Last year we ran a three-part feature on Ye Vagabonds All Boats Rise Tour, their inland waterway tour of Ireland in which they wrote updates, a postcard if you like, of their slow progress across the waterways. This was all before releasing their new album Nine Waves which we recently reviewed here.
Along the trip, they planned to meet up with friends and fellow musicians and perform intimate concerts on the banks of the waterways. They were joined by John Francis Flynn & Feli Speaks, Brigid Mae Power, Cormac Begley, the wonderful Laura Quirke & Joshua Burnside and more.
Their good friend Myles O’Reilly also joined them. He was on hand to capture some of the magic unfolding on camera for a film documentary he plans to release later this year. Also, don’t forget that Myles has his own album due out on 30th June, titled Cocooning Heart.
In the film excerpt below, you can watch Laura and Joshua performing Far Away the Hills are Green, a track from their 2021 EP In The Half-Light.
In Myles’ own words: Last July, I spent a month on board a barge with Ye Vagabonds documenting one of the most memorable music tours of my life, where brothers Diarmuid and Brían Mac Gloinn brought their beautiful folk songs to lucky audiences along the inland waterways of Ireland. Not only did they perform from the barge, but along the way, they also invited friends to play with them. This video is an excerpt from a film that I will be editing and releasing later this year and features a song from special guests Joshua Burnside and Laura Quirke, who joined the barge in Clashganny Lock, Carlow.
Joshua Burnside shared the following about Far Away the Hills are Green in an earlier FR feature:
After hearing Laura’s Taking the Wheel, I was inspired to tap into my own experiences of early relationships and teenage desires to escape the mundane. As it is in Laura’s song, there are two characters (although it is sung from the perspective of one of them) and my story also begins in an enclosed, comforting, yet somewhat oppressive environment, with the beating of the rain as a backdrop. Once the scene was set, the song sort of wrote itself from there.
As ever with my lyric writing, Paul Simon is an influence – the way he looks at something small and detailed, then widens the scope to reveal a larger theme. His song ‘Train in the Distance’ is an example of this and shares the grass-is-always-greener theme with Far Away, with the closing lines ‘The thought that life could be better, Is woven indelibly into our hearts and brains’.