The Return of McKeown

From her Grammy-winning album with the Klezmatics last year, to the series of exciting new concerts planned for spring, Irish singer Susan McKeown is back in the limelight, so prepare to be dazzled all over again. CAHIR O'DOHERTY asks McKeown what's in store in 2008.

A CATHEDRAL filling voice like Susan McKeown's only comes along once in a generation. It's a voice that has always defied categorization, mystifying and beguiling the critics in equal measure since her first CD in 1995, Bones, established her reputation and set her on the road to an international touring and recording career.

Carving out an international career over the last 10 years, McKeown's personal journey has been as rich as her recordings. Along the way she has been labeled a traditional singer, a rock singer, a folk singer, a Celtic fusion singer, and she's even taken time to explore jazz and klezmer - the latter being the raucous Jewish folk music whose spirit is, in her opinion, remarkably similar to the Irish.

McKeown has lived in New York City since she first arrived here in the early 1990s from Dublin, and it's her ideal place to learn and grow as an artist. But in the beginning there was only one drawback. It frightened the hell out of her.

"I had been to New York one summer on the J-1 visa program and it elated and terrified me. Back in Ireland by the early 1990s I had been on The Late Late Show and Nighthawks and I knew I could stay there and be well known in Ireland," McKeown told the Irish Voice.

"But the opportunity to work and study in New York became hard to resist. It was a chance to escape, too."

McKeown had grown up in Dublin where her father worked in a solid career job and her mother was an organist and composer at a time when most Irish women didn't have full fledged careers of their own. Through talent and her own determination Susan's mother had created her own career and her daughter inherited her independent streak.

"Going out at night to play a concert and supplement your income was second nature to her. Religious music was a huge interest of hers, too - when Pope John Paul II came to Ireland she was the only woman on the panel to choose the music for his visit," recalls McKeown.

"I was conscious of a woman who was a trailblazer and who had her own career and who was very successful on her own terms."

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