KILDARE ENTERTAINMENT SCENE: Talented folk singer launches album and tour

Karan Casey, one of Ireland’s finest singer-songwriters — and a leading advocate for gender balance in the Irish folk and traditional music scene — has released her new album Nine Apples of Gold.

Over the coming months, she will embark on a national tour including a gig in Kildare.

Karan has teamed up with Seán Óg Graham, her long-time collaborator and friend, to create a dynamic and enchanting album of songs that speaks to healing, camaraderie in times of strife, finding enrichment and new life in campaigning for women, and of course death.

This is an ode to the natural world featuring the songbirds of Portglenone, the moon, conversations from the grave, returning to the wild, listening for the cuckoo as she sleeps.

The empowerment of women is front and centre of Karan’s concerns as she gives voice to the notion that songs can sing what we cannot say. Her defiance, her vulnerabilities and her feminist heart bellow through these songs.

Adding their unique vocals to the album are Niamh Dunne on a duet song Sister I am Here for You; Pauline Scanlon on a searing feminist overlook of Ireland in a song entitled I Live in a Country; and Ríoghnach Connolly on Daughter Dear, a tender hearted song between a mother and daughter.

Also joined by Conor McCreanor, John McCullough, Hannah Hiemstra and Kate Ellis among others, this is Karan’s twelfth album and displays her fine poetic voice where she has taken traditional symbolism and shaken it by the neck to create an ode to mother nature and a poignant cry for change.

A Waterford native, Casey was among the vanguard of the Irish music revival’s “third wave” of the early 1990s, a founding member of the seminal Irish American band Solas before launching her solo career in 1999, and going on to record 11 albums.

Though steeped early on in Irish traditional and folk music, Casey has long followed an eclectic path, whether studying classical music (she is a talented pianist), fronting jazz bands or working with Frank Harte, a much-revered folk/traditional singer from Dublin.

The list of artists she’s performed with is similarly diverse: James Taylor, Maura O’Connell, Karen Matheson, the Boston Pops Orchestra, Tim O’Brien, The Chieftains, The Dubliners, and Béla Fleck, among others.

Nine Apples of Gold is out now via Crow Valley Music.

On her March/April ‘23 Irish tour, Casey will be accompanied by the dynamic duo Niamh Dunne and Sean Óg Graham both members of popular Irish band Beoga: Niamh Dunne (fiddle, vocals), who comes from a rich family heritage of Irish traditional music; and Seán Óg Graham (guitar), a talented arranger, composer and producer who is in great demand as an accompanist.

She visits the Riverbank Arts Centre, Newbridge on April 15.

For further information check out www.riverbank.ie