Like snails that change their shell and therefore feel different. Like someone who with a new car believes they are changing something substantial in their life. Many times we deceive ourselves, not to mention with technology, to which we attribute the ability to change our lives, when in reality it only changes our shell. Music often shows us that despite many changes, what lives inside the shell doesn’t vary that much, and we are subject to passions and anxieties that have long dominated our existence. Singer and composer Ferran Palau often affirms this by saying that in the beginning there was folk and this music, simple and popular, is our logbook, and can tell centuries-old stories and contemporary stories with validity. The Blues & Ritmes Festival, already 37 editions, had the foresight to bring Ya Vagabonds, an Irish folk group that, after their fourth album, All Tied Togheter, is on the launchpad, and in Badalona they offered their only concert in Spain and the last of their European tour. It was a bittersweet sound chronicle of what we are.
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The heart of the group are two brothers, Diarmuid and Brían Mac Gloinn, on vocals and strings like mandolins and guitars. In Badalona they were accompanied by three other musicians in charge of harmonium, concertina, and violin. With these elements and speaking of folk, one might expect a party of clapping and dancing, but Ya Vagabonds’ folk has a deep melancholic character, balladistic anchors, and a social passion that gives it a slightly solemn tone, though without fuss. In total, clapping, and little of it, only in The Humours Of Glin, an instrumental piece that sounded second to last in the repertoire, the only one that evoked a party. The rest was restraint and emotion raised by Brían’s warm and serene voice, occasionally also backed as a soloist by his brother Diarmuid, mostly in charge of doing the second voice. A vocal basketry weave.
The themes? The usual ones. The first, The Harest Lament, a popular theme that spoke of hunting from the perspective of the prey, while the second, Lowland Of Holland, also popular, narrated the misfortunes of forced conscription, which today appear on the horizon of some European countries as in 17th and 18th century Europe. Home, its loss and nostalgia in On Sitric Road; the housing crisis in current Dublin in The Flood; the struggle for a roof over one’s head expressed in hopeful phrases in Four Walls like “we will find our way/to our own four walls”; the nostalgia for the passage of time that distances us from the young person we once were in Young Again; or that song to the storms at the threshold between spring and summer in the beautiful Cuckoo Storm whose ending, by fortune, was punctuated by the wail of a creature that reinforced the human plot of the concert. Beautiful and simple songs, deep and melancholic, some rained down through the centuries, without a hint of rhythm, sometimes ethereal, like the introspective Gravity or the two sung in Gaelic, Máire Bhán and the aforementioned instrumental The Humours Of Glin.
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And as happens in concerts like this, the separation between what is new and what comes from time was barely distinguishable. Popular and new songs mixed in a river of life of music that when it was born, like all popular music, was our reflection, a mirror of our fears and illusions, of our own smallness, as Ya Vagabonds sang in Mayfly, the English name for the ephemeral, an aquatic insect whose adult life barely reaches 24 hours. Perfectly blended voices, beautiful harmonies, delicate mandolin plucking, the breathing of the harmonium, and great songs, like that Long Grass that sang to us that in the tall grass we will find the refuge we need. In the intimacy of a theater, at that festival that once brought Randy Newman and will close with another unique concert in Spain, that of Texan legend Rodney Crowell on the 25th. More music to tell us that we are basically like our ancestors were. Even if intelligence is artificial and we buy a bigger car.
