Aoife O'Donovan with Maya de Vitry
This event is in the past
Thursday, September 29, 2022, 8 pm
Tractor Tavern
Ballard (Seattle)
This is an in-person event
$20
21+
The following description comes from the event organizer.
Reflection, remembrances, and self-reckoning combine on Aoife O'Donovan's third solo album, where her gift for tantalizing poetry is woven into a soundscape more rich and vivid than any she's created before. Age of Apathy is an album that traces a journey through grown-up life and ponders the question facing both singer and listener alike: what do you want from yourself?The 11 tracks on this record came together in an extraordinarily fertile few months, sparked by O'Donovan's move out of New York in September 2020. Transplanted to the lush forests of central Florida, O'Donovan found something she'd never known before: the time and space to craft an album away from a packed performing schedule and the rigors of the road.
For someone who admits that writing can be a struggle, the process was electrifying. "I felt I'd entered into a creative period unlike anything else I'd ever done," says O'Donovan. It's impossible to feel the groove of "Phoenix" -- a celebration of her muse's return -- or hear the cosmic uplift of the album-closer, "Passengers," without absorbing her own joy-filled experience.
She is, however, aware of the irony. After all, this burst of creativity emerged from -- and often charts -- the malaise that dogged her at the start of the pandemic, and which had its origins long before. In the album's title song, "Age of Apathy," O'Donovan references the moment she (along with so many of her generation) felt her adulthood begin: on September 11, 2001. Instead of dwelling on an individual tragedy, she draws her emotion from the two decades that followed: an onslaught of information from the digital age, a cultural environment that can leave us both overwhelmed and inert. "I let go around 2009," she sings, "lost the feeling in my hands."