Cumha na Cuimhní: Táim Cortha ó Bleith im' Aonar im' Luí (I'm Weary of Lying Alone)
A conversation with Iarla Ó Lionáird and Dan Trueman
For the third and last song of Cumha na Cuimhní, “Táim Cortha ó Bleith im' Aonar im' Luí” (I'm Weary of Lying Alone), Iarla Ó Lionáird and I had an informal conversation about the song and the larger project that it is part of. Here’s the recording of the song, to be released with the rest of the songs—along with another large piece, Midden Find, for Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh and sinfonietta—in early 2025:
Cumha na Cuimhní: Song #3, “Táim Cortha ó Bleith im' Aonar im' Luí” (I’m Weary of Lying Alone)
- Iarla Ó Lionáird, vocalist
- Contemporaneous, conducted by David Bloom
- Traditional song
- Orchestral setting by Dan Trueman
- Recorded, Mixed, and Mastered by Matt Poirier
The conversation, which has been edited for brevity and organized around a wide range of themes, follows, with a few audio excerpts when hearing the Irish is of importance. Audio of the complete conversation can be found at the end of this post, along with the lyrics for the song, while scores for the orchestral settings can be found here.
About the pronunciation of “lying”
Dan: Let’s start with the title of this song. We would normally pronounce “lying” as LIE-ing or some such, but when you sing the song, you consistently pronounce it LEE-ing, and I’m curious about that.
Iarla: Well, I suppose it goes to the heart of the macaronic quality of the song. Even though, as with macaronic songs in general, there's a transfer from one language to the other, usually from verse to verse, sometimes from line to line… even given that, there's also the macaronic quality of how she [Elizabeth Cronin] pronounces things. So there's bleed from the sonic world of the Irish language, because to lie down in Irish is…
I: Right so this is a beautiful example, isn't it? Of the sonics of one language effortlessly kind of slipping into the new language.
D: Amazing. Yeah, that totally makes sense. That's beautiful.
I: I love the way she does that.
About Elizabeth Cronin and the source of the song
D: So when you say ‘she,’ you're talking about Elizabeth Cronin.
I: Certainly neither you nor me nor anybody else would have come across this song by any other process other than by hearing Elizabeth Cronin, simply because of how early she was recorded, in the 1940s by Séamus Ennis, but also subsequently by Alan Lomax and others. She's kind of a superstar of folk song, not just in these islands, but I think around the world with anybody who's interested in folk singing from the British Isles and the kind of relationships between that kind of music making and the diasporic musical experience, particularly in America in the Americas. I don't think it's a stretch [read more of Iarla’s thoughts about Elizabeth Cronin in the prior post].
D: No, no, not at all, not at all. I agree.
I: I mean she's unusual, she's special, and of course I've got some bragging rights—she's my great aunt.
D: I would shamelessly brag about that!
I: There is a familial connection in how she sings, and how she speaks in the recordings. She reminds me of my own grandmother and indeed of my mother. The speech patterns are very similar.
D: Did you learn the song from a recording of Elizabeth Cronin?
I: Absolutely. At some point I think in the mid to late 1970s, one of our cousins, the Cronins, arrived at the house with a cassette tape. I actually remember the look of it, it wasn't clear plastic at the time, I remember, it was white, plastic, with some sort of orange label. Where did it come from? I don't know. Also how many generations of copying did that tape contain? I can't remember. I do remember it was quite noisy and I do remember that a number of things happened immediately. It was put on in the kitchen, we all marveled at it. There were 3 or 4 songs on it that I remember, and one of them was this one: “I'm Weary from Lying Alone,” “Táim Cortha ó Bleith im' Aonar im' Luí.” And I also remember that at least 2 or 3 of us set about learning it, not just me, also my brothers and my sisters and mother. They're all good singers, and I think there was a kind of a very natural high level of interest that manifested itself in several of us learning it, and being curious about actually trying to decipher what was on it, because the quality was so poor. There were some curious words in it that we still argue about.
D: Interesting. Yeah, yeah.
