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.

Songs of Love from the Celtic World: A Stor Mo Chroí

Love: subject of eternal questions, eternal answers, and loads and loads of songs and tunes. Love from many directions is the focus of A Stor Mo Chroi, a two disc collection of thirty tracks. Artists from the varied worlds of Celtic music contribute music, among them Niamh Ni Charra, John Spillane, Capercaillie, Damien Dempsey, Loreena McKennitt, and Grada.


In case you were wondering what A Stor Mo Chroí means, it can be taken several ways. In Irish mo chroí means of my heart, and a stor may mean thing, treasure, value, and is sometime used as a shortcut for dear or darling. Listen to the songs and see which meaning suits you.


It’s a well sequenced collection in both sound and idea. The steady beat of percussion in Lumiere’s version of Fair and Tender Ladies, a song well known on both sides of the ocean, leads into the thoughtful work of Davy Spillane on pipes and Sean Tyrell on voice in the song Starry Night. Eddi Reader, from Scotland, is supported by her regular road band collaborator Alan Kelly on a graceful tale of friendship and love written by John Douglas called I Hung My Harp upon the Willow. John Spillane’s gritty take on his own song of lovers’ regret, When You and I Were True, illuminates the traditional tale of another sort of lovers’ parting, She Moved through the Fair, as presented by Loreena McKennitt. The sequence which leads from the tale of passing glimpses of a possible love in Spanish Lady (set in fine harmony by Maighread and Triona Ni Dhomhnaill) through the rambler song Free and Easy by Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh to the lively melody and enigmatic questions in in the song Wedding Dress from T with the Maggies will draw you in and make you think as well.

There are, as the subtitle of the collection promises, songs of both love and loss, and songs of reconciliation, reflection, and fun, as well. They come from well known artists, rising stars, and several groups and artists you may be less familiar with if you live outside of Ireland. All the tracks are worth your listening, though, and so is the sequence of tale and sound they weave. Colm O’Siochain, who thought up the album concept, is also responsible for the way the songs unfold. Even if you know all the artists, you will want to check out this collection to explore the way the songs illuminate each other here.

It’s good, too, the find the work of newer artists and well known musicians alongside bands and artists who have gone on to other things, such as a song from the short lived Skara Brae and and an early track from Paul Brady and Andy Irvine, as well as a classic take on Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh’s Raglan Road by the late Luke Kelly. It’s also good to see the collection wind to a close with Pauline Scanlon’s offering of All the Ways You Wander, a song John Spillane wrote for his daughter.


you may also wish to see
Americana and western songwriter Michael Martin Murphey’s song about
A Long Line Of Love
Music Road: a bouquet of Celtic love songs & tunes
Music Road: from Donegal:T with the Maggies