Aoife O'Donovan Drops Women-Themed Album, Plays Denver With Hawktail

Growing up outside of Boston, Aoife O'Donovan occasionally traveled to Ireland, where she visited her cousins and learned to sing traditional songs that helped lead her to a career in folk-rooted music.

"I grew up singing a lot," reflects the Grammy-winning tunesmith. "I liked the music of my parents' generation as well as old Irish stuff. I definitely got into Joan Baez and Bob Dylan; a lot of their work is influenced by old ballads. Also, my dad had a show on a public radio station in Boston, where he focused on Celtic music, so I came up around that, which was a natural bridge to bluegrass and the kind of music I like to play."

O'Donovan, who soon began writing her own compositions, nimbly traversed the venerable path from Celtic fare to the world of mountain and old-time music, starting the well-appreciated progressive acoustic group Crooked Still in 2001, and in 2014, the all-women outfit I'm With Her (which won a Grammy for the song "Call My Name" in 2020). Most recently, O'Donovan has embraced a role as a songwriter-cum-social commentator with her latest release, All My Friends.

"The new record is inspired by Woman Suffrage and specifically by a woman named Carrie Chapman Catt, who is the focal point for my narration," O'Donovan explains. "She's a cool historical figure who campaigned fiercely for women's voting rights and founded the League of Women Voters, among other things. She led an interesting life and was a real fighter who gave many great speeches. I found her words to be very inspiring and I used some of them in my songs as jumping-off points. I wanted the album to have a folky feel, and her character was a basis for that. It's my own fictional imagining of her."
O'Donovan, who studied jazz and contemporary improvisation at the New England Conservatory of Music, says her album initially started as part of a commission she received to create art that would honor the centenary of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women in America the right to vote in 1920.

"The project took on a life of its own," she says. "It caused me to examine what it was like then for women and what it's like today, and how it's different now to be an American woman. It would be easy to say that there's a lot of darkness to what's happening culturally and politically nowadays, but there's also some good stuff in that there are a lot of people paying attention, and more people wanting to be involved.

"I live in Florida and there's a big initiative to put a woman's right to choose on the ballot. Things like that give me hope," she adds. "You can't just say, 'Okay, this is how it's going to be,' and then just complain about it on Instagram. I think you have to get out there and participate to actually change things. As a culture, we need to exit the safe spaces of our computers and our homes and get out and do something about it and make a change."

Such songs as "Crisis," which includes the mandolin playing of Sierra Ferrell, and "Someone to Follow," featuring the banjo picking of Noam Pikelny (Punch Brothers, Mighty Poplar), demonstrate the level of musicianship that O'Donovan attracts on the album, while also marking the collaborative nature of the project.

"The production on the record is very much a folk-based sound," says O'Donovan, who will be joined by the talented quartet Hawktail for her Denver performance at the Newman Center on Saturday, March 30.

"They're instrumental geniuses and [fiddle player] Brittany Haas is a dear old friend," she notes of Hawktail. "We've played a lot together over the years. Hawktail is going to do the whole summer tour with me this year. The title of the album, [All My Friends], really seemed to check all the boxes for me. It's exciting to get out there and play this material in such great company."

The album closes with a compelling version of a Bob Dylan social-commentary ballad "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," in which a Black female hotel worker is fatally beaten by a white man of high social standing at a society function in Baltimore in 1963.

"The song is an interesting coda to my album," O'Donovan shares. "It has nothing to do specifically with a woman's right to vote, but it concerns what it's like to be a human being. It's a tragic tale. I played the song at a concert in Washington, D.C., in 2017 with the National Symphony Orchestra at a big outdoor show using an orchestral arrangement. It was so stunning that we ended up recording it that way for the album.  I'm really proud of how it came out. The beginning includes a snippet of the 'Battle Hymn of the Republic.' It's very American which is why I included it."

The singer, who enjoys skiing in Colorado and whose brother lives in Denver with his family, says she can't wait to perform the one-off show in the Mile High City.

Aofie O'Donovan, Newman Center for the Performing Arts, 2344 East Iliff Avenue, 7:30 pm Saturday, March 30.