I: Honestly I have to admit there's a little bit of guesswork there on my part, as to what she said. And the thing about it is there are, of course, erudite documents written about this song and her other songs, particularly by Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, who has written THE book on Elizabeth Cronin. And with old recordings it isn't always possible to be 100% certain [what we are hearing], but that's part of the fun.
At that time when the tape came into the house, I must have been 10 or 11, and the Cronins—our beloved cousins—they're wonderful people, and they're all great singers, they were incredibly enthusiastic about Elizabeth Cronin's legacy, Auntie Bess's legacy as she was known, and that wouldn't be the last time that her singing was discussed in that house with my cousins and probably wasn't the first, but it's the first that I remember, and it was the first time I heard actual sonic evidence of this woman. It was tremendous.
On the Form and Characters in the Song
D: I'd be interested in talking about the character and structure of the song. There seem to be two characters: there's some kind of narrator, and then there is a young woman, and she's mourning. But there's an interesting sort of question and answer between the two. I'd be curious about your thoughts regarding the characters, and what it means to sing a song where you are inhabiting this kind of multiple character space.
I: Yeah, it's a very interesting area, Dan, and you know, there's a gender aspect as well. I remember growing up, there were occasions when you'd hear fellas saying “Oh, that's a lady's song,” and now the funny thing is THIS song isn't one of them in that sense, because, as you rightly point out, there are two narrators interacting in this song. One of them is in the mode of the aisling, or that common trope of the poet [usually male] wandering around [laughter], given to flights of fancy by the river, under the trees and in the forest, and then something happens, and then he uses other poetic devices to describe what's happening. In this case, “as I carelessly strayed,” it's like wandering around hoping to meet someone—it's not aimless as such:
I: The second line goes right into that sort of common poetic trope “'Sea do dhearcas an spéirbhean.” Or “I saw a spéirbhean” [pron: spare-van], which in strict translation means a “sky woman.” In essence, that trope, that image, belongs to a subset of songs called “The Vision Songs.”
It surprises me that this trope lands into this song, because this song is not in the shape of an aisling at all, and as it proceeds it becomes quite different, so it's funny, but curious that the spéirbhean is there. Spéirbhean is another way of describing a very beautiful woman as well, so, although it means a woman that appears sort of as a poetic vision from the sky, it also means a beautiful woman.
So he [the narrator] asks her a question, and she answers, and the answer is repeated again and again: Táim cortha ó bleith im' aonar im' luí, im luí, táim cortha ó bheith im' aonar im' luí [trans: I am weary of lying alone, alone, I’m weary of lying alone], at the end of every verse, whether in English or in Irish, as a kind of a couplet. And it's the way Elizabeth Cronin delivers that as well as the music itself is, is quite enchanting, isn't it?
D: It really is. Isn't it also with an aisling song, or with the spéirbhean, that she is usually unattainable, like, they wouldn't speak to you, would they?
I: They never speak about themselves, I think. They usually speak with the common devices that the Sky Woman in the aisling speaks about Ireland, and she's the embodiment of Ireland. There is some commonality because she does talk about personal injury, insult, a personal degradation. But there's also this tremendous aloofness. And I was thinking recently, it's a little bit like the goddess Athena. There is an element of interaction, but it has limits. And in the case of the spéirbhean and the aisling, they're never physicalized, they're alluded to in very physical terms. England is personified as the marauding, interfering, dangerous, malign male, and Ireland is personified as the the victim, noble, passive. But in this one you're quite right. It takes an aisling quite a few lines just to get into any of that but this song goes straight in, three lines in! The woman opens her mouth and says Táim cortha ó bheith im' aonar im' luí, im luí, that beautiful sort of thing that I can only aspire to doing like Elizabeth Cronin:
And then you're off into a story.
D: There's almost a confessional quality to it, right?
