Land of My Other

“We work like two halves of a single songwriter,” says McCallum, the Manchester-based composer and producer. “Imagine a guitarist and a singer who are not separate but are separate people. We just have this really special connection that lets us listen, adapt and evolve a piece of music together.”

Connolly nods her agreement. “Stuart is the yin to my yang,” says the reigning BBC Folk Singer of the Year, her north of Ireland accent untempered by two decades of Manchester living. “He has one face. I have many. He’s very measured. I’m not. I like mayhem. He doesn’t. I know where I am with him.”

Such a remarkable bond might have intimidated a lesser producer. But the Ireland-born, US-based Bartlett, famed for his work with the likes of Sufjan Stevens, St. Vincent, Florence Welch and Irish/American supergroup The Gloaming, intuited how to frame The Breath’s distinctive brand of art.

“The main aim was to capture the duo” he says of a work that was recorded in Manchester and at Real World Studios. “I’d sit at the piano not playing very much, just locating the energy and helping to focus it in a way I wanted it to happen. Sometimes I wanted to join in the fun.”

Having been sent The Breath’s previous albums, 2016’s Carry Your Kin and 2018’s Let the Cards Fall, both of which were produced by McCallum, Bartlett didn’t hesitate: “Within seconds of hearing Ríoghnach’s voice I was sold. It is so unmistakably Irish, its ornamentation so born of [traditional “old style”] sean nós, which was a big part of my early obsession with Irish music. It’s kaleidoscopic, what she’s able to do.”

Connolly has never sounded so glorious as on Land of My Other. Her emotions run the gamut: righteous, sorrowful, joyous. Authenticity is at a premium. Shame is cast aside.

‘If it all falls tomorrow, be glad of today,’ she sings on opener ‘Don’t Rush It’, which might be about the toll we pay for leaving home, the mistakes we make by hurrying grief or something else.

Win her trust and she’ll tell you.

Connolly lost her father – a socialist, Uilleann piper and Cambridge-educated poet – in 2019, when her baby daughter was just ten weeks old. She says he was her best friend. She also says she’d been grieving him all her life. “My Dadaí got lifted when I was seven-years-old. My mum, who’s Mancunian with Irish parents, was a badass and did her best. But it was tough, and dangerous.”

Read it here, then think before asking: there were tapped phones. Paramilitary hiding in bushes. Raids that saw Ríoghnach and her siblings – she was eldest of nine – moved from bed to bed. Visits to Long Kesh prison with smuggled notes written on Rizla papers. There were horrors affecting the extended family. But always – much of the time – there was music.

An accomplished flautist, Connolly hails from a long line of singers, musicians and song collectors. Her earliest memories involve lullabies about faeries stealing babies and animals lost in the woods.

‘Little One’, the album’s cradle song, is an ode to the child she’d worried might absorb her grief in utero.

“It’s about driving back from gigs late at night and having a cry while holding tight to the steering wheel,” she says. Then smiles: “It turns out we’re not raising a wallflower, which is great.”

The album’s trad-sounding title track – tight, organic, invigorating – features a Planxty-style flute break by Connolly and McCallum on acoustic and baritone acoustic guitars, merging patterns echoed on piano.

“Stuart’s facility on guitar is astonishing,” says Bartlett of McCallum, a musician whose numerous side-projects include solo guitar albums, cinema soundtrack albums and recordings and performances with UK jazz acts including downtempo maestros The Cinematic Orchestra.

“With that level of musicianship my main task was simplifying and focusing. So while Stuart is still playing complicated things he is anchoring Ríoghnach’s phrasing, which is so wonderfully unfettered.”

As, indeed, is her lyric writing. “On this album Ríoghnach is really getting to the root of what she’s about,” says McCallum. “We’ve done a lot of gigs as a duo and become stronger and more confident in just us two, in not hiding behind anything. There’s no way Ríoghnach would have been this open five years ago.”

Lifted by hooks and harmony vocals, ‘Burning Away’ is to do with catharsis: “It’s about washing off the sins of other people’s shit,” says Connolly. “I visit graves. I talk to ancestors. I used to love getting in the ocean to hold hands and shout at the waves to hit us harder, to really show us what they’ve got.”

‘Clíona’s Wave’ and its fast-paced floating guitar is a paean to one of the 19 mythical female deities in the Irish tradition, a healer stolen away to sit on the rocks off Glandore, West Cork (the home of Connolly’s grandparents), warning sailors of the danger while luring them to their deaths. ‘Remembering the Flood’ is an anthem for the dispossessed that takes its cue from the great emigrants’ lament ‘A Stór Mo Chroi’ (‘Treasure of My Heart’); the coiled, elegiac ‘Head Down’ recalls advice given in case of arrest: “Dadaí had these little codes: Say Nothing. Look at your thumbs. Hum a reel in your head.”

Both those songs lean into the blues – if you like, the north of Ireland prison blues. “Head Down’ is the only track we recorded live,” says Bartlett, “a real balls to the wall number with me stomping and Ríoghnach just going for it. We ended up connecting with this very genuine Irish march vibe.”

The meaning in ‘Letters From Long Kesh’ is sometimes overt, often hidden, always bittersweet. “My father was such a good dadaí in gaol, even if I was always grieving him,” says Connolly. “He used to write me every day, telling me stories and funny wee jokes. I kept the letters in a shoebox under my bed.”

‘Without You In It’, a song about absence, features McCallum on guitars and pedals and Bartlett, barely there, across several pianos.” Ríoghnach and I wrote the chords and melody during a quiet moment at soundcheck in Berlin,” says McCallum. “I love the process of music making, the journey, the unravelling of it.”

‘Every Time It Comes Around’, the album’s closer, is a reminder to us that grief is not linear. That it can swing like a pendulum, crashing in on anniversaries, resurfacing with other triggers: shadows dancing on walls, a late night call missed, the discovery of a philosophy book stamped from gaol.

It’s a caution, a call to hold it down. To inhale. Exhale.

Land of My Other. The third album by The Breath.

An album about a political landscape. About family, childhood, motherhood.

About a girl who misses her dad.

Words by Jane Cornwell.