This is Mary Coughlan’s 40th year in music and this album is one of her most poetic and poignant. Her voice has changed over the years and there is now a husky, almost rough, quality to her vocals, but equally she manages to get over a sense of beauty with her musicality. At some points she comes across as a female Irish Bob Dylan! The songs are full of gentle humour, defiance and real experience and you can hardly avoid falling for her smoky brogue.
The single, ‘What If I Do’, is a love song. No overblown emoting, rather she poses the question in a gentle jazz setting and draws the listener in – what is she actually questioning?
The opening – title – track is a gentle masterpiece. Reminiscences of her life sung/spoken against a simple piano and rhythm box. From her earliest memories to grown up trips abroad, every word has real meaning, and the listener cannot but be drawn in to her tales - a one legged tango player among them – and a life enjoyed to the fullest.
This album is one of the best in a long career, during which she has been hailed as the greatest female vocalist ever to come out of Ireland and while this is an album of memories and remembered moods, it clearly indicates that she is still in love with music and her life in Galway, Ireland. Mary says: “After 40 years in this crazy business I walk around Galway and remember absolutely everything about growing up there. All of those events made me who I am. The good and the bad times. All the learning. I'm still here and still working. I still love going to a studio and making music and playing music live.”
Jazzy and full of wry comment, it is an album very much to fall in love with.