I: There is, there is, isn't there? I mean, there's a frankness, shall we say. I must have been puzzled as a young lad, but I probably kept it to myself. 1970s, Ireland. I strain to imagine what I was thinking. We'll leave that back there. [laughter]. The frankness of this and the speed with which it suddenly becomes very personal is magnificent and is unexpected, and it's actually part of the power and charm of the song. And it's frankness, because she's basically saying I'm tired of sleeping alone. It's a song about sex and companionship, loneliness and isolation. It's most extraordinary. There's nothing like it that I can think of. For if you think about the fact that this was being sung by Elizabeth Cronin in the forties. I sometimes wonder, was there a priest in the room when she was singing it? [laughter]
D: There is a curious change to the third-person, in the last verses, where “SHE’s weary of lying alone” rather than “I’m weary of lying alone…” There's a curious turn in the narrator where he's now sort of looking away from her, or not giving her the stage in the same way, or she's gone, or?
I: It is. And in some cases the Irish is different from the English. That's another quality of the macaronic song we should touch on, and this is a prime example where they're not literal translations at all and often times they frame the narrative rather differently.
For example, “If I got a comely young man who would take me without fortune and make me a wife of his own. For the truth is, I'll die in despair!” Whereas that last bit in the Irish, it’s more like, rather than die in despair, “I wouldn't hide it from anyone. I would tell everyone! I would proclaim it from the mountain!”
D: Very different!
I: Then, in the last verse, I always loved the last verse. Because the story is kind of over there in some ways, isn't it? Because it sort of stands apart like you suggested earlier, doesn't it? The narrator kind of moving off, as if he's recalling from memory. He talks as if in this garden, the garden of youth, perhaps that you know you have only one life. The sort of the temporality of life is suggested there very beautifully. “There's a neat, sweet little flower this garden alongside us. Take it and make it your own.” So, like, seize the day, you know, “because the flower will fade, and so also will the maid.”
D: Right, which plays into that whole earlier verse of “seven long gone eleven years around;” whatever it means, it clearly conveys a lot of time has passed. She's been suffering alone, and she's been getting older alone, you know.
I: And she's been overlooked. And also let's not forget that in the Ireland of that time, or indeed any of the literature of the day, would suggest that, from whatever social stratum you came from, marriage was very important, economically, socially, religiously, spiritually, in a person's life. And women were particularly vulnerable if they failed to secure a marriage. It makes her sorrow and her privations all the more keen.
D: Absolutely. This is more than just about lying alone. There’s a lot at stake. And there's a certain distancing. Or maybe maybe that's not correct, but it feels like a certain distancing when it moves to the third-person, which to me amplifies that quality of aloneness, of vulnerability, because now she's being spoken about in the third-person, whereas at the beginning the narrator is approaching her, and is reaching out to her, and is sitting with her, and is almost consoling her in a way. It amplifies the sense of risk and aloneness that she has.
I: It does, and it strikes me as that way as well. That's so true, Dan. And leading up to that you find that in the first two verses the female figure occupies half to two-thirds of each verse. In the penultimate verse, she occupies all of it, and then you have this reflection, where you are looking at it from memory and you are becoming philosophical rather than storytelling, and it does have the effect of amplifing the sense of isolation, and the pathos, and the sadness. It’s funny that the metaphor can be more affecting than direct speech, that’s a good example of it there.
Orchestral Settings of Singing to Oneself
D: This is the last of the three songs in these orchestral settings. Is this the first instrumental setting of this song that you've done, or know of?
I: There may well be others by now, but there weren’t when you and I started working together. I always felt when I was performing this song, before, that it benefited from the notion of aloneness in a sense. Performing it in that way over the years, I will say I've often thought of Elizabeth Cronin, and you mentioned the word confessional with this song. There are wonderful photographs in Tavia Cronin's book about Elizabeth Cronin, and for some reason she chose that the recordings would happen in her sister's house, not her own house. You notice how small everything is. The rooms are tiny. Simplicity is the order of the day, with an overt, rustic aesthetic in terms of furnishing. No electricity, of course. And I've often contemplated the question of what was the performance space like to sing in? And then, reflecting on that, what would it have sounded like? And I think this song is a very good example of what I'm trying to get at, which is: when you listen to Elizabeth Cronin's songs on the recordings, even though some of them she's singing them out in the front of the house outside with the microphone in the garden, there is still the notion that she's singing to a very select few, or even to herself. Which would not have been uncommon in those people's lives at all. All of the best evidence we have from scholars, particularly of the 18th and 19th centuries, is that singing was extraordinarily common as a social practice among the Irish in rural Ireland. As they worked, as they walked, as they rested, in company or alone. And scholars have spoken about traveling through Ireland and hearing people singing the whole time. In the fields, inside their houses. It's extraordinary, isn't it? What's so extraordinary about this of course is that we don't do that anymore.
