|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Paul Brady reflects on his career as a Celtic trad pioneer and pop songwriter You’ve said that on a good day you inhabit a song, becoming the character in it. You certainly became the angry, frustrated kid in "Nothing but the Same Old Story." The cocky character in "Arthur McBride" seems just as fleshed-out but quite different. As antique as it is, do you feel there’s a sense of 1960s-style nose-thumbing in "Arthur McBride"? BRADY Yeah. There was that rebellion aspect to it, which was very much in keeping with the era of the time--the Vietnam War, the draft, the whole thing in Europe. And it dovetailed into the Republican thing in Ireland, too. Did "Arthur McBride" stay in your concert sets through the years or are you coming back to it after leaving it alone for awhile? BRADY I did leave it alone for quite a few years. Both musically, because I wanted to try different things, and lyrically. It had political connotations so I wanted to leave it alone for a while. There was a long period in the ’80s and the early ’90s where the political situation in Ireland was so volatile that people tended to be very easily confused about the intricacies of it. I didn’t want to be gratuitously throwing around sentiments like that at a time when things were very, very sensitive. Were you also having second thoughts at that time about performing songs like "Nothing but the Same Old Story"? BRADY No, not at all. But I was going through a period personally where I didn’t feel that the way to solve the political problems in Ireland was to do it through violence. There’s a long tradition of political revolutionary song in Ireland that has attached itself to the ethos of violence for political change. And I just didn’t feel comfortable at the time in being erroneously swept up in that whole thing. So why did you decide to record this new version? BRADY I felt a challenge to myself to reinterpret the song, believing as I did that the way I would do it 25 years later was pretty much the way I did it originally. I just liked that challenge. So in reinterpreting the song now from an older perspective, what did you do differently? BRADY You mentioned earlier how I put a lot of myself into these songs. That probably comes from my father, who was an actor. He wasn’t an actor by profession, just an amateur actor, but he was very, very talented. I remember watching him invent characters, and I got intrigued by that. There’s a part of him in me that’s that kind of actor. I like the challenge of coming back to a role again some years later, like actors come back and do King Lear again. It isn’t even a question of a conscious approach to the song. It’s seeing how you viscerally approach it—what comes out the other end of the experience. The other traditional song included on your compilation, "The Lakes of Pontchartrain," is another widely embraced hit in the traditional subculture. Why did you pick that one over all the other songs in your traditional repertoire? BRADY That is probably the most popular song of mine from that era, even more so than "Arthur McBride." Any concert I would play, people would shout for "Lakes of Pontchartrain" way in advance of "Arthur McBride." I’ve always loved that song. Again, it presents me with an opportunity to act out a role that I identify strongly with. Every time I sing that song, I see a whole landscape and pictures in my head of places that I’ve never been to. It gives me a great opportunity to invent myself in a certain way, and I’ve always liked that about music. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
