Having just completed a two-week run of dates across Scotland and England, with many sold-out shows, folk trio Cua have released their third full-length studio album, ‘Oh Sun Shine Down’.
John Davidson, Shane Booth & Ros O’Meara bring together dynamic and contrasting instrumentation and vocal arrangements. The group have an acoustic soundtrack blending guitars, fiddle, bouzouki percussion and three-part harmony arrangements to create a world music folk styling.
They say this new release, their third full-length studio album, is something very positive, born out of the lockdown. “Out of this last period of time and experience, we persevered and continued writing and recording,” says vocalist and guitarist, Shane Booth. “The new album has a very spiritual line running through it, in the sense of all the loss that was felt over the past couple of years, and what there may be to be hopeful about as we look ahead.”
Sunrise, for instance, which was the first single from the record, is, they explain, “a song of hope, symbolic in nature with the rising of the sun each day. Having a little celebration each time we know the world has come back into brightness again and being in awe of it, enjoying the experience it to its fullest – that’s the feeling we built this around.”
“As the sun comes and goes in a set time, so maybe we can be more mindful about our own rhythms and timings and different phases and cycles we go through and know how best to rise with the sun each day and just do your best.”
Written and recorded through the doldrums of the pandemic, while working remotely, they decided to make it “more expansive from an instrumentation perspective.”
“As our world became more limited physically, we set out to have less limits internally and just did what we felt was right in all of these very different circumstances. We drew our inspiration from the little big things much of which revolve around the sun, hence the album title.
“We really missed what we feel is at the very driving core of Cua, which is getting out there to play for people. We love being in front of an audience, feeling that instant feedback and sense of community. We have truly missed that,” Shane added.
There is one very poignant track right at the end, the closing Sail Home With Me, which, he reveals came out of a moment of deep tragedy in his own life.
The band had to cut their 2019 tour short so he could get back as quickly as possible after he received the devastating news that his Dad had died. “That date we sailed home was 11th December, 2019, the day my dad left us,” he says. “This song was written about that day.”