So that's a teacher I think to the performance of this song that has acted as a bit of a guide to me in the past: that the song would perhaps profit from being delivered with a sufficiency of quiet, of closeness, objective aloneness.
D: That's beautiful. And it really provides some powerful context for thinking about these orchestral settings for all three of these songs. There's a real conundrum in the sense that doing these with an orchestra is in some ways the total opposite of everything you just described. We're in a big hall with loads and loads of people, and we are not quiet. We're not singing to ourselves. And I remember thinking about these songs and imagining that situation and trying to approach the settings and the orchestral writing in a way that would do two things for me: try to still the space in a way to make it have a quality of quiet and smallness, in the sense that we are in a small space together; while also providing a usually unheard quality of internal activity. Not necessarily turmoil, but in some cases it is a sense of turmoil or emotion, or things that aren't being said, that are being felt in certain ways, underneath the singing, without having them overwhelm this private, close, intimate quality of the songs. To be honest, this constraint was for me a gift in approaching this project.
I've had a conflicted relationship with the orchestra over my entire career as a composer. I grew up playing in orchestras. That was one of the main things that I did as a young violinist. But I've always just struggled aesthetically with most orchestral literature. And some of this comes from my mother. Just as a representative story: she had these little letter blocks, you know those little blocks with letters on each side, that she used to leave messages around the house. You'd walk around the house and find on a windowsill a little phrase or a little word. One year, I remember, I was walking around, and I found a phrase on the windowsill in the back room: she had spelled out “NO Mahler.”
I: She didn't want to hear Mahler in the house? The apex predator of large orchestral music? [laughter]
D: She just had no interest in Mahler, or any music with those large orchestral sweeping, Romantic gestures. And you know some of this comes back to, I think, the certain quality of Scandinavian Norwegian reserve that my mother had and that I inherited in some ways. From that perspective, a lot of orchestral music feels overblown, it feels overwhelming, it feels showy. And I say this with the utmost respect for people who write this music, and the people who have written this music, and just saying that has just personally been an aspect of writing for orchestra that I've struggled with. I've struggled with embracing the large sweep that is so characteristic of orchestral writing, the big gestures, and so on.
And so this particular project was for me a gift in the sense that everything we've been talking about in terms of the intimacy, the privacy, the sense of a close space, or singing to oneself, all of those things meant that approaching the orchestra with them in mind was essential, which also aligned with my feelings about the orchestra in general.
And so all three of these songs have a restrained quality to them. There are moments where the orchestra kind of explodes in “Siúl a Rún,” where it gets very large. There's a distant trumpeter in “Siúl a Rún” that's reminiscent of a military assignment or something like that. So there are things like that that are characteristic orchestral writing that did find their way into these songs. But all for me come from this very close, intimate, imagined, confessional space.
In some ways “I'm Weary of Lying Alone” is the most extreme, perhaps, because of the intensity of the words as we've been talking about, and the fact that, until this setting I had never heard you sing the song with anything else at all. And so the orchestral stuff is completely still, non vibrato, literally a couple voices. And then with each verse the addition of one voice, and each pitch is kind of a shadow of what you're already singing. It's almost as though what you're singing is slowly permeating the ether like a fog, like a cloud, that's sustaining itself. It's just got this very still quality, with just slight turns to it from line to line, that for me are are meant not draw attention to themselves, but to just slightly change, maybe even like the shadow of a cloud going by, or the sun in the room, or something like that, rather than being some emotional setting that's supposed to do word painting to amplify the meaning of a particular word. It's more about a sense of a place and a kind of stillness within which the intensity of the song can live. And then over the course of the piece, it turns into this sort of lulling, swelling repetition that eventually overwhelms you. And there's this one section where you actually see the singer disappear, and then we were left with the third-person, the last verse. It's almost like she has been washed away. I don't even know if I was thinking that, but that's what emerged from my engagement with this song, and trying to think about how to give the song as much of the space that it needs while bringing something else to it that doesn't also just destroy the original in some way.
