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Susan McKeown
Blackthorn: Irish Love Songs / An Draighneán Donn: Amhráin Grá (World Village)
$16.99
The Irish singer's ninth studio album is a collection of Irish love songs, accompanied by a stellar ensemble - Xuaca Amieva, Cormac Breatnach, Edmar Castenada, Róisín Chambers, Steve Cooney, Robbie Harris, Lindsey Horner, Dana Lyn, Harkaitz Martinez, Don Meade, Eamon O'Leary and Igor Oxtoa.
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From the record label:
Love, with all its ecstasy, uncertainty and poisonous thrills, is the focus of this album. Nine of the twelve tracks are sung in Irish but all are given fresh contexts. For example, Oíche fá Fhéile Bríde (On Brigid's Eve), about a man stricken with a hopeless passion, is accompanied by a harp, the national instrument of Ireland. But that the harpist hails from Columbia grants an unexpected type of sensuality.
When McKeown applies her burnished contralto to the luscious material on "Blackthorn" she makes those songs feel that they're not only hers, but yours, that the moods and passions she's evoking belong to all of us. Because, in one way or another, we've all been where McKeown takes us. The singer understands that, and reminds listeners that wrenching as this journey of the heart sometimes is, in the end it's life lived to its exhilarating fullest.
A major reason why each selection contains such an idiomatic sense of time-and-place is that Susan traveled widely while recording them. "The challenge, and probably the most enjoyable part for me as a producer, was to explore this material in a completely new way." she explains, "There are songs about girls on the brink of love, women with babes in arms abandoned by lover and family, and one, Paudeen's Woman, about an obsessed stalker who seems like she's ready to kill. But others are just fun, about women having a good time, playing with love."
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