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)

Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music

Some years ago I was at a party talking to a fellow Cuban when an acquaintance of ours (another Cuban) happened to come into the room. We all greeted each other and I remember answering his question “How is it going?” with: “A la marchita” (Going). I don’t recall hearing myself using the phrase but the bloke who’d been sitting with me until that moment looked at me as if he’d just seen an alien.

 

“A la marchita” is not a form of address we use regularly in the largest island of the Antilles. And my English translation doesn’t really do the phrase justice. It fails to convey the old-fashioned sense of it. The only other person I ever heard using it before was... wait for it... my father.

 

“They f**k you up, your mum and dad/they may not mean to, but they do/they fill you with the faults they had/and add some extra, just for you”.

Philip Larkin got it almost right when he wrote This Be the Verse. Our parents’ approach to child-raising (as good-intentioned as it is) is probably the reason why many of us rebel in our teens. But then time marches on and one day we catch our reflection on the bathroom mirror and... Aaargh! Who’s that looking back at me? Could it be that...?  No, yesterday I had my own ears, mouth and mannerisms. And today they all look like... Even the way I scratch the back of my left leg with my right foot is just like... mum’s (or dad’s).

Enter middle-age despondence.

Up until that moment at the party I’d never realised how much I had metamorphosed into my father. There had always been comparisons between him and me, but of the normal kind and they were also easier to accept when I was little. But on closer inspection I noticed that my habit of bringing up song titles and linking them to random words in conversations and my current lectures to my fifteen-year-old-son (delivered with a professor-like, stern tone) were taken straight out of the Cuban In London Senior’s book.

In the novel I’m reading at the moment of writing this post, Life is Elsewhere, by the Czech writer Milan Kundera, the main character, Jaromil, aspires to become a poet but he cannot escape his mother’s ever-looming shadow. Kundera is a master at describing a person’s inner conflicts and Jaromil’s love-hate feelings, as a teenager, towards his progenitor sum up pretty much how we feel about our parents at that difficult age. Yet, once we arrive at middle age and find that we resemble somewhat those who are responsible for our existence and the good and bad in us (hopefully more of the former than the latter) we react with mild horror.

In my case it’s not just my father’s phrase “A la marchita” that has made me wonder if it was worth me running away, metaphorically speaking, all those years ago from my parents’ overprotective mantle. The first time I chastised one of my children, I remember using exactly the same words my mother used to utter when she gave me a tongue-lashing. What was weird about it was that, unlike my father’s old-fashioned greeting which I can’t recall saying, I plagiarised my mum’s words on purpose. Has that ever happened to you, my dear fellow bloggers and readers? Has any of you started to resemble your parents yet? And, is this (un)conscious copying one of those facts of life that we must resign ourselves to accept, like the assumption that our offspring will one day get married, have children, a good job and a house, although not precisely in that order?

Maybe it is fear what we’re dealing with here. And this fear of behaving like our parents is deep inside a fear of not being original. After all, part of our success in life (and I’m not talking of the economic side of it) is based on the idea of creating. Creating a family, creating a home, creating an experience for ourselves. And the fact that perhaps behind each act of creation we’re involved in lies the ubiquitous presence of mum and dad is sometimes too much to bear. Larkin, then, was on to something.

© 2012

Next Post: “Killer Opening Songs”, to be published on Wednesday 30^th January at 11:59pm (GMT)