I: I think you really succeeded. Then I must say there is a section in it, too, where, before the last verse, it becomes very dreamy. I've always thought it's like watching a young girl dance with a young man, you know. You mentioned Mahler, or you know, romantic classical music there. There is a sense of the waltz to it. And that's very beautiful, but it also lifts your mind away to where the last verse is, which is looking down on the human condition.
I remember when we did these in Dublin some years ago, I never felt that it impeded what I thought was inherent in the song. It really just created an orchestral possibility for the song to be actually that intimate, with these very fine lines on the violins. It's almost like a kind of a tone in your head, and I sometimes imagine it could be her sitting there, waiting. It's Beckett’ian in that sense, you know, stripped back. And then you have these flowerings…
D: There are these little lines in the winds, that sort of flower above there, and those are all literally based on transcriptions. I asked you to do some examples of keens and I literally just transcribed some of those to get some of the ornamentation and the shape and the energy of those, because that does feel like a keening moment. She is keening in a way right? She's keening for the loss of so much of her life, of so many years gone by alone.
The Three Songs Together
D: It was so interesting when we settled on these three songs. We had talked about some others at first, and then I remember I was drawn to macaronic songs, and so two of these three are macaronic songs, “Siúl a Rún” and “Lying Alone,” and the first one “Loch Léin” is all in Irish, and felt like it gave us a sense of place, of a home, or maybe not home, but it's kind of a special place, right? That sort of anchors or sets the stage for everything else. And then with “Siúl a Rún” there's the sense of leaving that place, or a loved one leaving that place, and then in “Lying Alone,” being alone, abandoned.
I: There definitely is Dan. I see where you're coming from there, and you know that “Loch Léin” is like a kind of archaeology, right? And you're delving into sort of the mythical and the mindset of the Irish people leading up to, and perhaps even beyond, Elizabeth Cronin’s generation. That mythic aspect of their frames of mind. And then in “Siúl a Rún,” the documented and long experience of Irish men fighting other people's wars abroad, simply because there was an economic opportunity. I mean, they were recruited. And then, of course, the desolation of whoever's left behind, as with all warfare, right? I think they work beautifully together. I'm a big fan, Dan. I mean, it's beautiful work. It's beautiful work.
D: Well, thank you, Iarla, I appreciate that. But we very much worked on these together, sometimes in this very room that I'm sitting in, or in the room that you're sitting there. And there are specific things that came out from us working together on this, and I'm now back to “Lying Alone” in that last verse where the orchestra returns to a drone—total stillness—and then vanishes, is just gone, and we are now actually for the last couple lines just like in the original song, you all by yourself. And I remember when I brought a version of this arrangement to you, that was how the song ended, with the two lines all by yourself. And you said to me “oh, but in this last line, how about something down low coming underneath? Just a little shadow of something?” And to me it's actually one of my favorite parts of the arrangement. The double basses and the low cellos come in with this sort of swell underneath that vanishes. That was your idea. So the setting is like very much something that came out of back and forth and conversation.
I: It's also a nod. That moment is very much a nod. Well, I don't like the word nod, but it is an acknowledgement of our mutual fascination with the technique deployed by Elizabeth Cronin as she sings this song when she scoops down to those low notes, the husky interiority of the way she sings, you know, and in a way, what we were doing was we were making that granular, giving the orchestra a chance to granulate that right in front of us, to open out her vocal cords, and to see into that darkness of her despair.
