Iarla Ó Lionáird
SKY'S THE LIMIT
Iarla Ó Lionáird's Journey from Rural Ireland to Urban Dance Maven -- and Back
Talk about a double life. When he's not singing with the high-energy, Grammy-nominated world-beat sensations Afro-Celt Sound System, Iarla Ó Lionáird (pronounced Earla O'Leonard) crafts quiet, contemplative vocal albums worthy of a Gaelic-speaking Nick Drake. His richly textured I CAN READ THE SKY is a stunning film soundtrack featuring Sinéad O'Connor, a cast of Irish traditional musicians, and nary a drum machine in sight. A young master of the ancient Irish a cappella style of sean nós, Ó Lionáird was raised in the remote, Gaelic-speaking district of West Cork before moving to the big city and falling in with the musical United Nations that is Peter Gabriel's Real World family. Not surprisingly, Ó Lionáird's tastes run toward the Catholic -- he shared his affinities for Nine Inch Nails, contemporary classical music, and pitching hay with Barnes & Noble.com's world music editor Mark Schwartz.
Barnes & Noble.com: What's the difference between your solo work and Afro-Celt Sound System?
Iarla O Lionaird: Solo work for me is personal work, it's something I do to learn about myself, to explore my musical field. When you go in with a band like Afro-Celt, it helps to develop your own patch. They feed off of that...though there are an awful lot of ingredients in Afro-Celt that I wouldn't use in my solo work.
Barnes & Noble.com: Your style of singing, sean nós, is so stark and makes so much use of silence -- is it hard being in a band with so many instrumentalists and rhythms?
IO: I think it's always a challenge. The great thing about sean nós is you sing solo, and you have a very relativistic relation with rhythm. And that all changes when you start working with other musicians. In some ways it sort of invades your sean nós space, you know? You have to start singing in a different way, perhaps trimming down the ornamentation, simplifying things. And, of course, you have to be in time, which was a really big challenge for me. But I've grown accustomed to it, at least according to the lads anyway.
Barnes & Noble.com: It's usually a cappella?
IO: Yeah, sean nós at its best is totally unaccompanied. It's been a tremendous learning experience, really. I still do sean nós gigs. I have a multimedia show where I show moving and still footage to do with the theme of memory. And half that show is completely solo, just drones and silence. Very different from Afro-Celt.
Barnes & Noble.com: Where does this singing usually happen?
IO: Well, singing occurs traditionally in pubs or in people's houses, and nowadays, Ireland is awash in festivals, singing competitions. In the Gaelic-speaking districts in the west, a death or a marriage or a birth are occasions for this kind of singing. Not a music-biz kind of situation, thanks be to God.
Barnes & Noble.com: Is it ever done in English?
IO: It is. My attitude is that the best songs are in Gaelic. But in the fringes of the Gaelic districts you have a dual-language song, called a macaronic song. The Irish verse is sung, and then there's a direct translation of it in English.
Barnes & Noble.com: So how does a traditional Gaelic singer fall in with multi-culti dance band?
IO: In Dublin it was hard to get a sean nós gig. It was very unusual for a singer in a band to be doing my kind of singing -- usually it would be English ballads or something. So I started making friends in the rock scene, and they would ask me to open for them. Eventually, the rock press was starting to write about me and take an interest in traditional music in general. This was in the early '90s. I began working with some programmers -- I had always been interested in that music -- using my kind of singing with various beats. Soon after that I was asked to attend the recording week at Real World in '95. That's where I met the Afro-Celts.
So pretty far back I was always listening to different things. You see, the kind of singing I do, I didn't do it out of choice. That's the kind if singing people do where I grew up.
Barnes & Noble.com: Are there singers in your family?
IO: Oh, yes. In fact, one of your great folk collectors, Alan Lomax, he collected songs from my grand aunt Elizabeth Cronin in the '50s. And the BBC collected songs from her in the '40s. On my mother's side, they're all great singers.
Barnes & Noble.com: What was your life like growing up?
IO: Very remote, in the middle of nowhere, up on a beautiful mountain. My father was a teacher, but he also had a farm. Two grandparents and my grand uncle were living in the house -- a big Irish family, there were 17 of us living there when I was a kid. Milking cows, growing cabbage, spraying potatoes...pretty much preindustrial. Also uniquely Gaelic. We spoke Irish, and a lot of people in the district spoke it too, from ancient times, and still do. It's my first language. But at the same time, I had a radio; I was listening to the Talking Heads, Brian Eno. So by the time you were a teenager, you knew there was a kind of culture clash happening. I was one of the few native Gaelic speakers in my school. I was aware that there was an incursion from the outside world.
Barnes & Noble.com: So you have a preservationist attitude toward the language?
IO: Obviously I grew up in that environment, but I always wanted to be an artist, I suppose, and an artist can't afford to be a preservationist. He can only do what he thinks is right. So I would like the Irish language to be safer than it is, and it's nice to know there's a new Irish-language TV station. But I don't see my job as being preservationist, although I do sing Gaelic all over the world. The art comes first. I'm using the language I dream in, and that's Gaelic.
Barnes & Noble.com: I CAN READ THE SKY is a movie soundtrack, so you were essentially the music director. How did you pick the people who guest on the album?
IO: The book was written a few years ago by an Irish American called Tim O'Grady, from Chicago. During the last 20 years, he'd been hanging out with Martin Hayes, the fiddle player on the album, and Dennis Cahill, his buddy who plays guitar. Before they made the movie, I knew the photographer, Steve Pyke, who made the book with Tim -- he shot my first album. So they started doing these spectacular presentations and invited me along. They did one at the Shepherd's Bush Empire in London, and that's where I first met Sinéad O'Connor. And that's how she got on the Afro-Celt album. The last song on the album is a live recording from that event. So when it came to doing the record, a lot of these people were in place. I wanted Ron Aslan's help [with ambient electronics] because I'm not a programmer.
Barnes & Noble.com: Do you despair that pop music is increasingly about rhythm and there's less room for your kind of music?
IO: Well, the people buying records are not 16 and 17, they're 11 and 12 and 13, and they're very succeptible to a certain kind of marketing. So there's an overabundance of short, sharp, shock kind of music and less of a place for more mature, subtle music. It doesn't please me, but the people to blame are the people not buying records. People like you and me -- I'm 35. If more people my age bought records, the musical terrain would be different. They buy DVDs, computers, cars. But they're not buying music. And that's diferent from the '60s and '70s, when people were including Bob Dylan as serious topic of discussion in universities. There's still great stuff being done, though -- Beck, Nine Inch Nails. Trent Reznor's last album was pretty ambitious.
Barnes & Noble.com: What do you listen to?
IO: I like contemporary classical composers. People like Arvo Pärt, Gavin Bryars.
Barnes & Noble.com: What are you listening to right now?
IO: Well, there's an Indian hammer dulcimer player out on Real World, Shivkumar Sharma. I thought that was brilliant.
Barnes & Noble.com: Can you recommend an Irish record?
IO: There's a composer that lives in West Cork named Peadar O Riada; he has an interesting compilation called AMIDST THESE HILLS. Kind of ambient and ancient but not in a tacky way. The world "Celtic" doesn't appear in it. It's new, but it's very old in some ways. The ideas are fantastic. And you should hear the Gavin Bryars record, THE SINKING OF THE TITANIC. He was using loops back in the '70s. He's got a track called "Jesus' Blood" that's unbelievable. And anything by Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill is worth your time.
Mark Schwartz
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