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Albuquerque Journal, Concert Preview >>
In some dark places, singer sees the light
By David Steinberg Journal Staff Writer
A convention awards dinner in a hotel ballroom isn’t an ideal venue acoustically for a singer. But the audience — the National Association on Mental Illness — was perfect for Susan McKeown. Perfect, because McKeown sang selections from her new album, “Singing in the Dark.”
The CD’s theme is about depression.
“(My performance) meant so much to the audience. It was very memorable. They just were coming up afterwards to share their stories,” the Grammywinning McKeown said in a phone interview.
And audience members at concerts since that last July NAMI preview performance have been sharing the sadness of family stories. “It’s wonderful to feel that people have a chance to talk where it’s not just in medical situations,” McKeown said.
“I’ve always found music was a safe place to go, no matter what is going on. Leonard Cohen has been making records like this, though not overtly, not telling people. People find solace there.”
On her album she sings the Cohen song “Anthem,” which states that “There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.”
Three cuts contain the words of poets Theodore Roethke, Lord Byron and Anne Sexton, all of whom suffered from severe forms of bipolar illness, according to the CD’s liner notes.
The song “In a Dark Time” has these Roethke words: “I know the purity of pure despair,/My shadow pinned against a sweating wall. …”
McKeown said that in this song, as in a number of others on the recording, she finds hope.
“For me, (Roethke) is saying he’s got this crippling state, but he gets this understanding because of it,” she said. “Roethke had a deep love of nature so he had that as his comfort.”
In the song “A Woman Like That (Her Kind)” are these words by Sexton:
“… lonely thing, 12-fingered, out of mind./A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
” …
McKeown thinks that Sexton, as with many women today, was crying out for help because she was undiagnosed.
Some of the songs on the album are rooted in her native Ireland. One is “Mad Sweeney,” an Irish legend, about a king who needs “the woods for consolation.”
Another cut has a McKeown arrangement of the traditional Irish tune of “We’ll Go No More A-Roving,” which is set to a Lord Byron poem.
Ireland, McKeown said, has a particularly high rate of suicide among young men, which is comparable to similar rates on Indian reservations in the United States.
McKeown will be in concert Sunday, Dec. 5, at the Outpost Performance Space with guitarist Ryan McGiver and bassist Jason Sypher.
Susan McKeown
WHEN : 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 5
WHERE : Outpost Performance Space, 210 Yale SE
HOW MUCH : $20 general public, $15 students and Outpost members in advance at the Outpost box office, by calling 268-0044 or at the door
Irish singer Susan McKeown features songs about depression on her new album. 12/03/10 >> go there
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