On Compositional Approaches and Identity
D: I think some of it has to do with what I was talking about earlier with my sense of ambivalence regarding the orchestra, my uneasiness with the expressive space of the orchestra and so on with these songs and this process. And in general when I work with musicians coming from from different places, different traditional places, and so on, I don't feel a need to put my voice forward as a composer, or to insist on showing a certain level of virtuosity, or “oh, well, you know, the orchestra has to have it solo.” It's not a priority, and that's not necessarily a good or bad thing, but I do think It made it easier for me to approach these and just be modest, but also adventurous with how to to think about this kind of an interesting challenge. Taking these songs, which honestly, these songs do well enough alone, they don't need anything else; I remember first approaching this project and these songs and thinking “do no harm!” What can I do where I won't actually just make these songs worse? Because they're just great as they are. And so I think there's an aspect of that that was important to me, and definitely shaped how the songs ended up.
I think in a lot of my work, I don't really care if there's a sense of my identity being apparent in what I've written. Often we talk in composer worlds about how all composers need to find their “voice.” But, well, maybe your voice is something that's always changing, and maybe there's an aspect of problem solving that is less about me than about something else, something outside of me that I can approach in a musical problem solving sort of way, and maybe it doesn't have to be something where it says “Oh, yes, that's Dan Trueman. I recognize it immediately.” Now maybe people do, I don't know, but it's not something that is a priority for me in how I approach any of the projects that I do. Oh, so that's all. Very sorry. That felt very self indulgent.
I: Despite yourself, though, Dan, despite yourself, I can tell a Dan Trueman piece. The orchestra themselves and the conductor seemed charmed by the various tonal challenges that you set for them. Can you speak to that a little bit?
D: Well, one thing: I was just adamantly opposed to putting your singing in a rhythmic box as well as into a pitch box. So, very little of the piece is written down in a way where the conductor can just sort of do their thing, conducting conventional patterns, and the orchestra knows what to do, and then you sing along with that. Instead, all the players can see your part roughly transcribed, in the ballpark of what you might do in any performance, sometimes with dotted bar lines for the players so that they would know where a conductor might do a downbeat, but always with the intention that the orchestra and the conductor would be following you so that you could sing the song with the flow and the nuance that you always do. That's quite hard and even notationally it was hard; I had spots with some time signatures, but I also had spots where it's like, look, here's a bar line, because this is an emphasized note in the text, where you would sing it in a way where we would feel something like a downbeat. And so the orchestra would know, “Oh, when the conductor goes here and Iarla sings here, we're at this sort of dotted bar line in the piece.” But otherwise we really have to go with the flow, and we've got to be listening and seeing where in the line Iarla is and go with that. It's not easy to do.
The conductor, David Brophy, was wonderful, and he conducts a lot of opera as well, and was in some ways the perfect person for this, because he wasn't looking at the score needing everything to be very precise. He's looking at you and listening to you and acting as a conduit to the orchestra, so that the orchestra can come together, almost like an amplifier of certain information that's coming from you, so that he can then convey that to the orchestra, so you can all sort of move and swell and and decay and so on together, rather than oh, there's something that we're all fitting into.
I: I remember that process, and it's good to hear you speak about it, and to acknowledge that at that point in time, David Brophy was of seminal importance. One of the prime challenges for me had been greatly reduced or even erased, that kind of sense of duration. I had tremendous autonomy there. Dan, I have another question for you. In this new configuration, with Contemporaneous, the steps that you felt you should take, and did take to bring those musical ideas into a different type of ensemble, say, from the orchestra we spoke of to the much smaller Contemporaneous.
D: Yeah, that's a good question. Contemporaneous is a chamber orchestra, maybe 20 players, while originally it was what they call a double-winds orchestra, so a sort of a mid-size orchestra, and we were moving down to single winds, and almost single string players. So not a full lush string section and that had both advantages and drawbacks. One of the advantages is that the group is smaller and more nimble and can much more readily follow along and move with you. And David Bloom, the conductor of Contemporaneous, is also terrific for this, and he'd worked with you before.
Otherwise with Contemporaneous, there were certain changes going down to single winds that required making things a bit more sparse, and sometimes with the strings, hearing something that sounds more like a string quartet than a lush orchestra. This meant a change in character, in some ways back more to the original song, in that this is closer, this is a smaller, more intimate situation.
