Aoife O’Donovan’s Songs Spill as Tour Closes

The process took most of a year. “This gave me and Aoife the opportunity to really listen to each item as it arrived,” Henry said of his home in Maine. “And do we need more to decide? How far are we going to take this?”

Surprisingly, the resulting album sounds cohesive and intuitive. “It feels very collaborative, but it also feels weird and futuristic,” O’Donovan said.

For O’Donovan, Age of Apathy is his most personal album. Unlike his other solo albums, it’s full of details: a bus route, a highway, a sense of historical moment. “I’ve never written so literally before,” he added. “In the past, I would shade it to try to make it a little more universal. But all this really happened.”

In the title song, O’Donovan mentions Taconic Parkway above New York and continues, “Go east at 23, past the farms and the festive memories.” At the foot of the Berkshires, along Route 23 mentioning the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival in Hillsdale, NY, Crooked Still found its first enthusiastic public audience, and the band miraculously began their career selling 1,000 independent CDs. The song also reminds us that she went on a vigil at the Christian Science Center in Boston a few days after the 2001 World Trade Center attacks. and wondering, “Is it the end or the beginning? / All I remember is the song and the music trying to drive the fear away.”

O’Donovan said the centerpiece of the album was “Elevators,” a lively waltz that sometimes skips a beat, as if it couldn’t wait to leap forward. O’Donovan sings about “this great experience of being a tourist musician, the memory loss you go through while on tour, having no idea where you are and yet the comfort of knowing exactly where you are.” . “Is he going back to this job? I’m going back there saying where am I? Who is that person who ran out the door? Is it me? Is this just the ghost of past tours?”

O’Donovan’s personal touchstones get into the mood of the album: pensive, determined, indecisive, and then resolutely hopeful. “Age of Apathy” ends with “Passengers,” a fast-strumming, pivotal song staring at Joni Mitchell. He dreams of a journey through interplanetary space: forward, post-pandemic, post-uncertainty, happily on the move again.

“Music is everything to me – literally the most important thing,” he said. “When I think about where I want my life to go, where I want to be when I grow up, what happens after I die – music is what gets us to the end. And music is what will be there after we’re gone.”