Today marks the release of Glenaphuca, the stunning debut album by Irish/English singer and multi-instrumentalist Lewis Barfoot. We have the pleasure of sharing the album alongside a personal track-by-track guide to the album below.
Glenaphuca is an album full of evocative, autobiographical songs that speak of Lewis’s wish to unearth the legacy of her family roots in Ireland and is a mix of original compositions and reinventions of traditional songs from Ireland and England.
We shared her Fisherman single from the album towards the end of last year, which perfectly represents Lewis’s effortless interweaving of the traditional and the contemporary, with it being an original composition by Lewis that infuses a melody from the traditional Irish song Dúlamán. Elsewhere she beautifully performs the traditional English folk song The Fox and gives a stunning rendition of the traditional Irish tune Amhrán Fosuíochta. Other original compositions include the captivating Sister Lover and the elegiac lament for Lewis’s mother White Dress.
Glenaphuca was produced by Lewis at Soup Studios, London and mastered by Pete Maher. Glenaphuca features guest musicians Elisabeth Flett (Fiddle, Backing Vocals) Matt Dibble (Clarinet, Piano), Hannah Thomas (Cello, Backing Vocals), Maria Rodriguez Reina (Cello), Ansuman Biswas (Percussion) and Jonny Huddersfield Helm (Drums). Having previously performed alongside Bróna McVittie in Irish folk ensemble Rún, Lewis has since cut her teeth as a solo artist on the London folk circuit, appearing regularly for institutions such as Nest Collective. Lewis has recently moved back to her maternal home of Ireland and is happily settled in Cork.
Also, don’t miss her Nest Collective live stream show on 11th March supporting Fay Hield – more details and tickets here: https://grandjunction.org.uk/product/nest-collective-fay-hield-with-support-lewis-barfoot/
Glenaphuca Track by Track
Fisherman – Apparently seaweeds saved the Irish people during the famine. They are rich in minerals and in the wisdom of the ocean as if they are a distillation of all the underwater knowledge.
White Dress – I have found much beauty at the tender edge of grief. This song was written as a love song to my Mum. Her death reshaped my world. I felt like I had been hollowed out and left with a bottomless vacuum of pain in my chest. With this song I choose to sing to the pain of grief or to sing to the healing of that grief itself. To transmute the suffering into freedom.
Sweet Dreams –A tender and uplifting track about grief, a prayer to the deceased. Sweet Dreams emerges gently out of White Dress knitted together by a shifting shruti drone. As a companion piece to White Dress, Sweet Dreams asks the question of what happens after death, and how we stay connected with those who have died. I learnt that we walk every day and every breath with our ancestors as constant companions.
The Fox – The album is a folk prayer to my ancestors and largely focuses on the feminine and my Irish roots. But I wanted to honour the masculine and my father in the album and what better way than to sing my favourite song that my dad used to sing to us as children – The Fox. I couldn’t get enough of him playing it and I would love singing along to the “bones o, bones o”. His fingerpicking style would tickle my bones with delight and was the inspiration for me to learn guitar.
Amhrán Fosuíochta – Back to Ireland and an old Sean-nós song from Connemara sung in Irish. A love song and a lament. A working song, sung by a woman to her cows. A herding song, also known as Dó-ín Dú as heard on the Alan Lomax Collection. This ode to yesteryear takes us on a filmic and evocative journey where the elemental magic of the voice, fiddle and shruti lure us into a Celtic phantasmagoria.
Sister Lover is a celebration of community, solidarity and sisterhood.
Ballinatray is a stripped bare and hauntingly hopeful ballad. Written in 2012 and based on the true story of my family in Ireland. Ballinatray was the farmstead my Grandparents bought to bring up their family in East Cork.
Rise Up was written as a blessing for my Grandmother, who like many women across Ireland was institutionalised for simply speaking up against her abusive husband. It is incongruous to think that women were so dehumanised at this time in Ireland that they could be locked up for simply defending themselves.
Twa Corbies – Originally an English ballad The Three Ravens, first published in Ravenscroft’s Melismata in 1611, later to become a Scottish ballad, The Twa Corbies, speaks of two ravens (Corbies) plotting to eat the corpse of a freshly dead knight. This track appears on the album as part of my explorations and acceptance of the life – death – life cycle.
Transmission Complete – I wrote this song for a wonderful Scottish friend Charlie Menzies, a sort of father figure to me. We spent many precious days exploring the land around his home in the North West Highlands of Scotland; adventuring into the wild, being still with nature, playing music, sharing poems and talking a great deal about death. The ultimate surrender. He spoke about a wish to die on the land, not in a bed or a home but on the earth itself. And the song became a sort of permission slip to die like that. I wrote this song as a homage to that beautiful trip to Scotland. Imagining the beauty of dying into the earth itself, the ultimate homecoming. It is a celebration of death and by that notion; a celebration of life itself.The traditional air is Return to Ireland which drives through the choruses and outro.
Diddlage offers calm after the storm. A spacious, grounding and meditative song created by multiple layers of vocals and guitar. Paving the way for a new cycle to emerge.
Photo Credit: Kate Bean Photography