In support of the release of their magnificent third album Nine Waves (a Featured Album of the Month reviewed here), we caught up with brothers Brían and Diarmuid MacGloinn of Ye Vagabonds before they embarked on their first official tour in two years. With several weeks’ worth of dates ahead and Féile Róise Rua coming up on 19th – 22nd May, the pair were in fine spirits, taking a breather between rehearsals to discuss where the record’s songs and title stem from, ancient Irish legend, politics and sexism in traditional songs, and why buoyancy is likely in their genes.
So, this record obviously came together under very different circumstances. Did the process feel different?
Diarmuid: Very different. It’s funny because we spent longer and further apart than we have in years. We did quite a lot of work on our own, in isolation from one another as well as from everyone else. Then, funnily enough, when we did come together, the process ended up being the most collaborative it’s ever been. Possibly because we were sitting down and playing things for each other that the other hadn’t heard, so, it was easy to be excited and to bring a fresh energy to it. Sometimes you can work a song to a point of being almost tired with it yourself. But when I played something, Brían was able to play it back to me. It sounded like a completely different song and opened up all these possibilities.
Brían: It was interesting because the way that I tend to write is often informed by how I arrange traditional songs. I’ll find a song, research it and then rewrite and restructure it. However, with this, when we came to the table, I could almost look at Diarmuid’s songs as if I’d found them. It was novel to be able to approach our own material in that way. I was able to have an open imagination for sounds, and we could conceive a space together for the songs to live in.
How did you bring together the ensemble we hear on Nine Waves? Were they artists you had worked with before?
D: They were people we were aware of. We’d played with Caimin Gilmore (double bass) before. Not in our own projects but on other stages. We were in Lisa Hannigan’s touring band six years ago.
B: Then Kate Ellis (cello) we’ve known for a good while. I think the scene in Ireland is so small; there’s a huge crossover between folk and other kinds of music. It doesn’t exist in its own ghetto, you know?
D: It helps that our manager was managing Crash Ensemble as well. So, we were involved with all those contemporary classical musicians, and maybe that influenced the direction that we knew was available there.
B: When we had honed it down to the songs that we wanted to go with, we knew that we wanted to push it into this swirling oceanic waving place. So, when it begins, you enter into this distinct world of the album.
D: We wanted other instruments and for them to create an atmosphere. Through the soundscapes Brían’s made for radio productions and an emerging scene in Ireland of ambient music, we’ve been getting more into those sounds. That textural thing rather than having parts that you can write down on a staff and hand to someone.
B: Then it was just a case of saying to our manager, “we want a dynamic thing that could flutter sometimes and others could dig in. Then occasionally it could become distorted and crunchy. Or it could be beautiful and all the things in between – maybe two musicians?” He suggested Kate and Caimin, both of whom had worked with or knew Spud already. It was very easy and effortless getting them in. They’ve toured and performed together as a duo too. So, they have their own interplay and dynamic.
D: Just like we have wordless communication often, where we don’t need to explain ourselves, for them, it’s similar. We also record live as a duo and insist on getting a really good core take without overdubs or click tracks, and they’re the same.
B: They’re exceptional players. They are classically trained contemporary musicians but can also play by ear, jam and don’t need to follow dots. Kate has done work transcribing bird song; sometimes if you’re listening, you can hear, “oh, wait, those are seagulls.”
We spoke to John Francis Flynn recently about his debut, and it sounds like he recorded in a very similar manner. Working with musicians who could interpret more abstract directions.
D: We actually used to live with John, all in one house. It’s been a rolling lease of all these Dublin musicians for many years now. I don’t know how many people have gone through that place at this stage. Everyone’s slept on the couch!
In a previous interview, you mentioned how excited you were for that album and its experimental flourishes. Do you think we’re now seeing that reflected more across the scene?
D: Yeah, it’s not even necessarily ‘trad’. I suppose trad is one of those words that means slightly different things depending on who says it.
B: Traditional music in Dublin might mean a specific thing like, “that’s people who play tunes at the cobblestone.”
