Aoife O’Donovan: The Hug That Surrounds Us All
photo credit: Omar Cruz
The title of the newest album by singer-songwriter Aoife O’Donovan, Age of Apathy, may strike some as cynical—until she explains it.
“Cynical is the wrong word,” says the Massachusetts-born artist, checking in from her current home in Florida. “What I mean is the numbing. I just read an article in The New York Times this morning about the numbing that we’re all feeling right now at this stage of the pandemic.”
The title song, like several of O’Donovan’s latest originals, is highly personal and stuffed with vivid imagery—specific dates and places populate the lyrics. Memories flow through the narratives, snapshots of life’s fleeting flashes.
“Let’s take a ride/ I know you love the Taconic at twilight,” O’Donovan sings, referencing a picturesque highway that runs north of New York City into New England. “Go east on 23 past the farms and the festival memories/ Listening to the Hudson Valley breeze/ Oh, to be born in the age of apathy, when nothing’s got a hold on you.”
Then, comes the resolution, the optimism the listener longs for: “If you need someone to hold/ You can hold me.”
“I started to write the song in June of 2020,” O’Donovan says. “I realized I could pinpoint the beginning of my adulthood to 9/11 and the end of my young adulthood almost to the pandemic. I was 38 when the pandemic hit and, for anyone, those are very formative years. You leave home, you become a college student, you start your adulthood. Then, in your thirties, you get married, have children, get a mortgage and do all these adult things.
“Through it all, I felt a fog descend over my generation,” she continues. “A lot of that has to do with the advent of information being so ubiquitous and bad information being so constant—the bad news and the sadness and despair. The planet is in crisis. The culture wars are wreaking havoc. Everything is bad. What I’ve tried to explore on the record is that there are these glimpses of hope and these really important moments of humanity that we are all experiencing simultaneously. This is the juxtaposition of those two things.”
Age of Apathy, like so many recently released albums, was recorded remotely. O’Donovan and producer Joe Henry didn’t even meet until they’d already worked on the recording, and the musicians never played together in the same room. O’Donovan cut her parts with engineer Darren Schneider in a studio located at Full Sail University, near her home.
“We started on it before anybody was vaccinated,” she says, “but Joe immediately signed on. He had just relocated to Maine and was eager to do a weird project like this. We had to be a little bit more delicate. We spent many hours on the phone, on FaceTime. When we finally got to meet, exactly two weeks after our second shots, to master the record in North Carolina, it was this joyful convergence. We also wrote a couple of songs together. One of them, ‘Town of Mercy,’ is one of my favorites on the record.
“I would send Joe demos. He would listen, then give feedback,” she adds. “Then, we would send them to Jay Bellerose, this great drummer, and Jay would send sketches to Joe. Then, we would take the drums and my tracks and send them to the bass player. It was all very piecemeal, but it was really cool and a really beautiful way to collaborate with people. Everyone had to use their own instincts and listen to the song and be in the moment with it.”
Age of Apathy’s 11 tracks were mostly written by O’Donovan. Henry also has a co-write on “More Than We Know” while Tim O’Brien splits the credit with the singer on “Prodigal Daughter” and adds a mandola. That song is the only one O’Donovan started prior to the onset of COVID-19. The rest, she says, were composed expressly for the album.
“The pandemic gave us all a little bit more time to be reflective, but I wouldn’t describe the songs as being particularly about the pandemic,” she says. “It gave me a real bookend to the time period, which helped me look at it in a linear fashion.
“With this record,” she says, “I feel like every single song has a very specific purpose; none of them feel redundant. She cites “Elevators,” a track featuring vocalist Allison Russell, and “Lucky Star” as being particular standouts. “Looking back, it’s almost like I’m a spectator watching a movie of my own life unfold, ” O’Donovan says. “I’m trying to access all those feelings. It’s hard to describe.”
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Age Of Apathy is only the third full-length solo album for Aoife (pronounced ee-fuh) O’Donovan, following 2013’s Fossils and 2016’s In the Magic Hour, but her résumé is already a mile longer than many artists twice her age. A handful of live releases and EPs fill out her discography and there have been numerous collaborations, guest appearances and other cameos. Her songs have been recorded by such notable artists as Alison Krauss and have appeared in several films and television programs.
From childhood, O’Donovan has known what she wanted to do with her life.
“There’s video of me singing songs that I made up when I was three,” she says. “I was actually able to do what I wanted when I was little. I come from a very supportive family, and I had a great education.”
She attended Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music but quickly gravitated toward the folk music side of things. There, she met other like-minded musicians and formed Crooked Still, an acoustic, bluegrass-inspired string band that built a formidable reputation during its decade-plus together. The band released a handful of albums and played festivals everywhere before going their separate ways, although they sometimes reunite for the stray project.
