Passenger

Hannigan needed almost two years to finish her new record

It tool Irish singer Lisa Hannigan quite a long while to pull together her emotional strength so that she could on one sad day leave her band Damien Rice. In the end, after six years spent there, from 2001 to 2007, the artist quite the ensemble with a solid intention to start a solo career. The first result of this initiation was a CD called Sea Sew (2008), a work that gathered elevated reviews in a lot of countries. The audience must have remembered the final track Lille that helped the singer have her name spotted in charts. After touring the world with concerts and collecting nominations and titles, Lisa returned to the studio where, in late 2009, she got down to making her new record. Passenger was first released in North American and then, a month later, in the OK and Ireland. The official release in the rest of Europe was due in early 2012.

A lifetime journey

As she developed the theme of journey, Lisa Hannigan not only named her next album likewise, Passenger, but decorated it with a map of an unknown town and loaded with a lot of travel-related songs. The first single off the record is Sail, and the second is Knots. For the recording of the latter, the singer arranged a short cruise with her band so that the noise of the waves was carried onto the track. To make it even more romantic, Lisa added the exotic sounds of ukulele. This folk instrument, though, is not from Ireland, but from Hawaii. However, journey on Passenger is just a metaphor to depict a human life, and the image of the passenger is someone to walk the entire path with you, in other word, the only faithful and loving person for ever. The songs of the Irish singer’s new album, in fact, are the stories of relations with this person. Passenger is filled with subtle music intonations, built along low tempos and adorned with the most valuable thing Lisa Hannigan has in her music, her vocals. Not only a performer, but a song-writer, she established a strong connection between the emotional content of the songs with their lyrics and music.

Passenger is ultimately dramatic and desperate

When to comes to travelling and wandering, you always know these are stories of separation; and the tracks of this album are nothing but love letters sent far beyond. Passenger is opened by Home, embracing you with chill and scares you with loneliness. It is followed by Sail, an insight into undermined trust and imminent breakup. Knots ties tight anxiety, unrest and desperation. This is how uneasy Passenger begins, and just a few tracks here bear a different sort of feelings. One of them is colorful and danceable folk piece What’ll I Do with the fiddle playing the main tune. Even the title of the concluding track has little bitter irony as beside the classic Safe Travel stands Don’t Die held in brackets. Lisa Hannigan still achieves a strong touching effect through the application of a wide range of rare instruments like glockenspiel, flugelhorn and euphonium as well as classic piano and violin. Passenger is more than good for a number two album, and we now have the right to expect even better releases.