D: But then you say ‘traditional singing’ – it’s a different thing again. Folk is such a broad category. There definitely is more cross-pollination between a group of intuitive and very musical electronic artists who are doing some quite ambient things, using tiny synthesisers and tape loopers like John.
B: It’s a definite crossover. If you took a bunch of different bands in Dublin, there would be a lot of Venn diagram circles crossing over each other. Say, there’s Brendan Jenkinson, who produced John Francis Flynn’s album, who also plays with Villagers and Inni-K. Then Inni-K has this bunch of contemporary jazz musicians playing on her album, some of whom only work in this really out-there jazz world. Then I also play in my partner’s band. That’s where Matthew (percussionist/jazz drummer) and Ryan (sax/keys) came from. So, there’s this endless chain where everything is colliding. It’s a very interconnected musical community.
How was it having John ‘Spud’ Murphy produce the album?
D: It was just the easiest ever. It was so satisfying not to have to explain ourselves or wonder if we’re on the same page. He’d be a hard person not to like. He’s so brilliant but also conscientious. He’s almost worrying most of the time that something isn’t quite right, with his ears tuned into everything too. When you’re working with someone like that, it means you don’t need to be vigilant; you can really let go.
B: I’ve done a bunch of recording in the past two years, recording others, engineering and producing. One thing that stood out to me is that about 50% of being a producer is people skills and managing the room. That’s one thing that I’ve learned from Spud. For example, he makes an excellent cup of tea and knows when to crack a good joke. He has a lightness to him. I can be quite meticulous when I’m setting up sound for people. Spud slaps a mic up seemingly without trying. It’s almost like he just falls over, and it lands in the perfect position. It’s mad; when we went in to record I’m A Rover, it was basically a trial to see if that studio worked and if we’d work well together.
D: Yeah, I don’t think we intended to release I’m A Rover and Bothy Lads when we recorded them. We never had this idea of, “let’s go in and record a seven-inch single.” Then the pandemic happened, and we thought we better do something with those tracks!
Tuaim is a very atmospheric opener. Researching the title, does it refer to a resting place, hilltop or something else entirely?
D: If you look up a project called ‘Sea Tamagotchi’, there’s a bunch of videos for that where I did soundscaping and ambient scoring last year for a brilliant Irish writer called Manchán Magan. He recently wrote a book called ‘Thirty Two Words for Field’ that was a big hit. Around the release of that book, he had this project where he collected interesting words in Irish speaking communities, with a particular interest in words to do with the sea. Tuaim is a word that he found somebody using to describe specifically the sound of waves hitting land. Though it can refer to any sound made in nature. As opposed to track nine, Fuaim, which is the word for noise and tends to refer to sounds made by people.
Where did the title Nine Waves originate from? Is the intention for Tuaim and Fuaim to stand separate, with the remaining songs symbolising the waves?
D: Exactly, so there are nine pieces of music, and then Tuaim/Fuaim are just incidental tracks.
B: The ocean is quite a significant theme on the album. In November, when we’d finished recording in Cill Rialaig, I was staying doing a residency for a week. I was getting mixes back and forth while trying to find a title and artwork for the album. While I was there, the Amergin Poetry Festival was on in Waterville, and there’s a poem called The Song of Amergin that we would have been aware of for years. It’s almost like a creation myth.
D: It’s the myth of the arrival of the Gaels to Ireland. Amergin was the first poet of the Gaelic people and a wizard of sorts. In the tale, he tries to lead his people across to land on Ireland, but the natives who live there are these magical beings, the Tuatha Dé Dananns. They use their magic to disturb the seas, and Amergin is only allowed to land if he can cross over these nine waves. So, he calls out to the three goddesses of Ireland – Fódla, Ériu and Banba – and in doing so, Ériu calms the seas enough that he can land.
Then this poem is the first thing that he says when he steps foot on Ireland. It’s an amazing invocation of himself, but it’s himself as a reflection of all these things in nature, such as, “I am the stag of the seven tines,” “I am the crest of the sea,” “I am the hawk on the clifftop.”
