Cara Dillon goes ‘fourth’

Also, as long as Waterford-born singer Karan Casey walks the planet, to say nothing of Aretha Franklin, Cassandra Wilson, and Renee Fleming (to name four other superior vocalists off the top of my head), Cara Dillon will have to be content with more qualified, sensible praise.
Bringing her hype to heel is not to diminish how impressive her new CD is. “Hill of Thieves” is the best solo album of the four she’s now made. On it she sings more comfortably within herself, that is, within the limited range of her voice, something that Kate Rusby does very effectively. This new recording should gain many more admirers for Dillon’s hushed, intimate, confessional style of singing.
The lyrics of the opening song, “The Hill of Thieves,” were written by Dillon and her husband Sam Lakeman in the idiom of a traditional song, which can pose its own challenges. The danger is to mistake simple for simplistic, to toss in nature and hope for metaphoric resonance, and the song’s reference to a “murmuring stream” and “babbling swell” echoes Alfred Tennyson’s “babbling brook.” The words of “The Hill of Thieves” fall far short of Dillon’s actual singing of them and her accompaniment from Sam Lakeman, Sean Lakeman, and John Smith on guitars, Flook’s Brian Finnegan on whistle, Beoga’s Eamon Murray on bodhran, James O’Grady on uilleann pipes, and Ben Nicholls on double bass.
A theme of absent or inconstant lovers on the album is apparent in the traditional songs “Johnny, Lovely Johnny,” “Jimmy Mo Mhile Stor,” “The Verdant Braes of Skreen,” and “False, False,” the last of which features the deftly evocative mood setting of pianist Sam Lakeman, double bassist Ben Nicholls, and fiddler Zoe Conway, who’s related to New York’s Brian Conway. They are all sung by Dillon with delicate, persuasive fervor, and she nimbly overdubs her voice on two of those songs, “Jimmy Mo Mhile Stor” and “The Verdant Braes of Skreen.”
The vastly overdone traditional ballad “She Moved Through the Fair” (paging Van Morrison and countless others) is refreshed by Dillon’s quietly quavering vocal, her husband’s piano, Nicholls’s double bass, and whistle playing by herself and James O’Grady.
“The Lass of Glenshee,” another traditional song, also gets a memorable treatment from Dillon and company, although past interpretations by Altan and Len Graham remain hard to match.
That song and “P Stands for Paddy (Lament for Johnny)” offer Solas-like arrangements, especially in the way the instrumental fills are executed between verses of the latter. But what distinguishes “P Stands for Paddy,” which was approached straightforwardly by Liadan on their debut album in 2006, is Dillon’s adventurous vocal. Overdubbed again, it is both skillfully melismatic and sometimes jazz-like in inflection, as “Lament for Johnny,” an intriguing coda of snippets from the song, displays in particular.
The three outright standouts among the recording’s 11 tracks are “Spencer the Rover,” “The Parting Glass,” and “Fil, Fil a Run O.”
Abetted by vocal harmony from Seth Lakeman, Dillon sings the quasi-Rip Van Winkle narrative of “Spencer the Rover” with panache and dynamism.
The other two songs are the album’s sparest in arrangement. With just Sam Lakeman backing on piano, Dillon turns in a shimmeringly beautiful version of “The Parting Glass,” an enduring, wistful song that she never lets slip into weepiness. The album concludes with “Fil, Fil a Run O” (“Return, Return My Dear”), the lone song sung in Irish. Dillon sings this familiar Donegal song without any accompaniment, a risky endeavor for someone without a vaulting vocal range, but she brings it off with assurance and suffusing warmth.
“Hill of Thieves” was released on Dillon’s own Charcoal Records label and licensed to Proper American. Opting for their own imprints and copyright control reflects a growing trend for Irish artists frustrated with stagnant or declining music sales and so-called middlemen costs at established record labels. Their thinking is: I can’t do worse, or I can do as well with less bureaucracy and expense. Marketing, distribution, publicity, and media coverage or airplay remain stumbling blocks to this rising entrepreneurship. But as the old models of the record industry crumble (the days of 10 million copies sold for any new U2 or Bruce Springsteen CD are long gone), artists at the traditional or acoustic folk end of the sales spectrum will probably choose the do-it-yourself route more frequently.
Cara Dillon, who seems to be nearing the “folk diva” status already accorded Kate Rusby in England, has issued a recording with enough recognizable trad songs to appeal to a wider audience. “Hill of Thieves” is her fastest-selling CD so far in Britain and an encouraging augury for going solo as both artist and imprint owner.
Hopefully not lost in all these economic calculations is a fourth solo album ranking first in aesthetic achievement by her.
“Hill of Thieves” (cat. no. PRPACD009) is available from www.properamerican.com, www.charcoalrecords.com, and www.caradillon.com.