Killer Opening Songs (The Bold Fenian Men by Cathy Jordan)

Some voices arrive in one’s life without any fanfare or red carpet treatment. They’re not the type to be found at presidential inaugurations, miming or not. They’re rather the kind to offer a seamless, smooth and meditative transition from past to present. On their (sometimes) puny shoulders these voices carry a country’s cultural traditions, occasionally with a modern twist. Cathy Jordan is one of those voices.

Formerly of Irish band Dervish, Jordan’s debut album, All the Way Home, turned up on Killer Opening Song’s doorstep a cold morning last November. It has since barely left its stereo. The first track, The Bold Fenian Men, is even on K.O.S.’s mp3 player for when it goes out jogging.

Haunting and beautiful, The Bold Fenian Men is an old school Irish ballad that abracadabras the way into a record brimming with disarming intimacy. The melody, originally written by Peadar Kearny, is part of the canon of songs with strong Republican sentiments that permeates the Emerald Isle’s folklore. On the clip below Cathy performs the track a capella (click here for the album version), thus, bringing an otherworldly quality to lines like 'Tis fifty long years since I saw the moon beaming/On strong manly forms, on eyes with hope gleaming/I see them again, sure, in all my sad dreaming/Glory O, Glory O, to the bold Fenian men.

Part of what makes All the Way Home a must-have album is Cathy’s sheer quality as a singer coupled with the musicianship of her collaborators. Obviously her voice takes centre stage; however, it is far from being the sole focal point. The arrangements are excellent, especially on tracks such as The Road I Go, In Curraghroe and The Jordan Jig, on which she plays the bodhrán, the Irish frame drum. Although All the Way Home is not as energetic a record as the ones she released with Dervish, the album still packs a mighty punch. Nowhere is this clearer than in the title track, a beautiful and rousing coda to a fine collection of songs.

It’s worth remembering at this point the reason why Killer Opening Songs exists. The genesis of this almost six-year-old section can be traced back to the Gospel according to Rob Gordon. Rob (played masterfully by John Cusack) is the lead in the movie High Fidelity. He is the saint patron of heart-broken, male thirty-somethings who still organise their record collection according to the date when they bought a particular record for a girlfriend or friend (And If I want to find the song "Landslide" by Fleetwood Mac I have to remember that I bought it for someone in the fall of 1983 pile, but didn't give it to them for personal reasons). It was Rob’s last words in that movie that gave birth to K.O.S.: “The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention.”

Just like The Bold Fenian Men as sung by Cathy Jordan. A Killer Opening Song.

© 2012

Next Post: “Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music”, to be published on Sunday 3rd February at 10am (GMT)

Song for New Year's Eve

When thinking of which song to post in order to kiss 2012 goodbye I didn’t have to think too hard. Even though it’s only been with me for less than two months since I bought it, Cathy Jordan’s All the Way Home has become a regular feature on my playlist at home or in the car when I’m driving. I will be blogging about this sublime album in the New Year for sure, but in the meantime I shall leave you with the title-track. All the Way Home explains better than I could ever manage the reason why, more than five and a half years later, I continue to blog. I see us, bloggers, as peripatetic beings, travelling in a virtual world without frontiers and without the need for a passport, either. However, we always return to our point of departure. As the chorus of All the Way Home goes: “Maybe it’s the mountains high above the valley/maybe it’s the long road that winds us down/maybe it’s the sunbeams that kiss the water/maybe it’s you (blogger) that keeps callin’ me (to your) home”. For what I can only say: thank you, thank you very much for welcoming me into your virtual home and sharing your experiences with me. Happy New Year! May 2013 bring you health and success!

 

Next Post: “Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music”, to be published on Sunday 13^th January at 10am (GMT)

 

Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflection and Music

I'm almost a third of the way through Middlemarch by George Eliot, a door-stopper of a book which I bought at a car boot sale (or was it a secondhand bookshop?) for a song. The novel is interesting and at times very, very funny, in that peculiar way in which some Victorian novels are. However, a few days ago, after reading a passage, I had one of those "moments" where different elements with no apparent relation to each other seemed to gel together all of a sudden.

