This is where I lay down
Where my kettle boils
This is where my mind sighs
This is where my heart lies.
So sing Ye Vagabonds on their powerful, cinematic fifth album, All Tied Together. With this release, the multi-award-winning Irish band deliver deeply evocative original songs infused with memory, tribute, and gratitude. Throughout, a strong sense of home prevails, both their own hard-won digs, past and present, and an inner refuge for anyone longing for connection beyond time and geography. “All these songs have addresses,” says co-frontman Diarmuid Mac Gloinn. “They’re about specific locations and specific people.”
Community has always been an integral part of Ye Vagabonds. With All Tied Together, they’ve brought that ethos to their music as never before. Rising from the ashes of the 2008 economic collapse, the Mac Gloinn brothers – Brian and Diarmuid – first performed in the streets together as buskers. They coalesced into Ye Vagabonds while simultaneously creating now-legendary music nights and community-building events in their native Carlow, and later in Dublin. At these gatherings, a vast array of musical styles unfolded: jazz, folk, punk rock, blues, traditional Irish fare, Sardinian pipers, the Beatles, everything. The brothers soaked it all up for their work.
Ye Vagabonds have since evolved into a robust collective – a sonically unique ensemble featuring layered acoustic and electric guitars, trumpet, upright bass, Moog synthesizer, harmonium, bouzouki, fiddle, and the blood harmony of the siblings’ distinctive, multi-hued voices. For All Tied Together, the whole shebang was recorded mostly live in an old Galway house, with acclaimed producer Phil Weinrobe (Big Thief, Adrienne Lenker) at the helm. “We kept seeing his name on stuff we loved,” says Brian. Both Weinrobe and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily (Laura Viers, Cass McCombs) flew over from Brooklyn. “Shahzad brings a magic to it,” says Diarmuid. “He is a wonder, one-of-a-kind.” The dynamic All Tied Together arrangements are credited to a collaborative group of (sometimes ten) musicians. No one wore headphones.
While initially achieving renown as purveyors of their ancestors’ music mixed with folk-based originals, the Mac Gloinns have increasingly focused on honing their own material, enlisting trusted co-conspirators to distill voice and vision into potent tunes. Prepping for All Tied Together, they created a Dublin-based songwriters’ meetup and enrolled in online workshops, studying the craft like a full-time job. Diarmuid says, “I treated it like my 9-to-5. I was going to a desk in our rehearsal space five days a week. For months. The days I wasn’t working, I was reading about the process, for both songwriting and short stories.” The brothers cite fiction writers George Saunders and Claire Keegan as particular inspirations.
The results of the woodshedding are immediately apparent in the gorgeous, novelistic detail of All Tied Together opener “On Sitric Road.” Over swelling synth, Brian sings, “I remember that first evening / Singing John Prine ‘til dawn / Round the iron stove on Sitric Road / With my big wool coat on.”
A companion piece to “On Sitric Road” is the upbeat, fiddle-propelled “The Flood,” a window into a lively, but doomed scene from their early Dublin days, a squatters’ community brought to vivid life in lines like “Bells ringing in the battered yard / Evicted this morning, thought you might’ve heard / At five in the morning they cut their way in / We were singing in the kitchen when the bailiffs charged.”
Over a distinctive mix of cello, synthesizer, and harmonium, the lens tightens for the character study “Danny,” based on a troubled Carlow boy who, Diarmuid says, “didn’t get a fair run. I wanted to celebrate him.” The brothers sing: “He ran like he could feel / Something snapping at the heels / Of his worn out shoes / Too fast to follow / Too hot to hold / Too good to lose.”
With “Cuckoo Storm,” the Mac Gloinns touch on the beautiful strangeness of friends from “squat days” becoming parents. Says Brian: “These people are one day zipping around on their bike ‘til dawn getting up to mischief, and the next, they’re being kept up all night by a baby.” Of the brisk, similarly themed piece, “Where My Heart Lies,” Brian says, “It’s recognizing a change of home, a change of life.” The brothers sing: “There’s knowing in the loss / In the greys of black and white / The fledgling on the nest / Pausing just before it flies.” Another tune longing for stable domesticity is the spartan, hopeful “Four Walls,” which, Brain says, chronicles repeated evictions he and his partner endured, thankfully in the rearview. Over a determinedly optimistic mandolin, he sings, “Hurrying on / We’ll leave it all / But we’ll find our way / To our own four walls.”
Another dearly departed Carlow friend is honored in the elegant waltz “I’ll Keep Singing.” As atmospheric feedback and synthesizer mesh, the brothers sing with both humor and melancholy of a beloved mentor who passed along books and encouraged early songwriting attempts: “Could have been worse / Gave me a verse / Looked good on paper / But fell apart later.”
One of the more striking sounding All Tied Together tracks is intense love song “Gravity.” It soars with only bowed double bass, spectral synth, pulsing harmonics, and soft, Eno-esque atonality. “Mayfly,” like “Danny,” is another sharply observed, compassionate elegy for someone who, Diarmuid says, has been “othered” by society, yet lives heroically, by their wits among “anarchists, squatters, a lot of them serious vagabonds.”
Unabashed, swaying ballad “Young Again,” written for Diarmuid’s wife, contains perhaps one of the best couplets yet penned in an amorous ode: “Young again we’ll never be / We’re as young as we’ll ever be / Who the fuck is better off than us?” That last bit was suggested by producer Weinrobe. “He really pushed us in a good way,” says Brian, laughing.
For buoyant “Long Grass,” Diarmuid was inspired by a Rumi line: “Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrongdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.” The long grass of the title is a kind of garden where, Brian says, one can bridge the distance that develops between people: “Maybe you grow apart because your political ideas form in different ways, or your jobs are so different you no longer have anything in common. ‘Long Grass’ tries to brush that aside and get back to who we really are, the core of us.”
With impromptu piano from photographer Louise Gaffney and dramatic cello from Kate Ellis, “We Always Forget About the Rain,” the brothers say, is about being unprepared for the inevitable, even when something – a rainstorm, a birth, a death, an eviction, a concert, an album – is coming. Yet in this song, and in All Tied Together as a whole, Ye Vagabonds render the unavoidable thing – real or metaphorical – as a cause for singing. That singing is best done with family of both blood and choice, preferably together in a room, where the magic of a well-wrought song defies loss and shadow, and people, places, and dreams live in the light again.
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