by Tom Mooney
In the time it took U2 to record their last album, which caused a minor blip on the radar, Julie Feeney not alone produced and recorded three exquisite CDs, but wrote all 36 songs herself, among which are many which still stand the test of time, including Aching, Fictitious Richard, Impossibly Beautiful and Stay.
Clocks, which has just been released, lyrically is a departure from 13 Songs and pages, but musically there is a foot in both camps, for which we should be grateful; Clocks is as infectious as pages, a remarkable feat as Feeney has had little or no time to prepare for the often difficult third album syndrome.
The last time I saw her perform, at a 40th anniversary celebration of the Gallery Press in the Abbey two summers ago, Feeney sung a John Montague poem: though ensconced in a cycle of dusk and shadows for the verbal snow drops of literary luminaries (Seamus Heaney, Medbh McGuckian) Feeney was not out of place. Her pure and pellucid tones were the equal of Montague’s lyricism.
It was not, however, authentic or vintage Feeney because neither the words nor the music (Bill Whelan) were hers. What is refreshing about Clocks, in the aftermath of countless live performances on RTE Radio 1 and Lyric FM, is that Feeney has developed the clarity of the recorded sound of pages and yet clung to the asceticism of 13 Songs, for, despite the commercial appeal of Impossibly Beautiful, there is always an undercurrent to this most numinous of composers that connects songs like Aching with Stay and Cold Water.
Exchanging Annamakerrig, where she wrote pages, for a different duchas, Kylemore Abbey, Feeney recorded the vocals over eight nights during a winter with visual leitmotifs mirroring the conclusion of Joyce’s The Dead. She isolated her muse from the distraction of thinking outside of herself, and the result is one of the most rewarding collection of songs this year.
Where to begin? With Just a Few Hours and If I Loose You Tonight, Feeney vicariously reinterprets the experience of the Irish diaspora, in an unaffected but pure delivery, an extension of tone and theme touched upon in Dear John and Julia, acute examinations of love and loss, but with intensity of voice and due weight in the music.
pages revealed her to be an extremely perfidious artist, chiselling sentences from arranged word pairings, as Apollinaire was want, a process called spouse melodies. Something as sparse on the page as Grace from 13 Songs was spawned in a whirlpool of words, though ruthlessly pared. You give me grace… is then pierced by the unstoppable trajectory of the orchestration.
With Fictitious Richard and Stay, Feeney was at her demonstrative best with both emotive breath and breadth: you didn’t need am imaginative leap to source a contrapuntal influence here and there. The range of her voice continues to be extraordinary, not at all fatigued, and as diverse as her talents as a writer, arranger, producer and conductor. A jewel of a song, Lui, bookends 13 Songs, and its frisson is repeated throughout Clocks.
The new album is not a million miles away from in perfection from the other great singer-songwriter-arranger of our times, Pierce Turner, who has achieved scatterings of miracles throughout SoNgs FOR A VERRY Small Orchestra, which debuted last month.
His Snow and Yogi With a Broken Heart are perfectly graduated pearls, as are Feeney’s Cold Water and Julia, where her tonal resource is flawless, while the seductive appeal of the arrangement unveils Feeney at her strongest. The voice, meanwhile, irradiated by blend and pitch, is expressively rich, embellished by words we may not have expected from Feeney, who performs on November 22 and 23 in the Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny and the George Bernard Show Theatre in Carlo
