Pauline Scanlon’s unique voice, described as “a superb mix of china cup fragility and steely strength” (Irish Times) comes from an ancient place yet is always fresh. Her music is both Irish and universal, traditional yet subversive at every turn. The ‘steely strength’ comes to the fore in both her activism and her determination to constantly evolve as an artist.
As a founding member of FairPlé, the role of women in the arts is central to Pauline’s creative path and something she is very vocal about. Her latest album, The Unquiet, reimagines what it is to be an Irish woman in the context of music and song. It is an album that shifts expectations and defy genre. The album is a representation through song, of the life of Pauline’s late mother Eileen Scanlon.
You’ve heard the story before, but not like this. A woman gives up a baby boy for adoption and passes away years later, before being re-united with him, while her daughter contemplates her mother’s story with love and compassion. This all-too familiar tale has been re-worked by Pauline into The Unquiet, an album of traditional songs each carefully selected to remember some aspect of her late mother’s life in all its joys and sorrows.
The making of Pauline’s album was captured over a period of 3 years in the profoundly moving radio documentary: https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/the-unquiet-songs-for-my-mother/
Witness Pauline perform these songs live as she continues album launch tour this Autumn to Castlebar September 15th; Dublin September 16th; Portumna September 17th; Cork September 18th; Waterford October 26th and Dingle October 27th. Tickets available from www.paulinescanlon.net
About The Unquiet, Pauline says:
“All my life as a singer, I have been drawn to old songs. In them I find solidarity with the ghosts of people I have never met and yet share fragments of feelings with. Somewhere in the empathy that is shared between singer, listener, and ghostly forms, I find strands of myself that didn’t originate in my own heart but have found their way in there all the same. They belong to someone or somewhere else, yet I feel them as deeply as if they were mine.
With this album I seek to represent the realities of modern-era women through traditional song. I am intentionally redirecting these songs away from the traditional narrative, turning them to face the modern era, to reflect a new social outlook, and I am imagining the present as I sing them.
’The Unquiet’ is based on the life of my late mother, Eileen Scanlon, and her contemporaries in Irish society. I include myself in this. The songs are not literal in that they do not reflect specific events in my mother’s life. They do, however, have a resonance and a purpose in reflecting her lived experience and that of modern-era women in Ireland, through my perspective.”
The album is out now on digital, CD, and vinyl. Order on Bandcamp https://paulinescanlon.bandcamp.com/album/the-unquiet
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