Davey returns with her first album in six years
Groove Tube with Jimi McDonnell – [email protected]
After taking a six year break between albums, Cathy Davey plays the Róisín Dubh on Friday next, 14 October. New Forest is her latest collection and follows 2010’s superb The Nameless.
So why has it been so long since we’ve heard from one of Ireland’s most gifted songwriters? Writer’s block might be the first thing that springs to mind, but it’s not the case here. After the brutal winter of 2010, Davey decided to set up the My Lovely Horse Rescue charity, an endeavour that has proven worthwhile but time-consuming.
“Myself and a group of friends were heavily involved in dog rescue, and it just became apparent that there was nowhere for the huge numbers of equines needing rescuing,” Davey says.
“There was an opening, a necessity, for setting something up. We started by rescuing two ponies, and we had a friend somewhere with land. One more came along, so I adopted that horse. I brought him to a yard, and it just so happened that the owners there were open to opening up their place to help us rescue more.”
Now, six years on, MLHR has 40 volunteers and UCD vets who come to treat the horses. Cathy – who herself has a farm with 20 animals – was able to return to making music and that fabled writer’s block didn’t come to pass. New Forest was written in two productive bursts – the first in Portumna, the second in Connemara.
“With each album I’d always pack up a home studio and go somewhere,” Davey says. “For The Nameless, I went to Donegal and France. For this one I went to Portumna, there’s a forest in Woodford which is indigenous. There was a cabin in the woods there, so I brought the dogs and the gear.”
Thylacine, one of the album’s standout songs, was written in Portumna, after Davey stumbled across a documentary on the cabin’s only TV channel. A thylacine is a Tasmanian marsupial whose plight struck a chord with Davey.
“The last one died in the 1920s in captivity – they were hunted to extinction, by us,” she says.
“That documentary was the lynchpin to the whole album. I’d been working in rescue, and it’s affecting and mood-altering to be involved in. Trying to process it, to figure out what’s the point in everything when you see so much awful stuff?”
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune