Chosen Daughter

When I reviewed O'Connor's debut release, This Willowed Light, back in #102, I enthused about how the turn of phrase in her own songwriting bore comparison with the best traditional tracks she sang. Five years later and that turn of phrase has not deserted her. In fact, her new album is entirely self-penned and offers more hooks to capture the memory. This is evident in the spellbinding opener, ‘Mary’, which is in many ways a microcosm of the whole project. Named after the archetypal mother, it's a song about mothers and daughters, with the haunting line: ‘Somebody told me they saw you last winter, carrying all the blame.’ It sets the tone for an unflinching examination of womanhood and the scars passed down the generations.

The spark for the album was O'Connor's discovery that her grandmother had been a domestic servant in England who, when she fell pregnant, had to give O'Connor's own mother up to a Catholic home run by nuns. This opened up further stories of silent suffering rooted in gender and poverty. Her finely wrought stories capture the zeitgeist surrounding the #MeToo campaign, but driven by the hypnotic piano lines of David Milligan and her own piano and guitar work, this is an intimate psychological portrait, not an angry protest album.