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Susan McKeown

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Susan McKeown: Singing in the Dark and Radiating Light

Irish singer-songwriter Susan McKeown

“Oh yes I am broken, But my limp is the best part of me.” ~ Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis from “Angel of Depression”

Creativity and depression. Two states of being that often are inextricably etched in our collective minds when we think of artists and writers; the term “Byronic hero” immediately conjures up an image of the late great poet, brooding and melancholic, as he pens his immortal verse.

But for all that, there is still a stigma surrounding the topic of mental illness. Susan McKeown’s new CD, “Singing in the Dark” is bringing the subject into the light in a brilliant and innovative way.

It’s a project that has been nearly 10 years in the making; the Dublin-born Grammy Award-winning singer and songwriter has the gift of being able to work on multiple projects simultaneously while never losing sight of her creative goals.

“Seven years ago, my marriage had just ended, my father passed away, and my musical partner [Johnny Cunningham] died. What I do at times like those is to go to poetry, particularly early Irish poetry. I get so much solace from what the monks of that time wrote. And from what women poets have written,” McKeown explained to me over lunch in New York a few weeks ago.

“I originally had an idea for an album of dark songs, because listening to dark songs has helped me go into my own world … you get something from music like that.”

“And then one day I was hanging out with Natalie Merchant, our daughters were having a playdate,” McKeown laughed. “And we were talking about my idea, and a light bulb went off. An album like this would be the perfect place to explore darkness in very human terms, and the link between creativity and that darkness.”

“Depression, and manic depression, these are not something that people talk about. People are afraid to associate themselves with it, or speak about it. When I recognized this, I realized it was time to start singing about it.”

It was Merchant who introduced McKeown to the writing of Kay Redfield Jamison, whose book “Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and The Artistic Temperament” became part of McKeown’s inspiration as she began work on her album.

Jamison herself became an important part of the project, and she writes in the introduction to “Singing in the Dark” of how McKeown “gives beautiful voice to those who have written of their suffering … has chosen the works of writers who describe their melancholy vividly, unforgettably.”

There are inclusions from the likes of Anne Sexton whose poem, “A Woman Like That” has been turned into a powerful anthem; Gwendolyn Brooks with the haunting lyrics “I shall not sing a May song, A May song should be gay, I’ll wait until November, And sing a song of gray” from “The Crazy Woman;” and Lord Byron himself appears with the melodic “So We’ll Go No More A-Roving.”

Because she’s never one to make things easy on herself, McKeown decided that her album would consist primarily, though not completely, of poems that had never been put to music before. And then she set about writing the music to five of those poems herself. I know because I counted them, and when I pointed this out to her, she seemed surprised and then laughed that she’d never consciously realized that.

“I’ve always written poetry, and music. When I was twelve, I entered a school contest and came in second with my song ’The Music Box;’ I was very influenced by Joni Mitchell.

“I think of music as poetry, so I start out writing them as poems. The challenge with writing the music for this CD was to find the music that each of the poems was looking for to make them singable. I just wrote as things would come; it’s completely subjective. What’s singable to me wouldn’t be for everyone … everyone has their own index.

“The music for James Clarence Mangan’s ‘The Nameless One,’ I woke up with the chorus in my head. When something comes like that, you feel like you’ve been given such a gift.”

The poems themselves were inspired from all sorts of different sources; researching the material was a huge part of the project.

“I got the idea for the poems from all kinds of places…’Good Old World Blues,’ I was given that one from a man I was on a second date with. There wasn’t a third date, but I got a really great song from it!”

The poem, “Mad Sweeney,” which was found as a manuscript in the 1670s, is believed to date back to the 10th century if not earlier, and McKeown received permission from Seamus Heaney to include his line ‘I need woods for consolation’ in the lyrics. But other than that, “the words are translated as they were originally written. It’s just human. And timeless. It could have been written about a homeless person today…and that’s what I wanted to get across.”

“I spent the last two years recording, we began in 2008 with John Dowland’s ‘In Darkness Let Me Dwell;’ this was always my favorite Dowland song. That one was recorded on Achill Island in Mayo with Steve Cooney. He had actually played Dowland’s music 20 years prior.”

With so much great material, and so many years of blood and sweat, how did McKeown know when it was complete? “When it’s hanging together well, and the glue is sticking, and the taste is good, then it’s done,” she laughed.

