Favourite Albums Since 1977: Junior Brother on Planxty's The Woman I Loved So Well

When I was 17, and leaving home for the first time, I was keen to find an album that captured the sense of the fields that had surrounded me back in Kerry. When I clapped eyes on the cover of The Woman I Loved So Well, I suspected I’d found it: a scene pastoral, archaic, mysterious. I paid 10 euro at the counter of my town’s CD shop, curious to see if the world on the cover was waiting within.

I remember hearing the first plucked strings of the first track, ‘True Love Knows No Season’, in the car as my mother drove me home. Intricate mandolin patterns like twigs and butterflies wove in and out of the opening guitar phrase, sounding like busy hedgerows. As the hedgerows of home accordingly whizzed by the car, the buildings of the town had turned to trees and meadows, and the album in the same way began to draw me further away from this century into another one.

Unlike earlier Planxty albums, virile and exuberant, this one grips in a manner akin to hypnosis. Acoustic instruments are bedded upon hazy synths and wispy electric piano. Through this mist the old songs people the landscape with a cast of vivid characters. The epic finale, ‘Little Musgrave’, sends the album into the skies, with a reel played ethereally by Matt Molloy lifting the song’s doomed lovers to heaven. This ends the album on a point of elation, tying this state to the fields and hills of home.

https://open.spotify.com/album/3otnFbKy9IrITYZZEcL70C

Photography: Nicholas O'Donnell.