B: So, I was telling that story to another artist that was staying in the retreat while I was looking at these islands that are in that bay. I was taking a lot of photographs at night and trying to get these blurry, misty kinds of scenes because I felt magnetised towards them. I felt it had a real resonance with the music on the album. Then I suggested the title, and we realised the parallels between the song An Island as well. Then around the same week, we found Petrie Lenehan’s artwork.
D: It looked exactly right; that swirling oceanic feel, so indistinct and abstract.
B: There’s so much of the landscape in the songs on the album. It just made a lot of sense.
You mentioned the oceanic theme there; with projects such as Six Songs on Seven Islands, All Boats Rise, The Singing Island of Arranmore all centred around water, do you feel it’s slowly permeated your ideas over time?
B: We’re constantly surrounded by water all right.
D: Surrounded by, on top of, travelling through.
B: I think we’ve always been drawn to it. Our family being from Arranmore, we’ve been out fishing on boats and around the island since we were little kids. Even though we grew up in the hilly Midlands, well away from the sea, it always feels very right for either of us to be on the water. Handling boats comes easily. There’s probably some genetic thing buried in there that we’re made to float…
D: Natural born floaters.
Filmmaker Myles O’Reilly has been a constant companion. Seeing you performing outdoors, often in the places that the songs you’re singing might be referencing, feels especially poignant. How has it felt recording those videos over the years?
D: It just feels so right to be in the place where the music makes the most sense, and it’s interesting that it’s an exception.
B: The island tour was just such an amazing thing to do. I think going to places where music doesn’t happen a lot; people just come out to see what’s going on. So, you have to perform in a different way. You must make it accessible to people, which brings out another side of it. We haven’t yet played a gig on Arranmore with the new material. That’ll be an experience for sure. I think people on the island will be aware of who the songs are written about and what the certain meanings of certain songs are. There might be a resonance they’re not even aware of, but that would probably make sense to them.
D: The opposite can be great as well. Say, when you sing an ancient song in very colloquial Donegal Irish, and you play it in Sydney, as far away as you can get from the place it originated. There’s also something rewarding knowing that through singing the songs of Róise Rua worldwide, we’re keeping her torch lit. It’s interesting to think what she might have thought of that.
In one interview, you said on occasion you had been surprised by some of the political leanings of your audience. Without being overly political, you spoke of how you might address these themes through your new material. Do you think that has factored in?
D: You never know what people are going to take away. As you say, without being overtly political or too forceful, you can address that onstage by trying to guide listeners away from a misinterpretation or an interpretation that you wouldn’t want them to take from a song. Even something as simple as you know, The Hare’s Lament for us, is not a tribute to hare coursing, which is cruel. For us, we’re on the hare’s side. It’s not literal.
B: I would never shove my ideas down an audience’s throat. But if I can encourage somebody to empathise with another point of view, then that’s powerful. I think when you have a respectful conversation with people or inquire about what somebody actually thinks, it can be a lot more nuanced than just being right-wing or left-wing. I think it’s an incredible effect of music and art to be able to encourage empathy in people, even if it just allows them to think about something they haven’t thought about before and feel that feeling. That’s enough for me.
Do you feel through traditional material, you can also tease out certain messages or subvert songs in a way that makes the listener rethink things? I’m thinking of the gender fluidity in your rendition of Hares on the Mountain, for example.
D: We’ve been asked why we don’t change the gender when singing songs that are sung from a female perspective. We’ll continue to sing them from that perspective because that’s the song. We’ve also been questioned why we didn’t re-gender the song or whether it was an LGBTQ move. Which it’s not at all, it’s just something that has always existed in traditional singing. There are those who will make every effort to re-gender a song so that they’re singing from the perspective of their assigned gender.
B: We also have friends who deliberately swap them around.
