunnel tigers of Ewan McColl, they who painstakingly dug out the London underground. Going behind the piano for ‘Whist The Wild Workings Of The Mind’, inspired by a medieval Danish ballad of doomed lovers whose families all kill one another to try and prevent their romance – “a cheery little number” as she teasingly puts it, O’Neill sings – “like every woman, I’m less of a girl with time” and Larry Beau who played support tonight, emerges to emanate a Hitchcockian whistle – and I’m thinking of the black back road from Blayney and the commotion of the wild wood.

O’Neill is a rare performer, one who possesses the ability to draw all the energy in the room towards her, as she sings, you feel the entire theatre lean into her. She introduces ‘Old Note’ asking us if we ever been in a field listening to the wind rushing through a gatepost and sounding like an orchestra? Or have we ever watched the blackbirds taking over a town about 4 or 5 in the morning? Hands stuffed in pockets, she could be wandering the fields of Ballyhaise, under the yellow moon which forms the stage backdrop, as she sings about such things with Colm Mac Con Iomaire absolutely sublime on fiddle.

Lisa finishes her set with her beautiful ‘Goodnight, World’, recalling attending drama classes in this very same building when a teenager and says she is delighted to be launching her record here tonight. She disappears to an ovation, reappearing for an encore where she generously allows her band to take much of the limelight, before finishing on her fantastic version of Dylan’s ‘All the Tired Horses’, which also dropped the curtain on the mammoth television series Peaky Blinders. She takes the ovation once again and is gone. The power which this artist, conjurer and naturalist emanates is staggering, make sure and capture some of it during what is set to be her annus mirabilis.

Stream All Of This Is Chance below.