in 2006, Órla Sweeney took over the job of producing the series of Ceol albums. A natural fit for her, it combined the two main loves in her life – music and the Irish language. The task was to convince a who’s who of Irish musicians to record a song as Gaeilge, and as you can see from the selection of artists who performed on just the first one, she succeeded.
A tough job – it required an in depth knowledge of music and Irish, persuasive skills, perseverance, and the ability to convince artists to strip their songs bare, translate them into a different language, and build them back up. Not easy. But she did it, and is rightly proud of the job she did.
Órla told us this on this week’s podcast. But the really interesting part came when my co-host Rory told Órla of the influence one of the songs had on his life and the secondary school he was in at the time. Everyone in his school loved The Coronas’ Heroes or Ghosts, but the thing was that when they sang it, it was in Irish, not English. A direct result of the work Órla did, this happened more than 10 years ago, and she had no idea about it.
And that’s the thing. You’re never going to know how the work you share will impact others, but one thing’s for sure – if you don’t share your work, it will have no impact.
To send you off into the weekend in a good mood, below is Orla singing Wild Mountainside from our recent show ‘Not a Theme Night’. Beautiful stuff.
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