D: There’s lots of singers who have never thought that there was anything weird about singing, “I’m a poor girl,” even though they’re a man with a beard or whatever. That applies to traditional singing in multiple different cultures as well. Singing is a space in which you’re allowed to do a little bit of role-play without everyone thinking anything of it, but also everybody’s aware of it at the same time.
There are songs with maybe overtly sexist storylines or, more often, a woman getting dealt a bad hand because, at the time they were written, that was the case. I’ve had weird things happen to me at sessions where I’ll sing a song where a woman is in a position where she asks for the help of a man to get out of an awful situation. Then I’ve had women approaching me after I’ve finished thinking that I’m perpetuating sexist ideas, even though it’s an old song written when women didn’t have agency. Songs are like short stories as well; you’re not suggesting every character is admirable. If it provokes you to say, “oh I really hate what happened in that song”, – well good!
B: There are certain songs that we won’t sing, and there are those we’ve changed or omitted verses in, just to subtly give the effect of having a different meaning.
D: If it ever feels like the sexism in a song is celebratory, then we don’t sing it. If it’s the kind of sexism that has always existed and still exists, and that’s one of the features of the story, you’re going to listen to it and will develop a response. In the same way that if you listened to a murder ballad, it doesn’t mean you’re promoting murder. They can be horrible songs with dark stories, yet we like telling these as well because they’re part of the whole bigger picture.
How did you come to this version of Her Mantle So Green?
D: So, our version was an extensively researched composite of that song. I’m sure anyone who’s really interested in old folk songs will have come across a song like it before, this motif of the man arriving back from war, who either disguises himself or is unrecognisable. He proposes, and then the girl in question replies, “no, she’s waiting for her man across the sea”, and in doing so, proves her loyalty. Then, of course, he says, “Ah, it’s me, let’s get married”.
I’d never really heard a version that truly caught my ear before. Margaret Barry has a great but very incomplete version of the story, and the story, for me, is key. Then I heard this version by Jim O’Neill from Markethill, Co Armagh. His recording was very different, with a great melody, delivery and a much more complete story. But still, there were elements missing. I had started singing it, changing the melody over time, making it more minor. Then I heard a good friend of ours singing it at the Inishowen Circle Singers Festival who had a complete version of the story. I was intrigued and wanted to see if I could get a complete set of the lyrics, so I went researching in the Irish Traditional Music Archive, and I found a good few manuscripts. Then between all those different sources, I put together the version that we play on the album.
B: In one of the final verses, you added in as well, “if you’ll still have me.”
D: Exactly, you can do subtle things to try to address things that you don’t necessarily like. If, for example, you want to make your protagonists a little bit more admirable because people will identify with them, then you might change the wording. The last verse I almost rewrote, just to give her a choice in the matter.
Could you share more about how you wrote Go Away and Come Back Hither?
D: That one, the chorus had been floating around as a couple of words and a bit of a melody, as a thing that we intended to write for years. Any relationship that either of us has been in during that time has involved a lot of comings and goings because we travel so much. So, it’s a love song about that feeling of absence and then being reunited. The other side to it is that when my wife and I started seeing each other in the early days of our relationship, we were both away for prolonged periods of time. We would send each other these long messages that, in hindsight, could be seen as like love letters nearly, talking about all kinds of philosophical things. One or two of the verses are direct references to that.
She’s Muslim, and the first verse has that line “we met before creation,” which is a thing that Sufis believe that all souls knew each other before creation, especially the souls of people who are close to each other in life. But they knew each other in some kind of swirling soul world before they arrived here, which I thought was beautiful, whether it’s something that you can believe in literally or not. Then the last verse references another conversation as well. We were talking about stars and how it’s only the tiniest pinprick of a star that’s visible: “the greater part of any love lies somewhere out of sight / astronomers attending to the paths of distant lights.”
Elsewhere we hear the absolute joy of playing with Cormac [Begley]. How was it touring and recording together?
