Like many of us, Shannon Lambert-Ryan recalls the pandemic as a dark time.
Since the gradual return to normal life, the Philadelphia area-based lead singer of Celtic roots supergroup RUNA says, “there was finally a light coming up at the end of the tunnel.”
The idea of members of the band being able to play together again fostered a fresh new round of creativity. The result is the ensemble’s new recording, “When the Light Gets In,” an uplifting response to those dark days. It’s an eclectic fusion of the traditional and the novel—RUNA’s trademark sound, or as close to a “brand” as you can get for this enormously inventive group.
Ideas for the new album first took root before Covid-19 first reared its ugly head. It was well worth the wait.
“We had started chatting about working on a new album in early- to mid-2020,” says Lambert-Ryan. “And then, obviously, the pandemic hit and so we had to take a break with all the obstacles that that created. And then we went into creating the Christmas album (”The Tide of Winter,” recorded with most band members working remotely) and had that finished by December 2020. So, the Christmas album took priority for a while. Then, after we released that, we started coming back to thoughts and ideas for this album.”
As with the Christmas album, many ideas and arrangements for the new recording were initially recorded remotely and exchanged among the band members.
Then, happily, the world began to open up again, and with it, festivals. RUNA began playing out again in the summer of 2021, and work on the new album began to pick up speed. More ideas and arrangements were exchanged, this time often in person in the home studio of Lambert-Ryan’s and her guitarist-singer husband Fionán de Barra.
de Barra and Lambert-Ryan quickly realized that an entire album would not happen in 2021, but in the meantime, the band released a six-tune EP, with five tunes making the cut for “When the Light Gets In.”
“We just wanted to continue creatively moving forward with it and knowing that within the next year or so we would continue working on it,” Lambert-Ryan explains. “And that was the basis for everything.”
The theme continued to develop as thoughts of what the world had just survived continued to sink in.
“Watching people across the world, including the people who were really close to us, the bravery of everybody—we continued to think about what that meant,” says Lambert-Ryan. “We wanted this to be a celebration, but not ignoring the ups and downs and the moments of darkness that happened over the past couple of years, and not ignoring the moments of deep, deep sorrow that many people, ourselves included, experienced.”
Tune selection, consequently, largely reflects a sense of celebration.
So perhaps not surprisingly, the recording kicks off on a bright note with an old standard, “Ó Dheara, ‘Sheanduine,” which on its own is an excellent interpretation, but takes on new life when interspersed, as it is, with snippets of the de Barra-composed “The Inheritance Polka,” played at blinding speed.
Skip ahead a few tracks, and another sprightly tune crops up, a Quebecois call-and-response folk tune “La Ziguezon,” and yet a few more after that, “Liam’s Lullaby,” an exquisite tune composed by de Barra for the couple’s son. You could hardly envision an optimistic note.
“When Liam turned 1, we had him dedicated at our church,” Lambert-Ryan recalls. “I grew up Unitarian Universalist and so, instead of a christening or a baptism, there’s a dedication service. Friends and family come and pledge to help support this little being as they grow and develop, and to nurture them and be there for them. Unbeknownst to me, Fionán had been writing this lullaby for him. He had played it once or twice during one of our tours, leading up to that. When he started playing that, I was a flood of tears. At the dedication, Liam and I were sitting on the sidelines, and he walked up to Fionán as he was playing up on the stage and was just walking around him and sitting next to him.”
Another standout number is drawn from a Robert Burns traditional tune (O Mirk, Mirk is This Midnight Hour) that is performed in distinctly non-traditional fashion. De Barra on guitar and percussionist Cheryl Prashker on hand drums lead off in what sounds South Asian or Middle Eastern, vaguely like a raga, leading into Lambert-Ryan’s singing. The song builds into a lush orchestral finish.
“We really wanted to explore some different things that we hadn’t done before,” explains Lambert-Ryan. “We’ve pushed ourselves into Middle Eastern directions previously. The song itself has an older world feel. It has an almost Renaissance sound whenever I hear it, but it twists and goes in different directions. So, when Fionán and I started playing it, I said, we either need to do this really sparsely with just vocal and guitar, or it needs to have more of an epic feeling.”
They went for epic.
“I said, what would happen if we went into a Middle Eastern direction?” Lambert-Ryan recalls. “So many of the sounds are complementary to one another from both cultures. There are lots of Middle Eastern sounds in lots of the Celtic languages. So, we just said, let’s explore that.”
Finishing off the recording is something unique—“Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” but performed in the Irish language. If you’re going to end on up note—and the band gives a good deal of thought to how tunes progress through an album—this is the one to end on.
The tune was chosen for two specific reasons. It has always been one of the favorite songs of Lambert-Ryan’s sister Emma. It also happened to be one of the favorite tunes of the late folk radio DJ Gene Shay, one of the band’s biggest boosters. Lambert-Ryan and de Barra have wanted to perform that tune for a long, long time.
“We were at a festival in Kansas maybe 10 years ago,” she says, “in McPherson, which is probably an hour away from Wichita. It’s in the middle of nowhere. Our GPS kept saying you’ll reach your destination in two miles, and all we could see were huge fields. Anyway, we had a really lovely time there and I said to Fionán that we should sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” because we’re in Kansas. And we both laughed, but then we thought—someday we should do this, but in Irish.”
That day has come.
Performing on this album:
Shannon Lambert-Ryan – vocals, bodhrán
Fionán de Barra – guitars, bass, vocals, mandolin, bodhrán
Cheryl Prashker – percussion, vocals
Tom Fitzgerald – fiddle, mandolin, vocals
Jake James – fiddle
The release date is November 10.
Pre-order here: https://runamusic.com
