Some time in the late 1990s, I read Dubliners by James Joyce. I recall enjoying his collection of short stories and was struck by how readable they were. That was as far as my relationship with Joyce went; a literary one-night stand. Not for one moment did I think that more than years later I would resume my affair with Dubliners and that, in collaboration with Irish folk artist Gráinne Hunt, I would be on the cusp of releasing an album of original songs based on Dubliners, to be performed during the 2023 Bloomsday Festival.
Gráinne and I met by accident in late 2020. We had followed quite different paths up to that point, but we shared a common thread in that we both left non-music jobs to pursue music full time. In my case, I left an actuarial career of twenty five years to begin a graduate degree in music in 2014. We were both gaining momentum with our respective original music projects when the curtains closed on live music in March 2020. The following months were challenging, as we all tried to reinvent ourselves to some extent.
In November of that year, a friend asked me if I would sign up to an online song-writing workshop with her. The workshop ran for two hours every Tuesday evening over a six-week period, with a song-writing assignment to be completed each week. In the third week, the assignment given was to write a song based on the short story Araby by James Joyce. We were put into random pairs and Gráinne and I ended up being paired together.
We clicked immediately and within 48 hours we had completed our first co-write of what would become a much bigger project. In January 2021, we decided to write some more songs and within a couple of months our ambition had expanded to write an album of 15 songs, one for each short story in Dubliners. It took us just over a year to complete the writing process. Our aim was to capture the essence of each story in the lyrics of a song and the sentiment of the story in the music that we wrote for it.
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My approach to song-writing up to that point had been to develop musical ideas first, with lyrics coming second. For our Dubliners project however, we took the reverse approach for most of the songs, which seemed fitting given their literary inspiration. For each song, we spent time crafting and honing lyrics that we hope Joyce would approve of, were he alive today. For example, in the final verse of The Dead, we tried to capture what Gretta might have been thinking as she reminisced to Gabriel about the “delicate” boy Michael Furey who died at the tender age of 17:
“Now I must go as darkness turns to grey / I often think of you memory never fades / What we might have been had I not gone away / In sleep I visit you where’er you lay”.
We decided early on that we would name each song after the story on which it was based and that we would follow the same running order of tracks on the album as the order in which the stories appear in Dubliners. While the songs are all firmly rooted in the folk idiom, we set ourselves the challenge of varying the structure and feel of the songs, with a view to maintaining the listener’s attention throughout the entire album.
At its simplest level, some of the songs such as Araby are tender, haunting ballads with delicate string arrangements while others like Ivy Day In The Committee Room are uptempo tracks with a rhythm section of drums, bass, guitar and piano driving the music. From a structural perspective, The Dead and The Boarding House have refrains rather than choruses while A Little Cloud and Grace have neither a refrain nor a chorus! An example of how the arrangements were influenced by the content of the stories is the song Eveline, which includes a soundscape of a bustling port with people, fog horns and seagulls.
We recorded the album at Black Mountain Studios over two sessions, in March and May 2022. During the summer months, the album was mixed and mastered which required little direct input from Gráinne and me and so we had plenty of time to come up with a title for the album and an artist name under which to release it. We decided on The Stern Task of Living for the album title, which comes from a line in the short story Two Gallants and which we felt reflected the hardship that many people have endured in recent years. One of Joyce’s biggest literary influences was the Norwegian playwright Henrick Ibsen and he ultimately was the inspiration for our artist name Hibsen.
We will be launching The Stern Task of Living at Smock Alley Theatre as part of this year’s Bloomsday Festival, performing two concerts, on June 9th and 10th. Each concert will entail a performance of the full album by a line-up of ten musicians, including the string quartet Musici. In addition, Frank McNally of The Irish Times will provide expositions of and recitations from Dubliners.
It is two and a half years since I first ‘met’ Gráinne, although we did not actually meet in person until six months later! It has been a wonderful journey, and in contrast to 25 years ago, Joyce’s Dubliners has become an integral part of my being. To borrow from and to paraphrase Joyce, “when I die, Dubliners will be written on my heart”.
The Stern Task of Living will be available on all streaming platforms from May 26th. You can listen to Araby on Bandcamp here. Hibsen will play Smock Alley Theatre on June 9th & 10th. See smockalley.com