Collaborations and Conversations
D: It feels like there is a small but growing group of musicians from various walks and traditions that are are having conversations and collaborations that wouldn't have happened 20–30 years ago, and somebody like you, who is coming from this incredibly rich tradition that, understandably and naturally, wants to preserve those the qualities—the detail, the stories—going forward, which sometimes can make it difficult to step out and have conversations and collaborations where you take risks, which is something that you do probably more than anybody I know and can think of. And for me and I know for others it has opened up these doors to different kinds of music, different ways of working together that I'm just really grateful for. And it makes me optimistic.
I: That's a good point, because, you know, the thing is I certainly grew up in a very boxed off kind of tradition, and in a way, so did you?
D: For sure.
I: You know, how you decode your mother's little messages of the possible suggested deletions from the oral space. I'm trying to imagine: what would a version of that be in my house? No more, Clancy Brothers? You know there could be something like that.
D: By the way, I grew up listening to the Clancy Brothers! My father had every Clancy Brothers record, and we listened to them, especially during the holidays.
I: That is amazing to me. But you know I've always felt that in the collaborations with yourself, Donnacha [Dennehy], Linda Buckley, now Dylan Mattingly and others—I mean I won't rattle them off as a list of people—it is fun for me. There's also tremendous challenge. There are occasional pangs of deep worry and fear, existential fear. But there is fun, and you end up just meeting so many different conversations about what music is and what it can mean. And also I suppose, from a singer's point of view, Dan, I would say the same thing right back at you. It's a gift for me, because these reframings of even traditional songs and the other collaborations we've done should involve new material much of the time. They're an opportunity just to step in a different direction, and to walk in a different way, and to meet different versions of yourself, to actually encounter music in a different way. Which I think you know must be the goal: to feel something at once kind of new in the music, but at the same time a familiar feeling.
That's what I love about these orchestral arrangements, the three songs of “Cumha na Cuimhní” as we now call them. I'm really looking forward to people hearing them, and to hearing these old songs reimagined. Rather than reinvented, reimagined.
The full conversation
The Words
Táim Cortha ó Bleith im' Aonar im' Luí (I’m Weary of Lying Alone)
Tráthnóinín déanach 's mé dul a' bhálcaoreacht
'Sea do dhearcas an spéirbhean a' caoi Airiú,
d'fhiosraíosa féin di - gur labhair sí a scéal liom
Táim cortha ó bheith im' aonar im' luí, im luí
Táim cortha ó bheith im' aonar im' luí
One evening of late as I carelessly strayed
I espied a fair maid in deep mourn
I asked her the matter, she quickly made answer
I am weary from lying alone, alone
I am weary from lying alone
A's a mhúirnín donn dílis, suigh anso taobh liom
Agus aithris dom scéala ar t'aois
A cúig a's a sé a's a' sárú dhá naoi
A's táim cortha ó bheith im' aonar im' luí, im luí
Táim chomh cortha ó bheith im' aonar im' luí
My comely young damsel, come down here alongside me
And tell me of the years that have a-flown
For seven long gone and eleven years around
I am weary from lying alone, alone
I am weary from lying alone
'sda bhfaigh-innse o-gan-ach ei-gin do thogfadh gan spre me
'sgo mbeinn-se aige fhei-nig mar mhnoai
ni cheil-finnse ar ei-nne 'sdo neo-sfainn don saol e
go a bhfuilim cortha o bheith im aonar im luí im’ luí
taim cortha ó bheith im’ aonar im’ luí
If I got a comely young man who would take me without fortune
And make me a wife of his very own
For the truth is, I'll say is, I'll die in despair
If I lie any longer alone, alone
If I lie any longer alone
's'ta roi-sin brea neata sa ghair-sin seo taobh linne
'se bhaineann mar stao-nadh me dhion
mar is roghearr na dhiaidh sin go mbeadh se ro thraochta
leis a' naoi bhiodh na h`aonar na lui
leis a' naoi bhiodh na h`aonar na lui
There's a neat sweet li'l flower in this garden alongside me
Take it away, sure it is all but your own
For the flower, it will fade and so also will the maid
For she's weary from lying alone, alone
For she's weary from lying alone