Released ten years ago to little fanfare, Winter Aid's 'The Wisp Sings' has gone on to become a viral sensation – not once but repeatedly with three hundred million-plus streams and plays worldwide. The song is the work of Winter Aid, AKA Kerry singer-songwriter Shane Culloty who's watched in amazement as his musical creation has graced the season finale of HBO's Genera+ion; featured in Amazon Prime's We Children From Bahnhof Zoo; been adopted in the UK by Mortimer & Whitehouse; helped to soundtrack RTÉ's Speechless documentary; get an Oscars sync; and feature in a Joe Biden presidential campaign advert. And that really is just for starters!

Today, October 17, finds Shane announcing the 10th anniversary re-release of The Wisp Sings EP, re-mastered and for the first time available on 10" vinyl courtesy of Blackstack Records. Accompanied by an expanded 13-track digital edition, it's available now for pre-order here.

Ahead of that comes the immediate digital release of the previously unavailable 'Lazy Beds', a wistful look at where Culloty grew up in Co. Kerry. To coincide, Shane has penned this fascinating account of how 'The Wisp Sings' was written, and has gone on to become one of the biggest Irish songs of the past decade. Over to you, Mr. Culloty...

'THE WISP SINGS': THE STORY BEHIND THE SONG

Ten years ago I was living with my fiancée in a drafty old apartment in Dublin. It was cold and damp, and there was occasionally frost in the shower, but we loved it. I had managed to save up to buy a decent microphone. I finally had a little home recording setup in the corner of the living-room, huddled around the borrowed piano. Scrawled in my notebook was a long list of half-crafted songs that needed recording, but almost immediately I found myself ignoring them and writing entirely new pieces, and one night (I really only recorded at night) I found myself humming a wordless melody over a few simple chords, and that’s when ‘The Wisp Sings’ came into my life.

More than any other song, this one seemed to fall out of the ether one piece at a time: first the opening melody, then the chord progression, then the vivid images in the lyrics. I’m sure it took a couple of days before it came together, but in my mind now it feels like it was done in one long night. I’m not sure why I decided to mirror the guitar picking with piano, or why I never wrote in a real chorus, or why the song goes for a minute and a half before there are any lyrics. I’m not sure why it works.

I’ve only written a few songs that felt this easy. My abiding memory of the process now is of the last night, standing in the near-darkness, recording the vocals, smiling at how everything in the song seemed to be falling into place - even my favourite part, the rising/falling piano break after the last verse, was improvised on the spot. As I sang and smiled, two rooms away, my fiancée washed dishes in the sink, and the sound of this happy moment seemed so well-suited to my new song that I could never bear to remove the errant clank clank from the recording.

The lyrics were similarly effortless, bundling imagery from the folklore of my Kerry childhood with abstract expressions of my happy station in life, and the accompanying fear and worry. Again and again I was lucky; lucky to be able to record the song when it came to me, lucky to meet Mark at Bluestack Records, who loved the song and has been a great friend and partner ever since, and lucky to see the song go viral that first time in 2014, on a Spotify playlist called The Most Beautiful Songs In The World.

In the decade since, 'The Wisp Sings' has been played hundreds of millions of times, an unknowable number that I can’t contemplate for too long. It has featured on daytime television segments, documentaries on BBC and RTÉ, dramas on HBO and Prime. It soundtracked an ad that ran during the Oscars broadcast last year, which I watched on a road trip in California, appropriately huddled over my phone and fries at an In-N-Out Burger. Millions have listened to those chords, millions have unknowingly heard the woman I love washing dishes. I can’t get my head around it.

For me the song sings with abundant happiness, but the sad tones ring truer for most. It’s gone viral two or three times at this stage, an experience I mostly perceive while sitting in front of a laptop, looking at jagged data visualisations from Spotify, YouTube, DistroKid, struggling to picture what it means. I’ve received more emails, messages and comments than I can recall, some of them thanking me for the song, and some sharing stories of desperate emotional wreckage.

 

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During the pandemic it became clear that there were countless people finding something soothing in the song, and clinging to it in the weird motionless and seasick days of lockdown. The messages became more urgent, the play-counts pointed higher, and suddenly the song was a kind of shorthand on TikTok for emotion: videos of discovered affairs, eating disorder support groups, and struggles with anxiety all featured my voice overlaid. By the time of the 2020 presidential election, the Biden campaign had used the song for a clip of the then-candidate calling his grandkids.

Now, in 2023, the song has continued its evolution, today a shorthand for “kindness content”. The song feels both unalterably mine and yet untethered; occasionally out of sight, in the orbit of others. It’s been cheekily recreated by global corporations for homespun phone ads, borrowed by young songwriters angling for virality, and ripped off repeatedly by beat-makers and spammers alike. Having a hit song is a surreal blessing; but the weirdness of having something so personal be embedded in the algorithm has never quite left me.

This anniversary rerelease is a good way to get close to 'The Wisp Sings' again, to do my best to appreciate what it’s become. It’s been a joy to revisit the song and remember how it felt to write it, remember that at one point it had never been heard outside our cosy apartment (our first home together). Rerecording it in a studio here in California (where I’ve lived since before the pandemic) has brought home to me how proud I am of the song, even if I can’t quite understand where it’s led me, or how it got so good at spreading its own wings.

It’s been wild too, hearing some of my favourite artists reinterpret it, finding parts of the song I never knew and giving it new ways to surprise me. I’m excited for people who love the Wisp to hear these new surprises too, as well as the songs that nearly made it onto the EP: songs 'Lazy Beds' (a wistful look at where I grew up), 'The Painting' (a frantically happy love song that I never could wrestle out of its demo form), and an old cover of the Motown classic 'Stop! In The Name Of Love', one of my favourite songs ever for how sad and joyful it is all at once.

– SHANE CULLOTY, AKA WINTER AID

Pre-save 'The Wisp Sings' on by following this link.