McKeown launched her CD at the end of October at Symphony Space in New York with an eleven piece backing band, following a daylong symposium at NYU’s Glucksman Ireland House. McKeown partnered with them to present the event, titled “Singing in the Dark: Irishness, Creativity, Madness.“

“I went to Ireland House because I have a relationship with them. It’s like drinking from a well … I’ve performed there many times. And it was such a great place to explore the topic in a scholarly fashion. Everyone who spoke there was so enthusiastic. I hope it’s just the first year; I would love to sponsor an annual festival to acknowledge our dark moods and how to use creativity to move out of them.”

Because there is no getting away from the link between Ireland and depression. Among the speakers were Patrick Tracey, author of “Stalking Irish Madness: Searching for the Roots of My Family’s Schizophrenia,” and Angela Bourke, who wrote “Maeve Brennan: Homesick at The New Yorker.”

And McKeown admits that, “yes, there are elements of what’s been going on in my own family … I discovered that there are three generations of men who all carried strains of manic depression, and interestingly, all three men married musical women.”

“People who are given these extra challenges as well as gifts are just trying to balance them, and learning that takes a lifetime … it’s how it is, there are high rates of creativity going along with depression. So I felt this is a wonderful way for me to speak out about it from the creative side.”

McKeown has begun touring for the CD, with dates scheduled in March 2011 for Germany, some in Ireland, and many more U.S. venues to be added in the next year. You can keep up with her plans on her Web site http://www.susanmckeown.com/live.html

Though she won’t be taking the 11-piece orchestra around the world with her, she has her trusted team traveling with her. “The two musicians that I’m taking on tour with me are Jason Sypher and Eamon O’Leary. I met them when I started going to a session that Eamon runs at The Brass Monkey in The West Village. It’s on Sunday nights from 5-8, and it’s great because I can bring my daughter there.”

The whole process has been one she’s cherished.

“This became something I had to accomplish in this life. It has been so satisfying to research it, so rewarding and such a pleasurable experience to record, and to do the tour … I’m just on a high. Because it’s got such meaning, and meaning for me is everything.

“I love all my albums, but this was something a bit different because it was a stretch and required a little effort.

“I like to explore and to challenge myself. I’m starting to look forward to challenges … I want to do something where people will say ‘Oh, that’s different!’ But in a pleasant way. These are songs that won’t be on your local jukebox, but that’s what makes it interesting.”

December 4, 2010 by Lori Lander Murphy

Music

Review: “Singing in the Dark,” by Susan McKeown

Singing in the Dark

The defining moment of “Singing in the Dark,” Susan McKeown’s moving meditation on the relationship between deeply debilitating mental illness and soaring creativity, comes toward the end of the recording, in a musical adaptation of the Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis’s “Angel of Depression.”

The words McKeown sings, Lewis’s words, are brutally unsentimental: “Don’t say it’s an honour to have fought with depression’s angel. It always wears the face of my loved ones as it tears the breath from my solar plexus, grinds my face in the ever-resilient dirt. Oh yes, I’m broken but my limp is the best part of me. And the way I hurt.”

When McKeown hurls herself into the word “broken,” she tears through the upper registers like a razor blade through silk. In that single harrowing moment, you can begin to see depression for what it is at its worst, a soul-destroying cancer.

This is strong stuff, in an album full of strong stuff. In “Singing in the Dark,” McKeown and her musical colleagues Frank London and Lisa Gutkin take on the daunting task of putting difficult words to music. The album celebrates the work of poets such as Anne sexton, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and and Theodore Roethke. Lord Byron makes an appearance. So do Leonard Cohen and Chilean singer-songwriter Violetta Parra. A recording industry pitchman might describe it as a tribute to troubled souls. It is far more than that.

McKeown says she was inspired to make this album after reading Kay Jamison’s book, “Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament.” She also met with familiy members and friends of those suffering from mental illness, and she tapped into the melancholic themes that run like a dark vein through much of her native Irish music. Recording began in a studio on Ireland’s Achill island in August 2008. Thus emerged McKeown’s exploration of mental illness as the wellspring of creative genius.

The source material is indisputably rich: Take, for example, Anne Sexton’s “Her Kind,” in which the poet casts herself in the role of madwoman-witch: “A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind.” Or Roethke’s poem, “In a Dark Time,” which ponders life at the extremes but ends on a transcendent note: “A man goes far to find out what he is—Death of the self in a long, tearless night, All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.”

