Pauline Scanlon - Live at Raheen House Hotel, Clonmel, this Friday, May 20
‘The Unquiet’ album to be launched in Clonmel this week
Pauline Scanlon’s unique voice, described as “a superb mix of china cup fragility and steely strength” (Irish Times) comes from an ancient place yet is always fresh.
Her music is both Irish and universal, traditional yet subversive at every turn. The ‘steely strength’ comes to the fore in both her activism and her determination to constantly evolve as an artist.
As a founding member of FairPlé, the role of women in the arts is central to Pauline’s creative path and something she is very vocal about. Her new album, The Unquiet, released in April 2022, reimagines what it is to be an Irish woman in the context of music and song. It is an album that will shift expectations and defy genre.
Pauline performs live at Raheen House Hotel, Clonmel, Friday 20th May 2022. Tickets available from www.paulinescanlon.net
About The Unquiet, Pauline says: “All my life as a singer, I have been drawn to old songs. In them I find solidarity with the ghosts of people I have never met and yet share fragments of feelings with. Somewhere in the empathy that is shared between singer, listener, and ghostly forms, I find strands of myself that didn’t originate in my own heart but have found their way in there all the same. They belong to someone or somewhere else, yet I feel them as deeply as if they were mine.
With this album I seek to represent the realities of modern-era women through traditional song. I am intentionally redirecting these songs away from the traditional narrative, turning them to face the modern era, to reflect a new social outlook, and I am imagining the present as I sing them.
’The Unquiet' is based on the life of my late mother, Eileen Scanlon, and her contemporaries in Irish society. I include myself in this. The songs are not literal in that they do not reflect specific events in my mother’s life. They do, however, have a resonance and a purpose in reflecting her lived experience and that of modern-era women in Ireland, through my perspective.
I made the album for my daughter, Kitty, that she may know her grandmother, what she was like, the bright, loving, funny and powerful force of nature that she was, so she will always know what her grandmother and many other Irish women lived through.
I dedicate these songs to my sisters in arms, to those who suffer and protest, working tirelessly to make Ireland a country that I hope my daughter can enjoy; an equal place, kind, inclusive, free of shame, and liberated from all institutions and instruments of oppression.”
The Unquiet was produced and recorded by John Reynolds at New Air Studios, and features guest vocalists Barry Kerr, Loinnir McAliskey, Bernie Pháid & Damien Dempsey.
The album is out now on digital, CD, and vinyl. Order on Bandcamp https://paulinescanlon. bandcamp.com/album/the-unquiet