Blazing Minds caught up with Ulster singer-songwriter, harpist and biologist Bróna McVittie for a chat.
Bróna releases her fourth solo album this autumn. Supernatural is her most ambitious work to date: an immersive journey into the mythic imagination of Ireland and beyond.
1.‘Supernatural’ is inspired by Irish folklore & mythology. What is it about these tales speak to you musically?
Actually, it’s broader than Irish mythology; there are fables from Lithuania, Spain and Ukraine in the anthology A Way with the Fairies, which is companion to the album. The stories are united across themes of love, loss and transformation. My life has recently suffered a number of upheavals, and I’ve identifies with the characters in the stories. I’ve inhabited them to birth the songs for the Supernatural album. It has been an incredible experience.
2. The album is being released around Halloween and Samhain, a time traditionally associated with the boundary between the natural and supernatural worlds. What does Samhain mean to you personally, and how did it influence the atmosphere of the album?
Samhain is the old pagan festival that marks the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter, the threshold between the lighter and darker halves of the year. Traditionally, it was a time for gathering, feasting and remembering the dead. As Christianity spread through Ireland and Britain, the calendar absorbed and reshaped many older seasonal traditions. All Hallows’ Eve, the evening before All Saints’ Day on 1 November, eventually became known as Hallowe’en. Since the stories in my folklore anthology all share a supernatural theme, Samhain seemed a fitting time to release the album.
3. You describe your music as ‘cosmic folk’, bringing together harp, traditional song, electronic textures and sounds inspired by the natural world. How has that sound evolved across your four albums, and where does ‘Supernatural’ take it next?
Actually, it was Cerys Matthews who came up with that description when she interviewed me on her show a few years ago after my first album was released. My sound had been described as “Pastoral folk with a kosmische filter” by Conor O’Toole of the Underground of Happiness. The blend of acoustic and electronic instruments on my albums is a consistent theme and has always been inspired by nature and the world around me. My sound has evolved through experimentation with my DAW – Ableton Live. The Supernatural album experiments more boldly with electronics in tracks such as The Black Rogue and Humpy. And I’ve started using Ableton Push 3 onstage, which gives me a very flexible palette of electronic sounds and the possibility of creating a bigger soundscape than ever before.
4. The album accompanies your illustrated folklore anthology A Way with the Fairies, what was it like creating music in response to stories, and did the music ever take you somewhere unexpected?
Yes! Every song has been a journey of unknown destination. The stories got selected based on which ones spoke to me most strongly as I began experimenting with sounds and lyrics, which are directly drawn from each fable. There were quite a lot of stories whose songs never got finished. And so, the songs kind of directed the choice of which fables and tales were to be included in the anthology. I have enough material to do a sequel!
5. You collaborated with artists from Spain, Ukraine and Lithuania on individual tracks. What did those collaborations add to your exploration of folklore and storytelling?
Dipping into European folklore – guided by my collaborators – highlighted the similarity in mythical themes and archetypes. These seem to be universal: love, loss and transformation. The folk legends and myths, no matter their origin, are about people who cross boundaries, are transformed, lose things, find things and sometimes come back changed. It was a pleasure to share in the deeply transformative process of writing from folklore with these fabulous female artists from Spain, Ukraine and Lithuania. Each brings their own unique style and flavour to the work. I am very proud of it.
6. Does your background as a biologist also inform your work? Do you see science and folklore as two very different ways of understanding the world, or are there more connections between them than we might think?
In the sense that I’m a researcher, yes. The discipline required for different styles of research is similar. But science is a very creative endeavour, like the arts. Biologists theorise on how the natural world works, what processes underlie life as we know it. That requires huge imagination. Mythology theorises on human relationships and our interactions with the supernatural. Our folkloric heritage isn’t just a bunch of quaint stories. It invites us to consider things we don’t entirely understand: death, love, loss, transformation and the otherworld.
Bróna McVittie’s new album Supernatural is released October 16th. To pre-order: https://bronamcvittie.bandcamp.com/album/supernatural
Karen Woodham is the founder and owner of the Blazing Minds. She is also a Cinema reviewer and works with RealD 3D reviewing the latest 3D releases and IMAX, she has also had several articles published in various publications including the first edition of SFW Magazine. In 2015 she became an Award Winning Blogger and also has her website listed as one of the UK’s Top 10 Film Blogs.