Most of this material is not, by nature, “hummable.” None of this would work if the music didn’t just hold together, but hold its own with the world-class poetry. This, it does—in spades.

Take, for example, “The Nameless One,” by 19th-century Irish poet James Clarence Mangan. With verses like the following, it’s hardly upbeat:

“Him grant a grave to, ye pitying noble,
Deep in your bosoms: there let him dwell!
He, too, had tears for all souls in trouble,
Here and in hell.”

Amazingly, McKeown and colleagues deliver a wonderfully folky tune to accompany those words. The bouncy banjo treatment reminds me of Woody Guthrie’s “Gonna Get Through This World” on the group’s 2006 Klezmatics collaboration, “Wonder Wheel.”

“The Crazy Woman,” based on the poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, is a revelation. If you think about the opening lines of the poem, “I shall not sing a May song. A May song should be gay. I’ll wait until November I shall not sing a May song. A May song should be gay. I’ll wait until November and sing a song of gray,” you may not be able to hear a jazzy little piano lounge tune in it. McKeown and friends did, and it’s a treat.

I was wondering where I’d first heard the dolorous “In Darkness Let Me Dwell,” written by the lutenist John Dowland. It was on Sting’s 2006 CD, “Songs from the Labyrinth.” Susan McKeown’s version will easily make you forget Sting ever tried his hand at Madrigal singing.

“The Crack in the Stairs,” based on the work of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, is a bit more challenging, both for the singer and the listener. It’s a dissonant modern piano piece written by Irish composer Elaine Agnew. Give it a chance. It fits the bleak material.

And if not that, there’s more. The Latin standard “Gracias a la Vida,” by Violetta Parra, is a pretty piece. You may remember a Joan Baez version. McKeown’s version of Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem,” is performed with soulful elegance.

That any song on the album would be sung otherwise is unthinkable. McKeown at her best is always balanced right on the edge: fragility on the one side, strength on the other. It’s perfect for material that is so emotionally weighted—and for painting a portrait of life at the extremes.

November 4, 2010 by Jeff Meade

Music

They Do Make Beautiful Music Together

Mary McPartlan gives Aidan Brennan a hug.

When they met last year during the Willie Clancy Summer School in Miltown Malbay, County Clare, singers Susan McKeown and Mary McPartlan vowed they would one day perform together. Lucky for us, they kept their promise.

The two, accompanied by remarkable Irish guitarist Aidan Brennan, sang separately and together on the stage at the Irish Center in Philadelphia on January 10. McKeown, who won a Grammy for her work with the New York-based klezmer group, The Klezmatics, performed an eclectic mix of Yiddish and Irish tunes along with her own inspired songs. McPartlan, whose voice has been compared to that of Dolores Keane, did several sean nos or unaccompanied traditional tunes, and even did a little rocking out. The two women and Brennan sang one song together in tight, gorgeous harmony.

But don’t take my word for it. Watch and listen.

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January 15, 2009 by Denise Foley

Music

McKeown and McPartlan: Two Great Irish Voices In Harmony

Singer Mary McPartlan

It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes you meet someone who makes you suspect you were separated at birth. You laugh at the same things, love the same music, have so much in common that it’s a little like meeting. . .yourself.

That’s how Grammy-winning vocalist Susan McKeown felt when she met trad singer Mary McPartlan last summer in a café in Miltown Malbay, where they were both attending Willie Week, the annual Willie Clancy Summer School music festival.

“We only chatted a few minutes but we talked so much we planned out our next five years,” laughs McKeown, who was born in Dublin but now lives in New York. “We had so much in common.”

One of those plans was to work together someday, and they are. The women, considered two of the finest Irish traditional singers today, will be appearing for the first time together at the The Irish Center in Philadelphia on Saturday night.

Although McKeown won her Grammy for her work with The Klezmatics—singing Klezmer music, the Yiddish version of Irish trad—she and McPartlan are both steeped in Celtic folk. In their brief encounter, they also discovered that they both love the music of Mali, the western African nation, and have a penchant for weaving the music of other lands with the tunes of their roots. They both also have a theatrical background. McKeown graduated from the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York, and for the last dozen years McPartlan has been a producer and director of numerous music and theatre projects, many for TG4, Irish language television.

They also learned that they loved each other’s music. “There is something deep and honest about Mary’s voice that appeals to me,” says McKeown. “When I first heard her, she reminded me of [singer] Dolores Keane. She has very soulful voice that seems to tap into the past.”

