Susan McKeown is nothing if not fearlessly eclectic. Her homebase is clearly the Irish song tradition but she has strayed widely and deeply. Her musical education included operatic training (brief, aparently, but she learned a few things about dramatic songs and their presentation), busking (always great preparation for the business of entertaining audiences), leaving Ireland for New York before the Tiger times, and embracing world music years before it became a popular and profitable side-trip for musicians. 
 

Even by her exalted, adventurous standards, the new album Singing in the Dark, is a reach. It’s a musical exploration of the work of poets whose lives or families were touched by mental illness, depression or substance abuse. Drawn by the Irish traditional flair for cloaking melancholic stories in seductive melodies, McKeown set out to transform dark and difficult words into lyrics she could sing and swing. 

She launches into Theodore Roethke’s In a Dark Time which provides immediate and persuasive proof of the concept. The music releases the redemptive aspirations embedded in this and the other poems. There is often a strong correlation between madness and creative pursuits and the album explores this interaction. Many of our best writers and musicians were driven by their own demons or, at least, had demonic chauffeurs. Roethke poses this question:

Ireland, like many nations, has ambiguous attitudes to mental illness. It was common enough years ago to find people who were “away with the fairies” or touched in some way. They were generally accepted and protected, at least in rural communities. But the condition also carried massive amounts of stigma and every county had a mental hospital where afflicted people were locked away. Often the location was a simple code: “She’s over in Ballinasloe” meant only one thing in Galway.

Some will remember the national brouhaha that ensued from the publication of Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics by Nancy Scheper-Hughes in 1979. In retrospect, it seems like a very mild episode of airing our cultural dirty laundry. Suicide is another tragic manifestation of these issues and among young Irish people it has reached epidemic proportions. It raged during the boom years and it does not seem likely to abate in the current straitened times.

One question that should be asked more frequently is: How much of the mental illness and depression in Ireland is really a legacy of many years of child abuse, the "gift" that keeps on giving?

And, somewhat down the scale, many Irish families lived with members who were visited by the Black Dog of depression. The ravenous dog was often fed a steady diet of the other black stuff by fathers who struggled but that rarely saved wives and children from sharing the suffering. 

Borrowing from Irish poetry has been an irresistible urge for many musicians. Yeats’s poems have been adapted by many composers and singers. Melanie O’Reilly has converted some of Nuala Ni Domhnaill’s poems on her albums. (McKeown has one on this album, The Crack in the Stairs, translated from the Irish by Paul Muldoon.) John Spillane and Louis de Paor have fused poetry and music on albums like The Gaelic Hit Factory. 

I first heard McKeown on Lowlands over ten years ago and following her career since has been an intriguing and rewarding journey. She had made six albums during the 1990s and her ambitions radiated through every one, including Peter and Wendy, the first of many collaborations with the late Johnny Cunningham. Here’s two snippets from my review of Lowlands in Irish Music magazine, September 2000.
Lowlands features carefully chosen songs with tasteful and varied arrangements, all of them beautifully delivered by McKeown. It’s a shining collection of some of the best music from the vocal traditions of Ireland, Scotland and England which enhances her growing reputation as one of  Ireland’s pre-eminent female singers.
Perhaps the most dramatic performance on the album, and the only non-traditional song, is Dark Horse on the Wind, an eerie indictment (and darkly prophetic too in light of recent scandals) of the hype and hypocrisy of the 1966 commemoration of the 1916 Rising written by the late, lamented Liam Weldon.

A Winter Talisman from 2001, is a marvellous record of her time touring and playing with Johnny Cunningham and Aidan Brennan. Sweet Liberty in 2004 has her singing with Taureg women in an extraordinary fusion on an old lubin, Oro Mo Mhile Gra (A Thousand Times my Love). Blackthorn, Irish Love Songs, issued in 2006, is full of delights: song geneaologies by McKeown and the late Tom Munnelly and Dana Lyn’s fiddling as the extra voice on the album. More recently she featured on Absolutely Irish, a recording of performances by many of Ireland’s finest players produced by Mick Moloney in New York. 

She has recorded klezmer music with the Klezmatics. Her first album with that band, Wonder Wheel, won a Grammy in 2006. And a second album exploring the Yiddish and Irish vocal traditions, Saints and Tzadiks with Lorin Sklamberg, was released last year. Singing Klezmer songs requires vocalistics since they are melodically and lyrically convoluted. It must have served as great preparation for the work on her new album. 
 

There are a few real torch songs on the record. Mad Sweeney is a very old poem which McKeown adapted and arranged.  She wrote the music for The Crazy Woman by Gwendolyn Brooks, a classic jazz quartet treatment with sinuous piano lines by Sonelius Smith. There’s a hair-raising rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Anthem. And, one of the funniest songs draws onHayden Carruth’s poem, Good Old World Blues. 

A Woman Like That (Her Kind) by Ann Sexton gets a muted rock arrangement and has been released as a single. Sexton took her own life in 1967 the same year as Chilean singer Violetta Parra whose classic ballad of affirmation, Gracias a la Vida, is sung with pure passion by McKeown.

It’s a deeply moving and uplifting recording. McKeown has impressive command of her voice with tone, phrasing, power and feeling always in balance. But she willingly takes risks with her singing, rising to every challenge, and she can live with the odd flaw, the cracks that light up her work. She has plenty to say about the album, which was seven years in the making, and her fluid explanations are worth a close listen.

The West Coast tour for Singing in the Dark begins November 26 in Eugene, Oregon and continues with shows in Portland, OR, Clinton, WA, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Full details are on her website.

For Bay Area fans and for those who may not have heard her, she appears at the Freight & Salvage on Thursday, December 2nd. She is not to be missed by any admirer of singing, songs and serious artistry.