Love Songs, Love Stories

Love is an eternal source of inspiration for artists. Here are five stories about romatic love you may not have heard, or may enjoy hearing again. The stories come with recognition that love holds its own challenges, of varied sorts.

The singer in Fear a Bhàta is waiting for her boatman to come home. That’s not an uncommon theme in songs from older times when, really, nobody knew if a loved one would return, for all sorts of reasons. In this song it is mot clear if th weather, the dangers of the work, or the possibility of change of heart are on the woman’s mind, but nonetheless, the longing is clear, even if Scottish Gaelic is not your language. Karen Matheson sings it here, with the band Capercaillie. You may find it recorded on their album The Blood is Strong. This video was recorded at a concert during the Celtic Connections Festival in Glasgow.

Tha mo Geal a Aird a Chuain/My Love is on the High Seas, is also a song of waiting for a man who works on the waters to return. This one has a bit of a more defined ending, though, which Julie Fowlis, who sings it here, talks about in the clip. The baby Julie is cradling in the story is a big girl now, but it is still a lovley way to see and ehar the song presented. You may find it on the album Mar a tha Mo Chride/ As My Heart Is.

There’s a swirl of hope, a challenging of invitation, a suggestion of strength, of passion, of the power of love in the face of heartbreak and danger; a lot going on in a few short minutes of the song What’s Closest to the Heart. Cathie Ryan sings it, and she also wrote the song. You may find it on her album The Farthest Wave.

At Valentine’s Day and beyond, may you.enjoy celebrating love through these songs.

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You may also wish to explore
Capercaillie:At the Heart of It All
Cathie Ryan: Through Wind and Rain
Music for a New Year at Wandering Educators
Seven Ways to Explore Scotland through Music at Perceptive Travel

Love Songs, Love Stories

Love: it is a source of endless reflection, conversation, story, at all times of the year. In the depths of winter love stories are often spun in form of song, shared and told and sung around and passed along again, as the lives and loves of those who handed them on to us join in from the shadows and as we add our own new love songs to the mix. Romantic love (it is near Valentine’s Day as I write) is an endless subject for musicians. They turn their thoughts to other aspects of love as well.

Mairead Ni Mhaoniagh grew up in Donegal, in the far northwest of the island of Ireland. One of her earliest music teachers there was her father Francie Mooney, himself an accomplished fiddler as well as a playwright and man who loved the sea. When her father died, two of Mairead’s friends wrote a song they hoped would help her. Named for a place on the far western edge of Donegal’s coast, it is called Far Beyond Carrickfinn. Mairead recorded it with Altan on their album called The Widening Gyre.

Eddi Reader is a native Scot. For many years though she lived and followed her career in music south of Hadrian’s Wall down in England. Her friend John Douglas -- now her husband -- thought she really belonged back in Scotland. One of the things he did to help her see this idea was write a song called Wild Mountainside. A love song to country and to woman both, you could say. Reader put the song on her album Songs of Robert Burns to show, she says, that great poetry and song are still flourishing in Scotland. It stands just fine in the company.

One snowy winter night, Carrie Newcomer was driving back to her home in Indiana after being away on tour. As she traveled she was taken by seeing lights in the windows of homes set back from the road, lights sent out by people she would never know and yet which lighted her path in more ways than one. She wrote a song drawing on where those thoughts led her called, unsurprisingly, A Light in the Window. Newcomer has recorded the song on her album called A Permeable Life.

Cathie Ryan gives a graceful and understated yet warm and welcoming voice to Rick Kemp's song of connection Somewhere Along the Road. She has recorded it on her album Somewhere Along the Road. A recognition of change and the continuing strength of connection.

Love songs for many situations and seasons....

Photographs by Kerry Dexter. Thank you for respecting copyright.

You may also wish to see
Cara Dillon: A Thousand Hearts
Cathie Ryan: Through Wind and Rain
Music and Mystery: Conversation with Carrie Newcomer

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Songs for Valentine's Day

Love finds expression in all sorts of ways in song. In honor of Valentine’s day and season, here are several songs about love you may not have heard. The links from the titles will take you to places where you may hear snippets of each song.

If you’re feeling that Valentine’s Day is getting a bit overdone, or that you’re a bit done with all the hearts and flowers stuff, consider the ideas about the day as a celebration of generosity, dignity, and kindness in this inspiring article from Alisa Bowman’s blog Project: Happily Ever After.

