Lisa Hannigan announces release of new live album

The collaboration – which sees Hannigan’s sparse, ethereal folk transformed into something cinematic and transfixing – has been taken to select festivals across Europe, and most recently graced the stages of London’s Barbican and Dublin’s National Concert Hall.

Thankfully for those yet to experience the mesmeric live show, their recent performance at the NCH in October last year is set for release in the shape of Live In Dublin, a discography-spanning 14-track live album, which also includes new track, ‘Bookmark’. The announcement comes alongside a new live video for ‘Swan’, a track born from a collaboration between Hannigan, playwright Enda Walsh and Aaron Dessner (producer of Lisa’s much-praised 2016 album At Swim) for the PEOPLE project - watch here.

This live record follows Hannigan’s critically-acclaimed third full-length, 2016’s At Swim, and arrives in a fruitful musical career spanning 17 years and several award nominations: from the Mercury Prize to Ireland’s Choice Music Prizeand Meteor Music Awards.

The meeting of minds immortalised on the album was the product of a chance-encounter between Lisa and the s t a r g a z e orchestral collective's conductor André de Ridder at Cork’s Sounds From A Safe Harbour Festival in 2015. The following summer, at Berlin’s PEOPLE Festival, s t a r g a z e would invite Hannigan to perform a couple of her songs with them on stage.

“Walking in I felt vaguely trepidatious. Sometimes, working with classically trained musicians can be slightly nerve-wracking as a singer-songwriter, because they speak a language so beautifully fluently that I can only fumble towards,” Hannigan recalls. “In a band, so much communication is done through the shoulders, the lift of an eyebrow, the feel of a small group breathing and dancing together. It’s hard to extrapolate that out into twenty, forty, even eighty people! It can feel like a glorious ocean liner tied to a creaking rowboat.”

Thankfully, Hannigan’s apprehensions would prove to be unfounded: “When we started to play though, it felt like all of s t a r g a z e had climbed aboard my rowboat. They approach a song very much as a band would, with an enthusiasm and musicality which immediately felt like home. I was overwhelmed to hear my songs in such a widescreen way, going from black and white to technicolour, and hoped we could do more.” And just like that, the idea of a live album was born: “The idea of eventually making a record and playing more together felt very natural and easy. Having made three records of my own I had a notion of making a live record but wanted to do it in a slightly more unusual way. We called on some wonderful arrangers over the following couple of years and built our setlist up one song and festival at a time.”

Live In Dublin by Lisa Hannigan and s t a r g a z e is due for release May 10th on digital platforms, vinyl and CD via PIay It Again Sam.

TRACKLIST
Ora
Prayer For The Dying
Little Bird
Undertow
Bookmark
Anahorish
Nowhere To Go
Lo
Swan
We The Drowned
Lille
A Sail
Barton
Fall