INTERVIEW: Karan Casey is so grateful to be back on stage
Photo: Karan Casey will play Joe’s Pub in New York on Sept. 6. Photo courtesy of Amelia Stein / Provided by Cindy Byram PR with permission.
Karan Casey, the accomplished singer-songwriter, was sidelined during the COVID-19 pandemic, like much of the music world, but she is back with some new songs and many of her classics to delight American audiences. Her U.S. tour, the first in three years, kicks off Thursday, Sept. 1 in Vermont and continues through Sept. 18 in Virginia. In the middle, she’ll make a stop at Joe’s Pub (Sept. 6) for an intimate show in Lower Manhattan.
“I’ll be doing some of my older repertoire — ballads, Irish traditional songs that I’ve always done — and I’ll also be doing some new songs that I have written with the people traveling with me, which is a great treat,” Casey said in a recent phone interview.
Joining Casey will be Niamh Dunne on fiddle and vocals, and Seán Óg Graham on guitar, according to press notes. “So we’ll be airing some of those new songs and I suppose seeing how they go down, hoping that they’ll go down well,” she said.
The native of Waterford, Ireland, has a relatively new recording with 2018’s Hieroglyphs That Tell the Tale, a collection of tunes that Casey truly appreciates from other songwriters. Most of the music is courtesy of American singers like Bob Dylan, Janet Ian and Patti Griffith, with tunes like “Hollis Brown,” “I’m Still Standing Here,” “In the Gutter” and “My One and Only You.” The American emphasis is not a great surprise; Casey actually called the United States home back in the mid-1990s when she kicked off a jazz career. Her professional interests brought her back to Ireland and traditional Irish music, but she has kept her American memories with her throughout the years.
The COVID-19 pandemic presented many unique challenges for Casey and other live performers throughout the world. The singer-songwriter said she thrives on live performance, and up until March 2020, she had been touring for 25 years straight. To suddenly hit the pause button was difficult.
“I didn’t really know anything else, to be honest,” Casey said. “Plus, in saying that, I think a lot of artistic minds were very well-equipped to deal with things being up in the air. Obviously, having no money or no gig or no work is something I think all artists have lived or endured at some point in their lives, so it did make me reframe and consider my privilege of having had so much touring and so much work. And I also really enjoyed … having some downtime with my family, being able to be at home with my two daughters. I probably got more time than I ordinarily would have. I’m not sure the feeling was mutual [laughs], but I definitely enjoyed having a good time with them. And I’d often write all these upbeat songs, and I actually wrote a book, and I wrote a play, so I explored other areas. And I actually really value that, and I really enjoyed that. I suppose in Ireland we were very fortunate that the government did give pandemic payments to people who couldn’t work, so that was incredibly helpful. That really helped to ease our anxiety in the artistic community, and so I was very grateful for that.”
When Casey finally made it back to the stage, it was July of 2021. She was playing an outdoor gig, and she was completely bowled over by the emotional response of the audience. They were singing along, and it didn’t rain one drop — a minor miracle in Ireland. Yet lovely rainbows arched across the sky while she played her set. “It was an extraordinary, very emotional gig,” she said. “I loved it.”
One commonality throughout Casey’s career is her undying desire to promote gender balance in the traditional music scene. She spearheaded a #FairPlé social media campaign to bring light to the issue, according to a press release. (Fair Plé stands for “fair play.”) And she didn’t only want women better represented on stage, but also behind the scenes in production and promotion.
“We’ve been doing a lot of work, a lot of activist work,” said Casey, who learned music from her two grandmothers and father. “I’m really proud of the work that we’ve done, and we definitely initiated much-needed conversation. And things have shifted, I think, slightly. Now if you’re bringing up gender balance in a room or you’re on a board, it’s OK to do that, I think, but we still have a lot of work to do. What I loved about the campaign was the camaraderie between the women and men who worked on it, but, sadly, yes, there are a lot of festivals where it’s predominantly male, like 75-80 percent. So we have a mountain of work to do.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Karan Casey will tour the United States, Sept. 1-18. Click here for more information and tickets.