“Being in a band is the fucking best thing in the world,” O’Donovan says, recalling the experience. “I can’t really imagine starting out in the music business as a solo artist. That just seems so lonely and scary. When we started Crooked Still, we were just having fun. We were a band— we wanted to play music together, to work up songs. There’s something about the band culture and a band’s mentality.”
O’Donovan also put in time with another acoustic outfit, a trio called Sometymes Why but, by 2010, she was ready to make the solo leap. She considers Age of Apathy a “companion piece” to those earlier efforts.
“When you make your first solo record, that’s all the songs that you’ve ever written,” she says. “I loved making Fossils. It was such a special moment for me. All of my musical experiences from my twenties—you can hear them in Fossils. I loved working with [producer] Tucker Martine and went back to work with him on In the Magic Hour, which is definitely more introspective.”
That album’s finale, “Jupiter,” pointed the way forward for her.
“It was very intense, kind of a post-apocalyptic love song, and that mood definitely gave me a jumping off point for a lot of the themes on this record,” she says. “It’s a natural evolution, but I think that any artist is going to be most proud of what they’ve just done.
“In a couple of months,” she adds with a laugh. “I probably won’t like [these songs] anymore, and I’ll make the next thing.”
At the same time that O’Donovan was developing her solo career, she was also spending a good amount of time sitting in with other artists. One of her most notable placements was on 2011’s Grammy-winning The Goat Rodeo Sessions, which featured Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile, and she served as a frequent guest on Thile’s Live From Here radio program. O’Donovan can also be heard on recordings by artists as diverse as jazz trumpeter Dave Douglas, jamgrass outfit The Infamous Stringdusters and the classical Kronos Quartet.
More recently, she’s served as a core member of I’m With Her, a trio with fellow vocalists/instrumentalists Sarah Jarosz and Sara Watkins. Thus far, the group has released one album, 2018’s See You Around, and a 2020 single, “Call My Name,” which nabbed them a Best American Roots Song Grammy. “That was hilarious,” O’Donovan says of winning the prize.
The group, she says, is currently contemplating a follow-up. “We love playing music together, and we are all excited to see what comes next.”
For now, O’Donovan is just trying to keep busy—as much as any musician can during these strange times. One recent release that may have taken some fans by surprise was her song-by-song cover of Bruce Springsteen’s entire Nebraska album. O’Donovan recorded the 10-track set solo at her then-home in Brooklyn in May of 2020.
“It came out the year I was born, so I must have heard it subliminally a lot,” she says of the original. “I love that record so much. In 2011, I was doing a residency at a small club in New York called Rockwood Music Hall. One of the weeks, I decided to learn Nebraska from start to finish and I performed the whole thing. But that was 10 years ago, and I didn’t think about it much after that. When the pandemic started, I resisted doing livestreams for the first couple of weeks when everybody was jumping on the bandwagon, but then I did a fundraiser for a homeless shelter and it was such a great experience that we decided to do another one. I said, ‘I’m going to reprise this idea of doing Nebraska start to finish because, hopefully, they’ll watch.’ It got such a great response. I did every song and it was a real catharsis. A year and a half later, my manager said, ‘Hey, we should release it.’”
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Over the years, O’Donovan has performed with a number of symphonies, and that “huge sonic palette” sensibility, as she calls it, makes its way into Joe Henry’s widescreen production of Age of Apathy, albeit with a much smaller cast of players.
At the heart of all her music, though, is the song. Regardless of the format, the configuration or the sounds that give shape to her words, it’s all about the gut feeling the listener takes away from O’Donovan’s craftmanship, her vocal delivery and her presentation. Sometimes, she says, “I’m still coming around to the idea that I’m even a songwriter. I’m a singer and I’m a musician and I’m a collaborator, and I love every facet of my musical existence, but I’ve never been one of those songwriters who wakes up and writes a song a day, or says, ‘Look at me go, I’m so prolific.’ But I do feel that, with this record, I was able to tap into something and get the juices flowing and write more freely.”
There’s a song on Age of Apathy called “What Do You Want From Yourself?” In the chorus, O’Donovan sings, “What do I want?/ I want to be what I wanted to be in 1993/ When it would snow a dozen times in January/ And we’d grab our sleds, go to Albemarle and we would fly down.” Of course, she was 11 that year, when finding the best snow-covered hill at a local field was all a New England kid needed. So what does Aoife O’Donovan currently want from herself?
“What I wanted then,” she says without hesitation. “To just be content and excited and motivated to make music and to be a good citizen of the world. And to continue to prioritize relationships with my friends and my family.” She pauses, thinks for a second and then adds, “And to hold music, as music is kind of like the hug that surrounds us all.”
