Spotlight On: AOIFE O’DONOVAN

ABOUT this week’s podcast guest + radio hour featured interview:

They say to know your future, you must know your past. And with just days left of Women’s History Month, in this particularly tumultuous election year, a time when women’s rights are at stake, it couldn’t be a more perfect moment for the release of Aoife O'Donovan's fourth full-length solo album, All My Friends. The album has a unique origin story, and one could say has been years in the making, as half of the songs had their first life as pieces written for, and performed with, an orchestra, before their rebirth as songs for this new album. Aoife will tell us how in the midst of the pandemic, she was commissioned by the Orlando Philharmonic to write a piece about women’s suffrage to mark the centennial of the 19th amendment - the passage of which finally gave women the right to vote in August of 1920. It was a hard won victory. And as Aoife began her research she was especially inspired by the woman who helped bring the amendment to ratification, Carrie Chapman Catt, who served as the president of the National American Woman Suffrage movement. The resulting work, titled America Come, was a five-piece song cycle, which premiered in 2021 with the Philharmonic. The following year, Aoife released her third solo album, the three-time Grammy-nominated Age of Apathy - the writing of which had overlapped with the America Come project, and as we will learn in today’s conversation, followed a period of creative stagnancy and uncertainty for Aoife O’Donovan. It would fuel not only the completion of the America Come song cycle, but also inform and inspire this new album, All My Friends, which includes reimaginings of those five songs, as well as three new ones, and a poignant Dylan cover for good measure. And while the album reminds us and inspires us to learn about and continue the fight for equality, Aoife has endured her own times of self-doubt, grief, and worry: as a woman, as a daughter, and as a parent to her own daughter, and she infused these new songs that reflect on our collective and individual past with a message of hope, optimism, and perseverance into a better future. I am thrilled to welcome back Aoife O'Donovan as this week’s SHERO in the Spotlight.