The music:

Trust, holding on in uncertainty, and being open are aspects of love, ideas which are gracefully and poetically explored by Carrie Newcomer in Hush.

In day to day life as well as with family and friends, we do not always know, as Newcomer says in her song Stones In The River, where our best intentions go. At home and in the wider world, it works to keep working on the good intentions, though. This song makes an especially good companion to the ideas in Bowman’s article, above.

In many parts of the world it is quite cold, and definitely still winter, this Valentine’s Day. Though she wrote it about the December holidays, Shannon Heaton’s song Fine Winter's Night fits with cold February nights, as well -- cold night skies and the warmth of the hearth drawing us in work all through the winter season.

Kathy Mattea’s Asking Us To Dance is a gentle, romantic reminder that love persists, and we need to honor that and make time for it.

The lasting and renewing aspects of love, hope, and connection are all found in Cathie Ryan’s thoughtful version of Somewhere Along The Road, a song filled with trust and grace. Just right of Valentine’s Day.


you may also wish to see
Music Road: Carrie Newcomer: Before & After
Music Road: Cathie Ryan: teaching tradition
and just in case you were wanting a Valentine's treat here's a Chocolate Apricot Cheesecake recipe from My Kids Eat Squid

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here is a way to do that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this.Thank you.

Three songs for Valentine's Day

Loving hearts, seeking hearts, hurting hearts, hearts wide open, hearts reconciled, hearts and flowers: it’s Valentine season. Three songs to listen to as you prepare and enjoy your celebrations:

Scotland’s national bard, Robert Burns, wrote dozens and dozens of songs about love, funny, bawdy, serious, heartfelt. Eddi Reader has recorded many of them including Ae Fond Kiss. My Love is Like a Red Red Rose, and John Anderson My Jo. Good ones all. On her album Eddi Reader sings more of the songs of Robert Burns she also chose to record a contemporary song, Wild Mountainside, by John Douglas.

It’s a fine look at longing, change, trust, and homecoming. all framed it touches of the Scottish landscape. It will work to illuminate love whatever landscape happens to be your place at the moment.


Cathie Ryan draws in images of nature and weather in her song What’s Closest to the Heart, as well, framing a journey of trust, questions, and acceptance in swirling melody driven by John Doyle’s guitar and laced by John McCusker’s fiddle. It is a song that may have you tapping your feet even as you consider the images and questions in English and Irish that Ryan offers. A fine and perhaps a bit unexpected companion to the season of hearts and flowers, you’ll find the song on Ryan's album The Farthest Wave.


Indiana based songwriter Carrie Newcomer looks at love, trust, connection, and staying true in her song Hush. It’s a reflective piece which takes a quiet look at the strength of love beyond the first days of romance - as indeed do Ryan’s and Reader’s songs as well. You will find Hush on Newcomer’s album
Before & After.





you may also wish to see
eddi reader, willie stewart, and the search for haggis
Lovers' Well: Matt & Shannon Heaton

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A bouquet of Celtic love songs & tunes

A meditative guitar piece from Donal Clancy, a tune for a friend's wedding and a lively jig from Hanneke Cassel, and a set of reels meant for dancing from Matt and Shannon Heaton are the instrumentals in this set. Then there’s a song about transitions in loving in Western Highway from Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh, a happy song that holds several meanings in Carrick a Rede from Cathie Ryan, and a swirl of emotion and music with words in Irish and English, in What’s Closest to the Heart also from Ryan, and an affirmation of love and hope in a song which blends Irish and African American tradition in Fisherman’s Lullaby from Matt and Shannon Heaton. For your Valentine themed listening, and beyond.






you may also wish to see
Voices: Donal Clancy

Lovers' Well: Matt & Shannon Heaton

Hanneke Cassel and Christopher Lewis: Calm the Raging Sea

Cathie Ryan: Songwriter

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Lovers' Well: Matt & Shannon Heaton

Lovers' Well



Lovers’ Well is a romantic album, but perhaps not in the way you might at first expect. Matt and Shannon Heaton offer a mix of song and tune, drawn from or based in Irish tradition. The tunes, which include reels, jigs, hornpipes, and a waltz, are all made for dancing, because, as Shannon points out, “dancing together is as sweet as singing together. All the tune sets on the album have love themed titles,” she adds, “and to ensure proper tempos, we worked with dancer and choreographer Kieran Jordan on the material.” Shannon plays flutes and whistles on the tunes, and Matt plays guitar, bouzouki, and bodhran.

