STORYBOOK is a new album by Cathy Jordan and Feargal Murray, featuring ten songs by Irish composer Brendan Graham. The songs are a mix of love, loss, leaving, elemental things, shifting seasons and desires, and country, emigration, and blessings. Graham writes in an old genre way of drawing pictures, experimenting with form and delving into such as ‘night-visiting’ songs.
The album was inspired by the demos that Jordan and Murray made of Graham’s songs over the last 25 years. They have augmented these demos with a stellar line up of musicians from Ireland, Scotland, Norway and Sweden. The album has been praised by ethnomusicologist, sociologist and Professor of Anthropology at South Carolina’s College of Charleston, who wrote in Hot Press that Graham’s songs are “a link” between the old tradition of writing and the more modern ‘folk tradition’. The album is a beautiful and moving collection of songs, Including Isle Of Hope Isle Of Tears and The Fairhaired Boy, that will appeal to fans of traditional Irish music, folk music, and singer-songwriters.