Our Song of the Day comes from How I Became A Wave, the new solo project of Pat Carey, the former vocalist and songwriter with The Hard Ground. His new single lays a solid path for his upcoming How I Became A Wave album (set for release in Autumn 2021), a collaboration between Carey and some of Ireland’s finest musicians.
Below, Pat mentions Grief Is A Thing With Feathers, a surprising book debut from polymath Max Porter that seems to have caught the hearts and minds of many. At just 114 pages the novella reads more like a poem in which, following the death of a mother and wife, the way forward for husband/father and two sons seems impossible…until crow arrives, the accredited caregiver and a bully, therapist, trickster and nurse. Porter’s book was inspired by Ted Hughes work Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow written following the death of Sylvia Plath and Porter’s personal experience of his losing his own father when he was six.
Pat tells us:
“Inspired by the Max Porter book Grief Is A Thing With Feathers, Fading Out is a song that explores the ups and downs of grief – the anger and the mundanity, the exhausting, wearing down of nature of loss. The video for the song is a nod to the last 12 months. A world where the simple sense of touch – one of the most powerful medicines in the face of grief – has been forcibly absent.”
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Part of a new wave of collaborative contemporary folk music from Ireland, the song Fading Out features a hugely talented array of artists including Cork composer Cormac McCarthy, Maria Ryan (Strung, Crash Ensemble), Aoife Burke, Matthew Berrill (Niamh Regan) and Brian Casey (Screenreader, John Blek).
As with many projects born in 2020, the single was recorded both in studio – Casey’s Wavefield Studios in West Cork – and remotely in the homes and studios of featured artists. The song blends an intimacy of vocals with a richness of texture that hints at a more cinematic sound to come.
Find out more here: https://www.howibecameawave.com/