The songs all concern love, and as that emotion embraces all shades of dark at light at times, so do the songs. There’s Lily of the West, with Shannon taking the lead on a song where jealousy and murder play a part, while Matt sings lead on Lady Fair, a version of the broken token song in which two lovers reunite after a long separation and the woman does not at first recognize her man. Where Moorcocks Crow is an enigmatic song of love at first sight, and in Botany Bay a husband bids farewell to his wife and children. Golden Glove finds the bride to be falling for the best man, and Lao Dueng Duen, a Thai song honoring Shannon’s time in Thailand and with a bit of an Irish arrangement is a piece from the tenth century in which a lover serenades his young woman -- and the way the Heatons do it, it both respects the song's origins and fits right in with the rest of the music on the album. Through all the songs, the Heatons’stellar harmonies add depth and beauty to the songs, as well.

“We dug deep to find material which explored both the highs of being in love and some of the darker aspects,” Shannon says. For the song Golden Glove -- that’s the one where the bride falls for the best man-- Shannon added a chorus which brings a touch of realism to the otherwise giddy story of courtship in the song--and which also, she points out, “sums up the different parts of the album: 'Deep is the lover's well, Higher than Heaven and Darker than Hell.'"

That might lead you to think things get rather grim in the music, but that’s not the case at all. Straightforward, rather, and endlessly intriguing. Much love went into the creation of the recording, too, as Shannon explains. “This project had a clearly defined mission statement from the beginning: to represent different aspects of love.

“Because Matt and I really worked together on the initial concept, and then brought in a team of people to help us bring it to life... people we love and trust, musically and personally --it was very much a labor of love for us, from the rehearsal and recording process to the material itself. We worked with our friend and producer/engineer Eric Merrill, dancer and choreographer Kieran Jordan, Keith Murphy on mandolin, guitar, and piano, and Dan Gurney on accordion.

“A friend offered us a cottage in Wellfleet on Cape Cod for the recording. Before heading down to record, we spent weeks with Eric to prepare material. From initial rehearsals through the week of recording, Eric’s holistic musicianship, beautiful engineering, humor and love guided us through the project.

“The result of our rich traditional material -- much adapted, but hopefully still intact in its musical and emotional intent -- our loving creative team of Eric and Kieran, and the forest home in which we recorded was a thoughtful, natural, and sweet working process. Because some of the tracking was done at night and even outside on the porch, the tracks have an organic nature about them — cricket chirps, bird calls, rain on the roof all made their way into the microphones.” That care and connection, and the deep well of musical experience and respect for both tradition and innovation which the Heatons and their musical friends bring to the work, create an experience which both honors Irish tradition and extends it in a natural and graceful way.

And if Irish tradition isn’t your thing, you really don’t have to know anything about it to enjoy and appreciate this music. If you and your valentine have a taste for fine singing, excellent flute and guitar playing, creative approaches to acoustic music, and thoughtful choice of material, Lovers’ Well could be the perfect soundtrack to your Valentine’s Day celebration.

you may also want to see

Another Fine Winter's Night: Matt & Shannon Heaton

Matt & Shannon Heaton: Blue Skies Above

Shannon Heaton: Oil for the Chain

by Kerry Dexter

Favorite Love Songs: Tuning Up for Valentine's Day

As it’s coming up on Valentine’s Day, that has me thinking about love songs. My favorite ones include






from Kathy Mattea
Goin' Gone

Untold Stories
Asking Us to Dance


from Cathie Ryan
The Farthest Wave

What's Closest to the Heart

from Carrie Newcomer
Tornado Alley

Only One Shoe

Hold On

From Tish Hinojosa
Amanacer
Everything You Wish

from Eddi Reader
Wild Mountainside


from Danu
Follow On

from Emmylou Harris
Someone Like You

from Maura O’Connell
Blessing



What they have in common, I think, is recognition that deep true love includes the hard stuff as well as the joy, and that part of the gift of love is helping us live with and through the humanness of all that. I’m not sure the artists who wrote or who sing all of these necessarily thought of them as love songs, either, but for me they work that way. See what you think, and please share some of your favorites by leaving a comment if you’d like.