Lisa O’Neill: “I’m a moonchild”

“We often get asked where does a song come from [but] it can be quite elusive, like a lucid dreaming place, and that’s quite beautiful and mysterious… you could be walking through a field or somewhere in nature, and you feel a whistle through a gate post or through a tree and it sets off a little couple of notes in your head.” Irish singer-songwriter Lisa O’Neill is describing the essence of the song ‘Old Note’, the tender lead single from her fifth album, All of This Is Chance. “The poem, which became that song, was trying to capture the size and majesty of that. The fact that you can’t put into words what is hard to comprehend.”

Written primarily during the pandemic, All of This Is Chance is both a love letter to the natural world and interiority, and a lament for our lost relationships with each. The lyrics throughout gaze upwards, peppered with birds, stars and palpable wonderment. This is echoed on the cover, where a single dandelion lies exploded on a black background, looking equally like the cosmos and an egg, beauty in the macro and the micro. “I’m a moonchild,” she laughs. “When I look up, I feel smaller, I feel on the planet, freer. You can get too wrapped up in yourself, you know? We’re tiny, so when we can bring the stars and the birds and everything else into us, it’s a little step back.”

There is such poetry throughout the album: ‘the stars in the sky / They know the same light / As the stars that are hanging in the trees’ she sings in ‘Silver Seed’, or ‘When I was small / Two feet tall / I thought that the world was a map on the wall’ (‘The Globe’). As we speak, she expresses a thankfulness that she has the tools of poetry and metaphor to process the experience of life, but is reluctant to pin down what the album represents. “It’s a suggestive album, coming from a place of what it’s like to be human in today’s world, and the beauty and struggles of it.”

O’Neill’s poetic turns are perfectly complemented by a deft aptitude for songcraft, whether it’s the otherworldly wash of sound that cradles her singing on ‘Old Note’, the rolling banjo of ‘Silver Seed’ or the subtle accompaniment of ‘Goodnight World’. Throughout, her earthy vocals are the focal point; she has a lived-in voice, weighted with the soil of Ireland that owes as much to Nick Cave as to Traveller-singer Margaret Barry. 

An ageless atmosphere is conjured from the beginning of the opening title-track, inspired by the epic ‘The Great Hunger’ by Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh. “[Kavanagh’s] poem is a big social question about the famine of the soul and imagination. He was addressing that in the 1930s and 40s in Ireland and I still think that’s a question hanging over us today.” A harmonium drone and strummed guitar propel the song forward, as O’Neill sings ‘Are you frightened of dying? / Are you frightened of the dead? / Are you frightened of living / that you don’t live instead?’ Well, are you?   

Read the review of All of This Is Chance

This interview originally appeared in the April 2023 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today