Matt McGinn, the husky-voiced Co. Down singer-songwriter (and occasional Folk Radio reviewer), says that he felt ‘terrified’ when approached to take part in an East Belfast Community Engagement programme for, brought up a Catholic he learnt he would be collaborating with a Loyalist flute band. However, they came to realise they shared a common connection through growing up amidst the Troubles, resulting in him writing eight songs, two of which appear on Behind Every Door, his sixth album, on which he’s variously accompanied on piano, banjo fiddle, mandolin, whistles, strings and Uilleann pipes.
The first of the two provides the album opener, The Music, a driving rhythm with swirling fiddles, whistles and a lyric that captures the common ground of music and mass immigration shared by a generation of Irish, sung in the voice of the music itself (“In Wild West Towns the church bells rang/My melody was in the hymns they sang/In the mountains and the Ozarks they took to me played me with a banjo upon their knee/I am your music I am your song/Carry me with you/Play me forever”).
Opening with lone fiddle, thumping drums carry along the rhythmically chugging Nightmare Alley, which could be about an obsessive doomed love (“You’re a dead end street/a one way trip/you’re the vision of Mary I can’t disappear from/You’re the ghost I meet/a sinking ship”), though you sort of suspect he’s trading in metaphors here. The second song from the project, church organ introduces Making Waves before it erupts into a lively ceilidh shanty romp as the lyrics head out to sea (“The first time we sailed across the ocean/We sang under the blue heavens/As we heaved against the tide/Blindly leading forward men & women/With nothing but each other by our side”) and another reference to immigration (“We’ll have fair winds and following seas/Leave our wake wherever we go/Horizons full of promise are waiting/We’re making waves together as we row”).
On the urgent, foot-stomping Lig Dúinn (slang for back off), he sings of oppression (“We’ve been pushed/Harried/Scourged/Beaten/Bruised/God knows how long/We can stand/Head up strong”) and coming together (“Oh there are distances between us/Ye let them in/We have differences between us/Ye let them in”).
A co-write with Susan Savage, the fingerpicked and piano-arranged God Only Knows echoes the sentiment (“God only knows the differences between us are only for show/God only knows the differences between us are our own/Are of our own”) as it speaks of Irish obsession with land and its history (“There are reasons why I’m proud/Blood of the father’s in this ground/Work the land, breaking stone/Bow heads to a god long gone…This place is more than what we own/More than fields than we have sown/Call it out what’s it for/What’s mine can’t be yours/Take your God, take your shame/Take your truth while it runs lame”) as his voice builds in intensity and fiddle and whistles play it out.
Taking on country colours, the organ-backed title track is a slower, reflective, sadness-stained number about growing apart (“In the next room I can hear the tv playing/The dog is with you, she’s happier there/If I could tear these thin walls down/Just like paper I don’t think I could break through to you”) but of staying true (“Behind every door there’s a promise/A promise that I’ll never speak/Behind every door there’s a promise/A promise I intend to keep…When you come lookin’ I’ll be here waiting/If you ever let go I’ll never tell/Marks aren’t leaving/Scars are stayin’/Memory serves me too well”).
Stripped back to spare piano backing, muted drums and guitar, the wistful, melancholic Rainbows pays respect to those with the courage to declare themselves gay in Northern Ireland (“I’ve been here/Looking on/Waiting/For someone like you to come along/And tell me/It’s alright/To be me”) but also, Damien McGheean on fiddle solo, on a wider scope about holding true to your beliefs and living right.
The tempo kicks back up with the upbeat rock n rolling Shine Your Light, another number about stepping out of the shadows and finding your place (“Sometimes the hardest thing/Is knowing what song to sing/Is finding your voice to sing it in then/You can do most anything”), before ebbing away again for the pipes-coloured melancholic but optimistic To The New Year, weaving a musical atmosphere of mountain mist as the day fades as it looks forward in hope in its dreamy benediction “The old year has passed to make way for the new/Let us pray for an end to our sorrows/Time may not always be with us/New worries will come so leave old ones behind/Leave your burdens unsaddled/Hate travels heavy but mercy is light” and as we “sing a new song to a world that’s renewed/We’ll cast out the woes that won’t break us/And welcome the new dawn’s light breaking through”.
Reminding me of Yeats’s An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, it ends with The Turning Of The Tide, a slow-building eleven-minute opus in tribute to Willie Campbell, who busked the streets of Belfast in the 60s playing the musical saw, sung in his voice (“The wind has changed for winter/And still I play/As cold as I may be/Though damaged limbs/Goad me toward my failure/I sound the air/my bow touched upon steel”) with intimations of mortality (“Farewell I feel it’s near the end/There’s a changing of the Seasons coming/A turning of the tide”) and the portending of the conflict that hit Northern Ireland shortly before he died in 1969 (“A vision comes/I hope to God I’m mistaken/These streets awash/With blood surrounding me”), the arrangement featuring a lengthy instrumental close of strings, fiddle, whistles, virtuoso piper Darragh Murphy and, in the final moments, a recording of Campbell himself on performing. Grained with both aching and joy, it’s a heady, quietly intoxicating work that may well stand as McGinn’s finest to date.
Website: https://www.mattmcginnmusic.com/
Pre-Order Behind Every Door via Bandcamp: https://mattmcginn.bandcamp.com/album/behind-every-door-2023