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(HOPEWELL, NJ) — Karen Casey, certainly one of Eire’s best singer-songwriters – and a number one advocate for gender stability within the Irish people and conventional music scene – will make her first U.S. tour in three years from September 1-18, a slate of 13 performances that may spotlight her current work, together with her album Hieroglyphs That Inform the Story and new, as-yet-unreleased materials.  The tour involves The Hopewell Theater on Friday, September 16.

Her ardour for storytelling by songs, her means to offer centuries-old lyrics and themes a common, fashionable setting, and her perception that music may help change the world have enabled Casey to forge a deep reference to audiences in all places. 

A Waterford native, Casey was among the many vanguard of the Irish music revival’s “third wave” of the late Eighties/early Nineties, a founding member of the seminal Irish American band Solas earlier than launching her solo profession in 1999, and occurring to report 11 albums. Although steeped early on in Irish conventional and people music, Casey has lengthy adopted an eclectic path, whether or not learning classical music (she is a gifted pianist), fronting jazz bands or working with Frank Harte, a much-revered people/conventional singer from Dublin. The record of artists she’s carried out with is equally various: James Taylor, Maura O’Connell, Karen Matheson, the Boston Pops Orchestra, Tim O’Brien, The Chieftains, The Dubliners, and Béla Fleck, amongst others.

Praised as a first-rate interpreter of conventional and modern songs alike, Casey has through the years added one other dimension to her music: songwriting, a expertise she first displayed on her 2005 album Chasing the Solar and to full impact in 2014 on Two Extra Hours, her first recording of fully authentic materials. Casey has currently explored new modes of efficiency by accompanying herself on piano in addition to branching out into spoken phrase and theatre. Her musical play I Walked Into My Head directed by Sophie Motley was carried out in 2021 on the Kilkenny Arts Competition.

On her September 2022 tour, which can embrace her fourth look on NPR’s legendary Mountain Stage syndicated people music radio program, Casey shall be accompanied by a pair of achieved musicians, each members of widespread Irish band Beoga: Niamh Dunne (fiddle, vocals), who comes from a wealthy household heritage of Irish conventional music; and Seán Óg Graham (guitar), a gifted arranger, composer and producer who’s in nice demand as an accompanist. 

Hieroglyphs That Inform the Story (2018) has the hallmarks of Casey’s all-around excellence: her expressive, heart-on-the-sleeve voice; her means to immerse herself in numerous genres, together with alt-country, rock, gospel and blues in addition to Irish and people; and songs – two of them written by her – that empathize with the beleaguered, disdain the forces of strife and sorrow, and have fun the triumph of the guts and richness of the soul.

On the album, Casey covers “I’m Nonetheless Standing Right here,” Janis Ian’s ode to resilience; Bob Dylan’s bleak however insightful “Ballad of Hollis Brown”; the slicing “Man of God” by Eliza Gilkyson, on the exploitation of faith for private achieve; and Patti Griffin’s “Mary,” a portrait of mom Mary because the tragic however resolute personification of moms in all places. 

Becoming a member of her on numerous tracks are a who’s-who of feminine singers like Maura O’Connell, Niamh Dunne, Pauline Scanlon, Karen Matheson, and Aoife O’Donovan, and musicians like Catriona McKay and cellist Kate Ellis.

Unquestionably a spotlight of Hieroglyphs is Casey’s personal “Down within the Glen,” her deeply shifting tackle the 1916 Easter Rising that focuses on two heroic however forgotten girls: Julia Grenan, a nurse who stayed within the Irish rebels’ beleaguered Dublin headquarters, and her lover Elizabeth O’Farrell, who accompanied insurgent chief Pádraig Pearse to give up the Irish Republic flag to the British. As Casey famous in a 2019 interview, O’Farrell was airbrushed out of images taken of the occasion – an all-too-common prevalence in Irish historical past the place “the function of ladies, whether or not within the Rising or elsewhere, has typically been forgotten or ignored.”

Casey’s concern for the marginalization of ladies led her to spearhead the #FairPlé (“Honest Play”) marketing campaign in 2019 to advertise gender stability within the manufacturing, efficiency, promotion, and growth of Irish conventional and people music. #FairPlé (“plé” is the Irish phrase for “dialogue”) prompted the rise of a motion referred to as “Mise Fosta (Me Too),” which goals to handle issues about girls’s private security and safety in Irish music circles, from efficiency conditions to recording studios to touring.

“We began a dialog that wanted to happen,” she says “I’m pleased with the work that we’ve accomplished. It’s not been with out issue, and disappointment, and I used to be maybe a bit of naïve about how entrenched a number of the attitudes are towards girls. However the thought behind #FairPlé wasn’t to make individuals really feel unhealthy. It’s to the advantage of everybody if girls really feel protected, really feel equal, and really feel included.”

Casey’s repertoire has lengthy included conventional, modern or authentic songs that talk to the situation of ladies, and her still-unfinished new album – a few of which she is going to debut on the upcoming tour – follows that precedent: “It’s a deeper, longer dialog about girls,” she says.

Returning to the U.S. – the place she lived for a number of years throughout the Nineties – is at all times an important day for Casey, who has typically spoken of the affect of American music, and artists corresponding to Nina Simone, on her profession. After greater than two years of coping with isolation and different results from the COVID-19 pandemic, the September 2022 tour makes this newest go to all of the extra welcome.

“Coming to the US all these years in the past allowed me to discover – and to be – who I needed to be, and I’ve at all times had a particular place in my coronary heart for America since then,” says Casey. “I’m actually wanting ahead to it.”

Tickets for the Joe’s Pub present are out there for buy right here. Tickets for the Hopewell Theater present are out there for buy right here.

KARAN CASEY US TOUR 2022

Karan Casey (vocals, piano) – Niamh Dunne (fiddle, vocals) – Seán Óg Graham (guitar)

Sept 1     Barnard, VT               Feast and Area / BarnArts

Sept 3   Cumberland, RI          Blackstone River Theatre

Sept 4   Randolph, VT               New World Competition

Sept 5.    Truro, MA                    Payoment Performing Arts Heart

Sept 6   New York, NY               Joe’s Pub

Sept 7   Vienna, VA                     Jammin Java

Sept 8     Charlottesville, VA   Blue Ridge Irish Music / The Haven

Sept 11th of September  Greensboro, NC      North Carolina Folks Competition

Sept 13    Rockville, MD            St. Mark Presbyterian Church

Sept 14    Somerville, MA         The Burren. SOLD OUT

Set 15    Previous Saybrook, CT        Katharine Hepburn Heart for the Arts (The Kate)

Sept 16  Hopewell, NJ               Hopewell Theater

Sept 17  Frostburg, MD             Appalachian Competition / Frostburg State U. Frostburg Palace Theatre

Sept 18  Harrisonburg, VA      Mountain Stage James Madison U. Forbes Heart for the Performing Arts

TOP PHOTO BY AMELIA STEIN