Album Review: ‘Aoife O’Donovan & Hawktail Play All My Friends’
Aoife O’Donovan’s friends Hawktail—Brittany Haas on fiddle, Jordan Tice on acoustic guitar, Paul Kowert on double bass—join her as she revisits and re-imagines five of the songs from her fourth studio album, All My Friends. On that album, O’Donovan drew on the letters and the speeches of Carrie Chapman Catt, the founder of the League of Women Voters, to produce songs that both celebrate the suffragist’s vision and tenacity and that carry her wisdom about the nature of democracy, community, and women’s rights into our own day.
Haas’s lilting fiddle opens “War Measure” in a joyous flight of notes, providing underlying sprightly moments of hope set against a more somber musical theme that runs through the song, an ode to Woodrow Wilson’s support for Catt and women’s suffrage. Following the musical themes established by Kowert’s double bass notes and Tice’s sparkling guitar, the syncopated jazz of “Daughters” encourages suffragists to prepare the way for their daughters by seizing the moment to work to get the 19th Amendment passed. Tice’s swirling guitar picking, Haas’ elevated fiddling, and Kowert’s bass bowings mimic the “Crisis” women face if the amendment fails to pass and the hope that lies in its passage.
The gospel-inflected “All My Friends” celebrates the power and intimacy of women’s community, while the Joni Mitchell-esque “America, Come” shuttles from the sparse to the atmospheric as the song uses Catt’s own words to ask questions that are relevant today: “What is the democracy for which the world is battling, for which we offer up our man power, woman power, money power, our all?” The album closes a stunning medley of O’Donovan’s 2004 song “The Middle” and Haas’s gorgeous fiddle tune “The River That Runs Both Ways.”
On Aoife O’Donovan & Hawktail Play All My Friends O’Donovan and Hawktail strip down the songs, revealing unheard facets of them, and the spare arrangements of the songs convey their emotional depth through layers of rich instrumentation providing the foundation for O’Donovan’s crystalline vocals.
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Aoife O’Donovan & Hawktail Play All My Friends is available HERE
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