Aoife O’Donovan: A Wren Flies High
The wren, the wren, the king of all birds
On St. Stephen’s Day got caught in the furze
So it’s up with the kettle and down with the pan
Give us a penny to bury the wren
— The Clancy Brothers’ “The Wren Song”
The wren is a particularly charming bird. It’s petite, somewhat round, and has a tail that aims skyward. Its songs are complex — and loud — oscillating between short whistles and rapid couplets full of counter melodies. But it’s the avian’s ancient reputation that makes this little bird such an interesting specimen. In old Irish fables and Germanic stories, the wren is considered the King of All Birds, a title of distinction brought on by a story of ingenuity … and a bit of deception.
“There’s the story of the wren and the eagle — they’re having this contest,” says singer/songwriter Aoife O’Donovan. “The eagle flies the highest, but the wren has outsmarted the eagle and hitched a ride in the eagle’s wing. When the eagle flies as high as he can, the wren pops out of the wing and flies even higher. So he has won the contest, and he’s proclaimed the King of All Birds. I’ve always loved that story. I think it’s hilarious. It’s like a sneaky battle of wits.”
O’Donovan is not unlike the kingly wren. Physically, she is small but not absurdly so. Her lyrics share universal themes — like the fear of death and lonesomeness — while her melodies range from pure folk to avant-rock. And her status amongst the Americana crowd is rising quickly. She’s been in two popular bands, Crooked Still and Sometymes Why, and only has two solo records in the bag — Fossils and her recently released sophomore record, In the Magic Hour. She’s even in the trio I’m With Her, with fellow roots singers Sarah Jarosz and Sara Watkins.
That’s a pretty high professional altitude, and the view looks quite alright.
“I think that we all have dreams about flying … that’s been a human obsession forever,” she says, referencing In the Magic Hour’s carousel of bird and flight themes. “Being trapped on the land and not being able to be outside the body — to experience what it’s like to be in the air.”
Much of O’Donovan’s newest record was written after the passing of her dear grandfather. He lived back in the old world, in County Cork, Ireland, in the coastal town of Clonakilty. There, O’Donovan just got to be a kid — a beach baby, as evidenced by the album’s cover image.
“My grandad, as I call him, was a butcher by trade,” she says. “I wouldn’t say that we had the kind of relationship that a lot of people associate with the grandparent relationships in America. It was quite a different thing.”
O’Donovan grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, and was only able to see her grandad once every summer. It wasn’t until she got a bit older that she could have the generational bonding she desired. “A couple years before he passed away, a good friend of mine and I went to Ireland on a mission to get some audio recording of him, and to hear some stories. That was the first time in my life where I had a deep one-on-one conversation with him about his history. It definitely helped that we had had that time. I kind of was struck after his passing and moved to write a lot of these songs.”
In the Magic Hour can be drawn as an arc, an astral projection from birth to death. It illustrates how humans can swing from one anxiety to the next, resting with hesitation before moving forward again. O’Donovan foreshadows this sense of weariness on the introductory track, “Stanley Park,” by building a gorgeous six-verse layer cake of shit happens. “See that babe at her mother’s breast / If I could I’d take my rest / Back in the belly from where I came / Nobody knows my name,” she sings. It’s a cold and calculated opener, brilliant in its delivery of the facts — life facts that you have to learn the hard way.
The second track, “Magic Hour,” is the heartbeat of the record. It begins with a literal pumping sound, that of a wurlitzer in 4/4, grinding through a memorable first verse which references another slice of O’Donovan’s childhood nostalgia. “The one literary reference [on “Magic Hour”] is of an old children’s book called The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey, which is out of print and has been for a while. It was an Irish book from the ’30s that my dad read to us when we were kids. [There are] fairies, and these two poor children, and all their adventures with this magical donkey.”
Aside from being, perhaps, the only modern singer capable of seriously using the words “Turf-cutter” and “donkey” in a song, O’Donovan is just getting warmed up with her wicked wordplay. Her description of a sunset — something we’ve all seen and read about hundreds of times — is exactly inexact: “a kind of blue that you think you know, but you don’t know.”
“The sun is long gone in my magic hour,” O’Donovan assures. The exact timing of said “magic hour” has been a source of contention among friends, but she sees it as a very specific moment. “The sunset in West Cork in August or July … when you’re in the far north in the Summer, the sun goes down, but the sky doesn’t really get dark for quite a long time … The sky just stays this really weird blue and then it turns to grey. And that’s sort of how the sky looks on the cover of the album. The magic hour, to me, is that moment after dinner, when it’s still daytime, and you’re still playing even though you should probably be in bed because you’re just a kid.”
On “Magpie,” O’Donovan mixes her Irish heritage with additional images of tiny fliers. The much-loathed magpie has a call that sounds like a piece of artillery rather than a song, and the species has been accused of rampant kleptomania — though, that’s actually up for debate. “The funny thing is, magpies are, of course, not the nicest birds. They’re kind of horrible birds,” O’Donovan says with a laugh. “… The irony of this song is that my grandad did not particularly like birds in any way. He wasn’t a bird watcher or a bird lover. He probably hated them. But it’s just supposed to be an image — an image of a bird. And I feel bad that so many people have a negative association with magpies. I don’t. I always liked seeing them when we were driving down the roads in Ireland. And really, even here, I’m into all birds and think that they’re a fascinating part of the ecosystem.”
By track seven, “The King of All Birds,” O’Donovan’s sense of symphony comes out in spades. Like a flock or a gaggle of swooping geese, the track boasts a jet stream-level string arrangement courtesy of composer Gabriel Kahane and the Brooklyn-based string quartet Brooklyn Rider. On the traditional Irish tune “Donal Óg,” meaning young Donal, O’Donovan anchors her Magic Hour project to the voice of her very own grandad. The result is extremely emotional and delicate — dissonant but in a pleasing and ethereal way. “It’s actually my grandad singing another tune called ‘The West’s Awake’ — a recording that my dad took on his iPhone, I think at my cousin’s wedding. It’s him just singing his party piece. He always would sing that song.”
“Jupiter,” the closing tune, sees O’Donovan at her most Atwoodian. Having drawn the arc from birth, she finishes it with a somewhat sci-fi narrative on death, surrounded by tribal drums. It’s about the end of life, “about being a hundred years old” with post-apocalyptic themes like being launched into outer space with your loved ones. “Til we are star stuff,” she sings. “Steady in a coal mine sky / wherever you go, I go.”
There is a deliberateness to In the Magic Hour. It moves the artist forward with a high level of consciousness not usually seen in these circles. Songwriters use a lot of guesswork around the fretboard, happening upon satisfying chord changes and melodies by chance. Even if O’Donovan wrote this way, feeling her way through the sonic landscape, it doesn’t show.
What’s available in front of us is a record of adult-level maturity. Her songwriting is moored to her grandfather’s wing. She’s happy, secure in herself, unafraid to fly higher than many of her peers. She’s measured. Cool. Extremely alright with being uneasy. If In the Magic Hour can illustrate one thing, it’s that Aoife O’Donovan hasn’t even gotten started yet. This is an artist who’s on her way to becoming the next Joni Mitchell, except that when she’s Mitchell’s age, music fans will be looking for the next Aoife.
In the Magic Hour is available now via Yep Roc Records. BGS is currently presenting Aoife O’Donovan on her West Coast tour. Click here for tickets.
Illustration by Cat Ferraz
Originally published at www.thebluegrasssituation.com on February 3, 2016.
