Two Roads Home: Music from Tim Grimm and Mary Ann Kennedy

Home: it’s an endless source of inspiration for creative artists of all sorts. For Tim Grimm, this might include writing a song that begins with speaking of a well loved cat sitting on the front porch of a farmhouse in Indiana. For Mary Ann Kennedy, it could include making a song out of a historic report of a sporting event that took place in a park near where she grew up as a Gaelic speaker in Glasgow. There are differences; there are similarities. Both well know how to make personal memories and insights resonate beyond place and moment, and yet how to respect both those things.

Tim Grimm’s recording is called Heart Land Again. It is revisit of sorts to his album Heart Land, which he released twenty years ago. Back then, Grimm and his wife Jan had moved back to central Indiana after a time working in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles. The sons who were young children then have grown up to become musicians themselves, and now join their parents on this recording, and as regular participants in The Grimm Family Band.

The songs on that album twenty years ago “were a gift,” Grimm says,”the result of falling in love again with the rural Midwest and its people.” Times change, people pass on, the whole country changes. These songs, ones from the original collection reworked with fresh eyes and ears, and songs newly added for this project, are lasting.

Together, the dozen tracks bring both wide angle and close in views of heartland stories. Better Days, which is sometimes described as Grimm’s anthem, offers a well limned portrait of generations, connection, what changes and what remains on the land. That might seem a lot to find in one song. It is all there, though, told with the voice of a singer who knows how to serve the story. Down the Road considers the accelerating rhythms of change on the countryside. The traditional song Sowin’ on the Mountain, here with bluesy groove filled sound, suggests, perhaps, possible consequences.

Pumpkin the Cat (watch for that cat, who comes and goes quickly in the lyric despite being the song’s namesake and centering visual image) is a meditation on choices both immediate and long term and what’s good and right that comes from them. The whole album is that, really. It is w ell worth repeated listening. Grimm has a natural storyteller’s voice, Jan and sons Connor and Jackson add illuminating harmonies and instrumental backing. Dan Lodge-Rigal, who played piano on the original Heart Land, is back for this project. Ben Lumsdaine adds percussion and Krista Detor, whose music you’ve encountered before here along the Music Road, adds backing vocals too.

Mary Ann Kennedy’s road home is to a different place: the busy, lively, and sometimes gritty city of Glasgow in Scotland. She grew up there in a Gaelic speaking family, and has gone on to a many faceted career as harpist, singer, composer, producer, and broadcaster.

With her album Glaschu she’s created what she names as a home town love song. For some time now she’s lived in the Highlands of Scotland, but work often takes her back to her home town. That’s a perspective which gently informs some of the song choices and the arrangements you’ll find here. It’s a perspective which is not nostalgic and certainly not sentimental, but reflective, vivid, and thoughtful. “You can take the girl out of Glasgow, but never Glasgow out of the girl,” she writes in the sleeve notes, “ and in the spirit of the Gaels’ eternal need to sing about home, this is my Gaelic love-song for the city in all its guises -- the voices of arrivals in search of a new life and of those, like me, born and bred there with Gaelic as our first language.”

Song -- mostly in Gaelic -- and music from instruments are woven together with occasional spoken word interludes, at times in Gaelic and at times in English. Kennedy has an expressive soprano. You will have no trouble understanding the emotion of a song even if Scottish Gaelic is not one of your languages. There are English language lyrics and notes on the songs in the sleeve notes, however.

Kennedy takes you on a journey that includes a sports report from a historic shinty match -- did you know that shinty is a Highland game with stick and ball was the inspiration for ice hockey? A lively story of a trip along the River Clyde “which quite possibly hasn’t been sung in a century or more,” Kennedy notes, adds to the fun. When I Came to Glasgow First, a mixed language Gaelic and English song, takes a more serious turn as the subject is vignettes of what it was like for a person from the Highlands to arrive in the big, rambling, and loud city of Glasgow in the middle of the twentieth century.

Orange Parade in Glasgow points up some of the clashes and differences that both immigrants and long time residents found. The lyrics are by poet Derick Thomson, who was from Lewis in the Outer Hebrides but spent much of his life in Glasgow. “His images of Glasgow in the 80s in his Gaelic poetry are absolute reflections of my memories growing up n the city,” Kennedy writes. Orange parades commemorate the victory of William of Orange over James of Scotland more than five hundred years ago. It is often a flashpoint of religious and political division. It was, Kennedy continues, “a sad and fearful thing to watch in my home where I was brought up to celebrate diversity rather than reinforce difference.”

There are more songs, some of laughter and others of conflict or of sorrow, all weaving into the tapestry of Glasgow as seen and heard through the lives of its Gaelic speaking people. All its people, really. A translation of Michael Mara’s song Mother Glasgow into Gaelic seems a particularly appropriate and movingly done choice. There’s also the engagingly titled Statues, a Goose, and the Morning After, in which a man takes enough drink to go dancing with the statues in George Square -- and that’s only part of the story.

Kennedy brings Glaschu to a close with Goodnight & Farewell, which she points out, is not only a song often used to close concerts and gatherings but also “a beautiful parting glass song, making a heart connection with emigrant communities and urging us all to look for the good to keep hold of in ‘strange times.’”

Kennedy is supported by a number of musical friends, among them Findlay Wells, Nick Turner, and Jarlath Henderson. Wilma Kennedy and Bill Paterson do an excellent job of bring the brief spoken word sections to life in good connection with the music, too.

Roads home: whether that be to the countryside in Indiana or the city in Glasgow, or some other place which has its part in your life, this music will resonate. Give Heart Land Again from Tim Grimm and Glaschu from Mary Ann Kennedy a listen. Give them several; each has much to offer.

You may also wish to see
Mary Ann Kennedy and Na Seoid
Wilderness Plots
Julie Fowlis: Alterum
Music & Mystery: Conversation with Carrie Newcomer

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