Folk to the fore as Canada’s Cara Luft plays concert in city

Canadian songwriter Cara Luft plays upstairs in Róisín Dubh this Saturday, June 8. Cara is someone to reckon with as she has been awarded a Juno (Canada’s answer to the Grammys) and was a former member of folk trio, The Wailin’ Jennys.

She has just released her third solo album, Darlingford. With all this experience behind her, was making this album easier than her previous efforts?

“It was a different process because I chose to record it myself,” Cara says. “Whereas all my previous solo recordings, as well as the recordings with the band I’d been in before, we’d always had a producer involved.

“I was always still very hands on with the process, and I understood how to produce an album but I’d never undertaken it myself. So it was quite different that way, learning to trust my instincts and learning to express what I wanted from the other players that were taking part.”

The album was recorded in a church in Darlingford, a rural town in Canada. What made Cara choose that unusual location?

“I used a couple of churches, actually,” she says. “Part of the reason I did that was the album was written after a pretty severe break-up. I was really wearing my heart on my sleeve, and I felt it would really help to capture the energy of the songs if I was to record them in a really unique environment.

“Churches have often been sung in; they’ve had a lot of music played in them. So I could pick up a little bit of the vibe that was already within those walls and have it seep into the album a little bit.”

Darlingford sees Cara Luft deliver a stirring version of Bring  ’em all In,a relatively unknown Mike Scott song. How did the Canadian folk singer come across it?

“A friend of mine, a guy who produced one of my albums, was a big Waterboys fan,” Cara explains. “I had listened to The Waterboys quite a bit, but he gave me Mike’s solo album. I listened to that song, and I was just floored. I thought it was one of the best written songs I had ever heard in my life.

“I thought ‘wouldn’t it be cool to it as a duet?’ and came up with my own rendition of Mike’s song, but not straying too far from Mike’s version. It’s such a great song, and audiences absolutely love it.”

Many of the songs were co-written with Lewis Melville, a songwriting friend of Cara’s. Having Lewis there helped to up her game, but it also meant she was a little more measured in how she wrote about her break-up.

“I did that purposely because I didn’t want to wallow in misery,” Cara says of having a collaborator. “Songwriters write from their experience, and I was going through a really difficult time. And I wanted to be able to write about it, but I didn’t want to do it in a way that nobody could relate to.

“Lewis could help me capture what I wanted to say in a song, but capture it in a way that it could be upbeat. It might have a sad subject matter, but it’s not going to be overly depressing to listen to.”

There was also a free flow of ideas, and opinions, between Cara and Lewis.

“I know him well, he’s an excellent songwriter, but he’s also the type of person that isn’t precious about his ideas. I wanted to write with somebody who wasn’t going to be ‘it’s my way or the high way’. If I had an idea and he disagreed, he could say so but neither one of us needed to feel hurt or upset.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.