- Culture
- 28 Sep 22
300 Letters - Michael Collins & Kitty Kiernan, Torn in Love, Torn Apart will come out on the 14th of October.
Sri Lankan born and Dublin raised musician Mustafa Khetty will release album, 300 Letters - Michael Collins & Kitty Kiernan, Torn in Love, Torn Apart, on the 14th of October to honour the life of Irish revolutionary Michael Collins. Voted Ireland's Greatest Hero by listeners of Newstalk, he was assassinated by forces against the treaty he was negotiating with Britain.
The album will be released two days before Collins' birthday, to honour and detail his life. Khetty took a special interest with Collins' life and spent two years researching and getting input from his family to put the album together. It mainly focuses on letters sent between Collins and his fiancée Kitty Kiernan, while he was negotiating a treaty with the likes of Churchill.
“I look at Michael Collins as a world hero,” Khetty says. "He inspired Mahatma Gandhi, Che Guevara, Nelson Mandela and a stream of others who looked at him and his tactics in the Irish struggle. He had brain, brawn and Adonis looks. The more I find out about the extraordinary dexterity and depth of his capabilities, the more I’m flabbergasted.”
“I want to stay out of politics, and write a love story that makes this amenable to all sides. A lot of it is based around the 300 letters that Michael and Kitty wrote before and during the peace talks in London.”
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The story is set to music that merges Celtic, Prog, neo-classical, funk and more. 'The Overture', for example, features Irish folk instrumentation- flute, harp and bodhrán drum.
The album has 22 tracks in total filled with music and narration- all of which is composed, produced, written, and narrated by Khetty.