Hannah Donelon & Grace Lemon are a traditional vocal duo whose distinct voices blend together through haunting harmonies and ornamentation. With a background in traditional Irish music, the duo draw from an array of wider influences to reconfigure ballads and tell stories with contemporary resonance.
Through the simplicity and rawness of their music, Hannah and Grace tell lucid narratives of the lives and landscapes preserved in old songs with sympathetic accompaniment on the hammered dulcimer and harmonium.
It’s with great pleasure that we’re able to premiere their debut single May Morning Dew (out tomorrow – 14th December) on which Grace shares more on below. This is a duo you won’t forget and we can’t wait to hear more. Be sure to follow them on Facebook and Instagram.
Grace on May Morning Dew:
May Morning Dew is a song that both Hannah and I learnt in childhood, long before we became friends and started singing together. As a piper, Mick O’Brien’s recording of the slow air became regular bedtime listening for me as young child when all my friends were going to sleep to their Harry Potter tapes. Meanwhile, Hannah was introduced to the ballad by the fantastic Grace Kelly in Manchester’s thriving Irish music scene. The song felt almost untouchable to her at the time because the version she had heard and loved was so hauntingly beautiful. Only recently, when moves between Manchester, London and Dublin have made the notion of ‘home’ more pertinent and complex, has she felt able to return to the song and bring to it her own stamp.
When Hannah first suggested it for our debut single, it seemed a pretty unquestionable choice. We’ve been told that the song was written by an elderly man who, having emigrated away from Donegal early in life, returns to his home to find in it in a state of decay. I remember travelling to Donegal in my summer holidays to visit the ‘ruins’ that used to belong to old aunties and Hannah often talks of going back to her father’s childhood home, likewise nothing but a ‘stone on a stone.’
But I guess what really drew us to the song was that, unlike the majority of traditional ballads, the song is less a story and more an illustration of a landscape or evocation of a sentiment. It’s incredibly visual in its depiction of passing time and we both really wanted to bring out the pictorial elements of the song in animation form. When we sat down to arrange the song, it felt natural to us to stray away from the traditional sean-nós style – generally unaccompanied and free in its meter and phrasing. If the song is in itself a tale of migration and the Irish diaspora, it seems right that our musical style is an evolution of tradition reflecting the wide range of influences we are exposed to today, giving voice to the contradictions that arise through generational and geographical change.
May Morning Dew is out tomorrow – 14th December.
Single launch at Voces8 Centre 19:30, 14th December 2019 – Tickets
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