The Wild Bees’ Nest


Recorded and engineered by Paul in 2011 for the Aileen Lambert and Michael Fortune song project.

Hot on the heels of hugely successful performances in the National Library, the Wild Bees’ Nest brings to fruition a raft of newly composed songs in the traditional style. Populated by singers from Dublin’s An Góilín singers’ club, it’s a formidable achievement: gathering diverse stories from our past – spanning the predictable (emigration) and the idiosyncratic (the media’s depiction of the Celtic Tiger’s demise) – and morphing them into songs to be sung by anyone.

Epitomising the definition of folk: music by, of and about folks, there’s an essential democracy at play which at times compromises its tunefulness. But this is unlikely to weigh heavily on listeners already well disposed to traditional song. Lyrically complex and relishing the recurring motifs of the genre (love tokens, fever, starvation), the Wild Bees’ Nest clearly relish the joys of community singing. A timely addition to our already weighty traditional song canon.

Siobhan Long, Irish Times