I don’t know (no pun intended) about an annus horribilis, but certainly the winter of 2008/09 was probably the lowest point of my adult life. Still, holed up with good friends in a little house off the Lisburn Road (a room for which I could not even afford the rent, and often relied on their charity) music was a refuge. The house had an odd-shaped back hall extension which I lived off, and we filled it with the drum kit and keyboards and amps and would fill it with a therapeutic wall of noise bouncing around off the entirely unsuitable tiled floor and plain boxy walls.1
That dark winter season was also filled with discoveries, chief among the Bon Iver’s Blood Bank EP2 and Lisa Hannigan’s debut solo album Sea Sew.
Hannigan was best known up to this point for being the best voice on Damien Rice’s heart-wringing O and 9 albums, and Sea Sew presented an entirely different tone and narrative – still very Irish and very handmade, but one dominated by an optimism that bubbled up and over. The first thing I saw/heard was the little live video above. Later, in 2009, we made the trip up to Derry to see The Frames for the umpteenth time at the Millennium Forum, and the support was Lisa and this full band – and the joyful noise was real and infectious.3 We were able to meet the band afterwards4 and they came across as a group of people in the best moment of any project – that feeling of the magic just taking hold as things come together, before anything happens to bring one back into the real world.
Future albums deserve a listen as well, but the raw chemistry of Sea Sew, as illustrated above, makes it, for me, a warm memory in a sea of tumult.
- This was dominated by tracks from John Mayer’s Where the Light Is and Kings of Leon’s Because of the Times, and we will stood by those choices even when the neighbours begged for mercy. ↩︎
- A four-track wonder that sounds like being parked in a fogged up car in a frozen car park on a winter night, waiting for someone to turn up. ↩︎
- My uni classmate Will, who ran a great live music project called The Bandwidth Sessions for years, which Lisa recorded two tracks for. The whole channel remains a delight, and increasingly a time capsule of better days. ↩︎
- I went back and found a blog post I wrote at the time. No, my writing wasn’t any better then either. ↩︎