Moving from Dublin to the rural beauty of County Clare right before lockdown gave Aoife Nessa Frances the solitude and stillness she needed to create Protector; “I might have been running away from my problems,” she admits, “I was disconnected from myself and from nature, but I found peace far away from the city, where there were no distractions. I isolated myself with nothing to do but make music.” It certainly worked; Protector is a collection of songs where she gained strength while the noiselessness of the setting allowed her to hear her own voice clearly.
Sometimes the simplest things are the toughest to put into words. You must actually figure out what it is you want to say. The problem is that conceding a relationship is over requires letting go, a difficult experience at the best of times. For Frances, part of the problem was actually admitting the feelings, “’Way To Say Goodbye’ reflects the feelings when a relationship ends, the difficulty of letting something go. How fear of loneliness can make you hold on to something for too long after it no longer serves you.” So, when she sings, “There’s no easy way to say goodbye to you,” one can almost feel the pain she’s going through. You can feel the bass punching you, along with the wistful guitar. Connor O’Brien’s trumpet only adds to the melancholy of the moment.
As the pages turn, “This Still Life” reflects something more musically upbeat while coming to the inescapable conclusion that our life in the universe may be just one small part of the equation. When she sings, “I see the vastness of my birth reclefting light on,” the realization comes that we tend to make too much of ourselves. Not surprisingly, like most of the album, it was written during the time of lockdown, when she had an enforced opportunity to look at the world from viewpoints we may have never noticed before.
A large part of what makes these eight songs so special is the arrangements. Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh’s viola and violin create indelible impressions, as does the pedal harp that Meab McKenna plays on “Emptiness Follows”, and there are moments when you are simply left breathless as the instruments wash over you. From the simple guitar that opens “Back to Earth,” instruments get layered on top of each other in an intricate dance with synths and strings, creating a lush bouquet of sound that builds before fading away.
The beauty that comes from the interplay of instruments and colours peaks on the seven minutes of “Day Out of Time.” The flugelhorn creates moments of incredible majesty as the song unfolds, mixing with the wonder of the creativity required to generate music of this magnitude. Aoife Nessa Frances may have been caught in the wonder of the moment, trying to figure out where she fits in, yet Protector is a most generous gift, where she plays not to the crowd but to the sound and swirl of her own heart.
Watch the live Take Away Show session that Aoife Nessa Frances did for La Blogothèque: