In the Magic Hour

Regular Songlines readers will need little introduction to Massachusetts-born singer-songwriter Aoife O’Donovan. Her exploits as soloist and collaborator with the likes of Yo-Yo Ma (as vocalist for The Goat Rodeo Sessions), Alison Krauss (who recorded O’Donovan's ‘Lay My Burden Down’ on Paper Airplane), and her touring folk trio, with Sara Watkins and Sarah Jarosz have been well documented within these pages. In the Magic Hour, O’Donovan's second solo album, is lushly produced by the Grammy-nominated Tucker Martine. Its ten tracks include guest appearances by fellow Goat Rodeo partner and Chris Thile, as well as Watkins and Jarosz. The publicity push has been focused on ‘Magic Hour’, a piano-heavy, Nashville-style, crossover pop-rocker in which O’Donovan ruminates, in her distinctively breathy, crystalline voice, on that special time when the world seems amenable to all possibilities and life's burdens are lifted, if only temporarily. It's a worthy, slickly produced single, but all too reminiscent of similarly packaged products coming out of the mainstream country music scene.

Other tracks offer the listener a much richer, more engaging experience, such as the eerie reverberations of ‘Donal Óg’ (adapted from a Gaelic/Irish poem by Lady Augusta Gregory and featuring the voice of O’Donovan's recently departed grandfather); the easy swinging, lyrical sweetness of ‘Magpie’; and the roughly hewn tone of ‘The King of All Birds’.