Yeah, the No Disco Planxty special,” Barry McCormack is saying. “You know, I was listening to Planxty and the Clancy Brothers and the Dubliners when I was writing these songs, and I was thinking, ‘I’m gonna give these songs to people, and they’re gonna go… (facial expression implying proximity to a foul smell) “What… is this? This is like… old-timer… Oirish… rubbish”.’ I thought people wouldn’t really get it. And then there was the No Disco Planxty special. And I thought, Oh, right. I’m not totally separate to what’s going on.”

Indeed not. It’s a sign of the times when the Kíla single is being dropped in the Village, an album by an Irish neo-trad-rapper enters the charts at number 5 and the finest music programme RTE never got behind is making documentaries about Planxty. It’s beautifully apposite, then, that the finest acoustic album of 2003 is Barry McCormack’s We Drank Our Tears, an album that owes less to this songwriting nation’s all too well-thumbed canon of Dylan/Drake/Buckley (junior and senior) and more to the Irish storytelling tradition: timeless and placeless, but at the same time very specifically observed and honestly rendered, universal, local music.
Three things about Tears are remarkable. One, it is that rare thing: an acoustic album in the purest sense, utilising only guitar and voice, where you absolutely would not wish for anything more to be present. Two, it’s hard to believe that McCormack has not, as JD Salinger would have it, buried at least one wife in his lifetime: that is, that these tales – ardent love-wishes for an ailing spouse (‘A Husband’s Prayer’), encouragements to the bereaved and the lost (‘Don’t Be Afraid Anymore’) and maunderings physical, philosophical and romantic (‘The Place Where Fortune Hides’, On A May Morning’) – are coming from one so young, and ring as true as if they were written a hundred years ago. (As well, acutely-drawn stories most definitely set in real-time Ireland – like ‘On The Evening Of The Epiphany’ – ensure that this is not mere genre-imitation.) Three, its title – and some of its content – notwithstanding, this is an overwhelmingly positive, uplifting, reassuring album.
So we’re a long way from McCormack’s previous band, the skewed Americana-with-a-peculiarly-Irish-grudge/hangover of Jubilee Allstars.
“I think, particularly when you get older, and you don’t really feel like jumpin’ around and kinda screaming, you know, I think you look for something that has a bit more depth, and a bit more humanity,” offers Barry. “And around that time, you stop thinking your parents are idiots, and you start thinking, like, ‘Wow, they’re real people’. And y’know, to bring up families, and do it well, is

just something that you really start to respect.
“That’s been a great thing about this record,” Barry says. “The people that have really liked it are my family – like, my father, my brothers, my friends’ parents are fans of it. It means a lot that, like, I have an uncle in Wales who listens to it and says, ‘Wow, that speaks to me about my life’. Rather than thinking, ‘I have a nephew in a rock band’.”

Barry McCormack’s We Drank Our Tears is out now on Hag’s Head. Barry also plays support to Katell Keineg on August 14 at the Sugar Club, and appears at this year’s Lisdoonvarna festival on August 30