The work of composer, songwriter and performer Cal Folger Day has increasingly embraced the conceptual with each passing release. Based between Baltimore and Dublin, the artist started out writing more traditional verse-and-chorus songs (as on 2013’s Ep. Drom-d’reau) but soon gravitated towards more ambitious, far-reaching projects. At the Roots of the Stars experimented with text-to-speech to celebrate and subvert the 1919 play by modernist author Djuna Barnes, while The Woods and Grandma centred on an interview featuring two elderly sisters who had been raised by Irish folklorist and cultural icon, Lady Gregory.
With their roots in the spoken word, the projects revealed Cal Folger Day’s deep interest in language and its attached rhythms. Music not merely inspired by the nuance and elasticity of speech but born of them, the energy latent within the patterns and cadences manifest as sound. “I definitely have an obsessive capacity for verbal detail,” Day explains. “Ums, you knows, hahas, and all the fragments they weave around, which is simply like a dog I have to take on a walk.” Latest album Piece-dye centres on this fascination, with Day interviewing distant aunt Irene Nally about her life as an immigrant from Sligo living in post-war New York, then using Nally’s verbatim answers as the lyrics for the songs. “I just knew that I liked spending time with Irene and that it was compelling for me to turn her words over and over like a pebble,” Day continues. “At the end of the project I didn’t know anything more than that.”
This exploratory attitude informs the music itself too. With help from Phil Christie (keys, guitar, vocals), Daniel Fox (bass), Solamh Kelly (percussion) and Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh (viola), Cal Folger Day weaves what the album notes describe as a “musically omnivorous” sound, encompassing punk and country styles within the experimental and jazz-inflected whole. A sound which fluctuates from bombastic to contemplative and back again with each of the ‘Acts’, all according to whatever vibe or energy is seeded within Nally’s words at any given moment.
What emerges is a fascinating and often contradictory medium with which to explore an equally intricate subject. One capable of communicating a candid story of one woman’s life which nevertheless carries an abstract weight by the very nature of its form. A style of music, that is, able to drill through the layers of history, evoking narratives both personal and social as well as more theoretical or conceptual ideas around language and memory. Piece-dye is the story of Irene Nally, born in Ireland and living in New York, but also a story of women more generally. A story of corporate America, of immigrants, of any human who has ever spoken to another in the hope of preserving something about who they are and where they’ve been.
Lead single ‘Act 2’ serves as the perfect introduction to the project. A journey straddling pop and avant garde which negotiates the pitfalls of the time, guided by Day’s rendition of Nally’s frank and often genuinely funny narration. “I wasn’t even looking for a career,” she explains in the opening:
The career happened
And then I obviously found myself dealing with some of the
I mean it was Mad Men time
Eh so you eh you were dealing with a huge amount of sexism and whatnot
Ehm on this but because of my background
I was able to deal with it in my way
Now it wasn’t necessarily the right way
But I would say my line was I was brought up in a convent
You know I’d stonewall
You know I played the convent card til it was threadbare ha
And then I played the I am married card until it was threadbare
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The track also comes with a video by the ‘mysterious Blob Galahad’, which you can check out below:
Piece-dye is out on the 3rd June and you can pre-order it now from the Cal Folger Day Bandcamp page.
Photo by Cameron Kelly