The passage was about Mr Lydgate, the surgeon, and his thoughts on the kind of life famous people might have led before they'd become renowned. It went thus: "Most of us, indeed, know little of the great originators until they have been lifted up among the constellations and already rule our fates. But that Herschel, for example, who 'broke the barriers of the heavens' - did he not once play a provincial church-organ, and give music lessons to stumbling pianists? Each of those Shining Ones had to walk on the earth among neighbours who perhaps thought much more of his gait and his garments than of anything which was to give him a title to everlasting fame: each of them had his little personal history sprinkled with small temptations and sordid cares, which made the retarding friction of his course towards final companionship with the immortals..."

One of the disparate elements that latched itself on to the above passage was a flashback I had when I spotted an old classmate of mine from secondary school in a photo posted on Facebook.What's strange is that in the image she was in the background, in the midst of a group of people, the majority of whom were alien to me (except for the owner of the camera, who was of my acquaintance in university and was in the centre of the picture), and yet my former classmate stood out. Something she never did in class.

There are people whose invisibility is an open invitation to ask ourselves if they ever existed. We all know them. They are the quiet ones, those who're neither top of the class academically nor flunk out exams, the ones who shy away from contact with other classmates, even if they share the same interests. They're part of your life as a student, but you'd be hard pressed to name them. One day the teacher will say: So and So is not in class today because s/he has been taken ill and you will wonder who they are. My class throughout secondary school had more than thirty pupils. I think we were more like close to forty, or just over that figure. Believe me, in Year 9 it could get quite rowdy.

This classmate of mine sat at the back of the class. She spoke in a whisper (I once asked her to lend me a ruler, or a sharpener, I forget now. That's how I know what her voice sounded like). At the risk of sounding politically incorrect and undiplomatic, I must admit that in the looks department we, boys, didn't take much notice of her. It's not that she wasn't good-looking (she was, but then, again, I ignored that detail), but there were other girls who, we boys thought, scrubbed up better. And then there were also the Literature and Spanish (female) teachers on whom we, highly hormonal teenagers had a crush. Was that the reason why my former classmate apparently chose the mantle of impermeability?

I don't know. As for the fame to which the above passage refers, as far as I'm concerned, my ex-classmate hasn't discovered a new Uranus like Sir Frederick William Herschel did in 1781. But there she was, in that photo on Facebook, receiving her quarter of an hour, Warholian claim to notoriety. People like my ex-classmate are the small, imperceptible details in our lives. They make no big splashes, and yet years later, we stumble upon their faces on an old, yellow photograph, and as if by magic, we remember the clothes they wore, the phrases they overused, the way they walked. They're like autumn leaves, undistinguished and unremarkable when they all fall from the same tree in unison and pile up on the pavement. But, how many times have I not held an autumn leaf in my hand, its golden and orange hues announcing the arrival of one of my favourite seasons and marvelled at the beauty of it?

Some of us look back on our school days through the prism of those characters who stood out: the nerds, the bullies, the show-offs, the failures. Especially if they went on to become famous for whatever reason. But there's another group, smaller, perhaps, who never demanded any attention, in fact, they eschewed it whenever possible. They were like the proverbial still waters, whose depth we never really did find out. And then one day they suddenly turn up in our adult lives, like a song, performed a capella, whose words we never learnt and whose existence we never acknowledged, but whose melody becomes familiar as soon as the first notes kick in. These invisible classmates (or students, if you are/were a teacher) are the echo of an earlier life before Facebook gave them the fifteen minutes of fame they never sought.

© 2012

Next Post: “Urban Diary”, to be published on Wednesday 3rd October at 11:59pm (GMT)