Archive News
US roots singer Sara Watkins for Galway show
Date Published: 16-Jan-2013
If you’re an Americana fan, then pencil Sara Watkins’ February 1 show at Róisín Dubh into your diary. A former member of the Grammy winning Nickel Creek, Watkins has just released her second solo album, Sun Midnight Sun. The record has a traditional, rootsy feel but was recorded in the urban sprawl of Los Angeles.
“There’s a really wonderful music scene in LA right now,” Sara explains. “I think one of the effects in the downturn in profits in the music industry is that lot of musicians are huddling together in cities again. I think for a while there people were spreading out across the country and isolating themselves.”
Sun Midnight Sun was produced by Blake Mills, a talented multi-instrumentalist who Sara had worked with previously. They were joined by Sara’s brother Sean, a guitarist who was also a member of Nickel Creek.
“Each of these songs I had played live many, many times but I wanted to have someone help me produce the record because I felt like there was more to get out of the songs,” says Sara. “I felt like they weren’t as good as they could and should be, so I wanted to collaborate with Blake.
“Together with my brother Sean, we played together as a trio to figure out what was the basis of each song. From there, we built up and messed around with different sounds and instruments that I don’t always have access to. It was really fun.”
When It Pleases You is the first single to be taken from the album. It’s penned by Dan Wilson, who co-wrote and produced three songs on Adele’s 21. The song has a raw, emotional edge to it and deserves to bring Watkins to a bigger audience.
“Sean was playing on a demo of it with Dan, and he said ‘Sara, you would love this song, you should sing it’. I didn’t have any songs like it, and I really enjoyed singing that chorus,” Sara says.
“It’s funny, in Dan’s version, the way he sings it, it’s not nearly as angry. The lyrics to him didn’t sound that way. And I don’t mean to be angry when I sing it, but there’s an intense frustration that I interpret, which Dan didn’t hear. He came by the studio and said ‘that’s so different.’ He was really happy with it.”
The video sees Sara singing alone in the ring of a classic circus tent. Her manager stumbled across the location, and Sara hopped on a plane for the shoot.
“He found this travelling circus in Connecticut,” she says. “There were just five of us on set – the director, his assistant and his son, my manager and me. Typically, on a video shoot there would be a lot more than that – this was a tight-budgeted thing that we put our energy into.
“In the circus, they had a day off. There were animals around, a clown, a contortionist’s daughter and her twin brother. It was a family circus. They were kind enough to let us use their big top tent and perform the song.”
For her fiery re-imagining of the Everly Brothers song You’re The One I Love, Sara was joined by the mercurial, talented Fiona Apple. The impassioned, swirling duet is one of the album’s high points.
“I was going through an Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly phase,” says Sara. “And I heard this song that I thought could sound a little bit more obsessive and intense. I thought this’d be a great song to sing with a girl.
“It was one of my favourite parts of making the record,” she adds. “We had all the band pre-recorded and she and I just sang to each other. Facing each other, singing this song over and over, about seven or eight times. We got into this trance, and it just got tighter and tighter. After the eight time through we just erupted into laughter.”
Last year, Fiona Apple released her fourth album, The Idler Wheel – after a seven-year gap. Apple has also made a welcome return to the road, and Sara is a fan as well as a friend.
“I’m such a fan of her singing, especially live,” Sara says. “Every night, she jumps into the character of what she was feeling when she was writing these songs. It’s something to see; she lets herself go, completely, and leaves everything behind for those three to four minutes. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
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