B: We have the best time playing with Cormac. In 2020 we were due to tour, but it got rescheduled, and eventually, in that brief period when case numbers dropped, and gigs returned, we got to spend some much-needed time with him. It was joyful. We did a lot of swimming, hung out with his family. It’s important to get to know people that you’re playing with. When we played together in September, there was a lot of slagging involved. The stage craic between us was different to how it is with me and Diarmuid. There became this kind of a rivalry between us; we’d be constantly setting up each other for good opportunities to rip the other, especially as the tour went on. It’s more than just the music with Cormac; he’s a devil.
What’s the story behind Joyáil?
D: So, we wrote that one.
B: It’s not a real word. Well, it is, but you won’t find it in the dictionary. There was a woman who was a neighbour of our mom when she was growing up. Arranmore is an Irish speaking area, and this woman basically conjugated the word ‘joy’ as if it was an Irish verb. So, after eating dinner or having a cup of tea and a piece of cake in their house, to say, “Oh, I enjoyed that,” she’d say this instead. So that was where that came from; a verb ‘to joy’. Diarmuid wrote the piece.
D: Well, we wrote it together. I wrote the guitar part, and then Brían wrote the second part on the tenor. That tune was a real collaboration with Spud too, when we got into the studio. He had so many ideas, and it was a perfect opportunity for us to be really open to his creative input. He made his mark on that track, and we’re so happy with it.
Then you’ve got the incredible close of Máire Bhán with that glorious saxophone section.
B: That’s Ryan Hargadon, sitting at the centre of all those Venn diagrams. I have been playing that song for a couple of years, and it’s from Róise Rua. That version of the song is only three verses, and there’s much more complete, elaborate versions of it. There’s one from Tory Island that Lillis O’Laoire collected, which is nine verses long, and there’s far more to it. Then there’s a different version sung in Connemara. But I just really loved the simplicity and the space for the imagination that was in that three-verse version.
The line that sticks with me most is the last line of the first and last verse. It translates as “I’m in love with Máire Bhán and there is no case for me”, as in, I’m in love with her, and it’s hopeless. The story of the song is a classic, old Irish romantic poem. Those poems often follow the same structure so, “I’d walk the island of Arran with you and part of Mullaghmore. I’d go to heaven with you if I could… I wouldn’t even ask for any cows or money with you… just to put my hand around your waist.” Then he gets lost in a foggy place because that always happens when you’re in love.
D: We all know the foggy woods!
B: There’s a lovely line in that verse, “I’d be drinking with you at the bright table of the king”, and then the last verse is the pathetic, lovesick protagonist. Musically I leant into that tremolo feel on the guitar, the constancy of it. It has this rolling little world that you can get into even if you don’t understand the song.
Throughout your career, you’ve worked on multiple projects, and you’re constantly doing archival research. Do you feel your practice has deepened with this album?
D: It’s deepening all the time, and it changes meaning as well. You learn different things, and your interests broaden when you’re doing archival research. Often you find yourself researching into these little rabbit holes that you go down into other little worlds.
B: I think the biggest development on this album was definitely the collaborative writing and getting back into writing songs in a big way. That’s where we’re interested right now.
D: As Brían said, those two things are not disconnected entirely. The work that we put into archival research and arranging songs from various sources plays into how we approach writing as well.
B: I see them as one in the same thing. I don’t feel like these songs are ours because already they’ve taken on different meanings for people.
Nine Waves is released on 13th May 2022 via River Lea.
Order here: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/ye-vagabonds/nine-waves
Ye Vagabonds Forthcoming Tour Dates:
4th-5th June – Fire In The Mountain (Wales)
9th June – Vicar St. Dublin Launch Show
10th June – Cloughjordan
11th June – Doolin Folk Festival
12th June – Visual, Carlow
15th June – Linenhall, Castlebar
17th June Oranmore Castle
19th June Arranmore Island
22nd June – The Everyman, Cork
23rd June – Connolly’s of Leap, West Cork
24th June – Crown Live, Wexford
25th June – Ballykeefe Amphitheatre, Kilkenny
Tickets are available from yevagabonds.com
Also, find out more about Féile Róise Rua 19th – 22nd May via http://feileroiserua.com/