“It does feel very collaborative, but it also feels just bizarre and futuristic,” O’Donovan said.įor O’Donovan, “Age of Apathy” is her most personal album. “And to decide, you know, do we need more? How much farther do we take this?”Īmazingly enough, the resulting album sounds cohesive and intuitive. “It allowed me and Aoife the opportunity to really listen to each element as it came in,” Henry said from his home in Maine. They also stretch accepted structures of verse, chorus and bridge and push against genre. “She can find family anywhere via music.”īut O’Donovan has brought her boldest material by far to her solo albums: “Fossils” in 2013, “In the Magic Hour” in 2016, both made with the producer Tucker Martine, and the new “Age of Apathy.” All three open with songs contemplating death, and her other solo songs explore desire, myth, memory and transfiguration: as narrative, as images, as parable. “Aoife finds a way to make the people around her sound better,” Thile said. And along the folk circuit, she found plenty of chances to collaborate onstage and in the studio. In 2005, O’Donovan also found time to form another group, the folky trio Sometymes Why, which released albums in 20. In Boston in 2001, O’Donovan and some fellow music students started Crooked Still, a string band that offered radical rearrangements of Appalachian-rooted songs and, over the next decade of playing clubs and folk festivals, added some of O’Donovan’s new songs to its repertory. And one day in May 2020, sequestered at home when she was living in Brooklyn, O’Donovan recorded her own versions of the songs from Bruce Springsteen’s album “Nebraska” she released “Aoife Plays Nebraska” online last year. O’Donovan performed it in October 2021 with the Cincinnati Pops. She has also written for and with her groups Crooked Still, Sometymes Why and I’m With Her (whose “Call My Name” won a Grammy in 2020 as best American roots song) and as a collaborator with the chamber-Americana project Goat Rodeo, which includes Yo-Yo Ma and Thile.ĭuring the pandemic, along with her album, O’Donovan completed two song cycles: “Bull Frog’s Croon,” based on poems by Peter Sears and recorded with a string quartet in 2020, and “America, Come,” a group of orchestral songs drawing on century-old letters and speeches by the women’s suffrage crusader Carrie Chapman Catt.
O’Donovan’s three studio albums represent only a fraction of her songwriting. She’s telling us secrets - kind of a secret about the magic in the world that she’s finding.” (This song was previously a hit for Glen Campbell (1965).The mandolinist Chris Thile, who welcomed O’Donovan as a regular performer on his public radio show “Live From Here,” said, “She’s not selling us anything.
This will take you to a list of links to CD and/or MP3 product pages from one or more online merchants that have sound samples. To listen to a song clip, click any song title that has a speaker icon. Please note that these are referral or affiliate links from which may receive, at no additional cost to you, a commission if you should make any purchases through them. Best known songs include "Sunshine Superman" (1966), "Mellow Yellow" (1966), and "Goo Goo Barabajangal (Love Is Hot)" (1969, with the Jeff Beck Group).ĭisclosure: The following links will take you to various online merchants outside of that sell recordings and other merchandise for the performing artist featured on this page.
Folk rock-psychedelic British Invasion singer-songwriter.