McPartlan—whom I caught up with by phone as she was cooking supper for her family in Galway—has heard that comparison before and was pleased to hear McKeown thought so. “I love Dolores Keane,” she says. “She’s been a massive inspiration.”

McPartlan is a relative late-bloomer in Irish music. Though she began singing in the 1970s, she didn’t decide to make music a career until 2003. “My life was totally taken up with my job—working in the arts–and rearing my kids (she has four, two in their 20s and two teenagers),” she explains. “It was a very demanding time and I pulled back from solo performance. The fact that I’m a professional producer of the arts and especially music kept me spending a lot of time in the company of musicians and being involved in making music programs kept me going.”

While in the midst of a time-consuming project that kept her away from home for weeks, she says, “I made a tape of my songs for a lift.” She gave the tape to her good friend, piper Paddy Keenan, and asked him what he thought. “He said, ‘Mary, quick, go get a producer,’ which I did and I’ve never looked back.”

Her first CD was “The Holland Handkerchief,” which debuted to critical acclaim in January 2004. But her burgeoning new career was almost derailed: That same year, McPartlan was diagnosed with breast cancer. “I struggled with the breast cancer treatments and went on stage whenever I could,” she says. “But I never gave up. I think that music healed me faster than anything ever could.”

At the same time, she was also studying for her master’s degree. While it sounds like the perfect storm for stress, her performances and studies provided a welcome distraction from doctor’s visits and radiation treatments, she says. Four years after her diagnosis, McPartlan released her second CD, “Petticoat Loose,” which contains some interesting collaborations between McPartlan and a variety of musicians, including a Romanian string quartet.

Like her new friend, McKeown is musically adventurous. Her Grammy came for “Wonder Wheel,” a collection of Yiddish music (with lyrics by American folk musician Woody Guthrie) she performed with the Klezmatics. “Now you might think that Yiddish and Irish songs had nothing in common, but it’s not such a great leap as you might think,” she says “The tunes are so vibrant and exuberant, as they are in the Irish tradition, and they also tap into the same great sadness and depth of emotions.” They are, after all, songs born of love—and pining–for a homeland.

McKeown was born in Dublin, the fifth of five children. “The story is told that my parents had four children, none having a talent for music, so they had a fifth child, me. My aunts told me this. My mother was an organist and an entertainer at social events, and I always sang with her. So she was struck lucky the fifth time. We used to go around in the car together singing, doing harmonies, singing everything—religious music, popular music, the Beatles—whatever was on the radio.”

Her passion for singing was fueled by “winning medals in competitions—I liked that,” she laughs. “I was always asked to sing at religious events in school and I always got parts in the school musicals.” She went to college in New York with a scholarship and toured Europe with a group of Irish musicians with whom she released a cassette called “The Chanting House.” While in New York, she collaborated with musicians like Seamus Egan (Solas) and Eileen Ivers. The release in 1995 of “Bones,’ which features McKeown’s take on traditional Irish keening (caoineadh)—the poetic, emotional crying over the dead—led to her solo career. Like McPartlan, she is entrenched in traditional Celtic music, but she also writes her own tunes and employs musical elements of other cultures in her work.

“I’ve worked with a number of Malian musicians, quite frequently the kora player Mamadou Diabate,” she says. The kora, she explains, the is African version of the harp, a stick plunged into a gourd with 21 strings, sounding remarkably like the Irish harp. “I worked with the Malian Ensemble Tartit, me sitting on the ground with 12 of them, men and women, playing instruments, clapping, singing.” The music was remarkable, but McKeown also remembers it as a moment of motherhood magic. “I had my daughter, Roisin, with me. She was a baby and still nursing Another Mali singer, Mah Damba, got a big piece of cloth and tied it on me like those baby snugglers they sell, and she was asleep in a few minutes.”

Both McKeown and McPartlan expect some magic moments on Saturday night. “We’ll probably be doing the set list as we come down in the van,” McKeown jokes. “And it will be the first time we’ve ever heard each other live. Sure, and we only just met for five minutes!”

Those five minutes make McPartlan believe the magic will last. “I really think Philadelphia will be the nucleus f what I hope will be great, exciting, creative things to come.”

Susan McKeown and Mary McParlan will be performing at the Irish Center, Carpenter and Emlen Streets in the Mt. Airy section of Philadelphia, on Saturday, January 10, at 8 PM.

January 9, 2009 by Denise Foley