Tea for Tunes Extended Liner Notes
My debut album, Tea for Tunes, is out in the world! It released officially on August 7th, and I couldn’t be more thrilled — making an album was a dream of mine for years followed by a full 10 months in the making. With a project this size there are naturally a lot of stories behind why I selected each track.
The physical CD includes an abbreviated section of liner notes, but there’s only so much you can fit on eco-friendly trifold packaging! The stories behind why I picked these tunes go deeper than space would allow, so I decided to write them out here in an extended version of the liner notes. Grab a cup of your favorite tea to accompany you as you explore all of the behind-the-scenes inspiration and the stories that created my first complete recorded music project!
*If you like, you can listen along to each track on Spotify!
The Flooded Road to Glenties/Martin Wynne’s No. 2/Joe Tom’s
I put this set together for the session crowd at An Spáilpín Fánach, which was one of my favorite pubs to play music at during my stay in Ireland. Sessions used to be very intimidating for me, so I wanted to have a few sets up my sleeve in case I was asked to lead the group in a few tunes.
This is one of those sets, and the guys liked it enough to make it into a regular part of their session rep for the season! I love that each tune dips into B minor at some point, never quite leaving that key. Pretty soon the set became known as “the B minor tunes that Hannah plays.” Every Wednesday and Saturday evening, my friend Kaylie and I would grab a bus to Cork City Centre and go play tunes with the Spáilpín guys. These sessions often ran into the wee hours of the morning after the buses stopped running, so I want to publicly give another huge thank you to Jamie, Ray, and Hugh for giving us lifts back to Eden Hall many a night! This set is for you and for all our Spáilpín friends!
Passage West
This track also came from the Spáilpín sessions! There was a lovely fiddler and singer from Austria, Anna Riepl, who was also temporarily living in Cork. If the B minor tunes were my signature set, Passage West was Anna’s. We all would join in the chorus, but I never actually learned the full song until I came home to the States. I had a severe case of nostalgia for the Spáilpín sessions in those first few months back home, so I started learning more of the sets just to keep the memories fresh! When I met my guitarist John Warstler in Fall 2017, we mostly played instrumental arrangements together. However word leaked out that I also sang so I introduced him to Passage West, and it became a regular in our practice sessions! Passage West is located east of Cork City and written by a Cork man, John Spillane, so it is a tribute to Cork through and through. I haven’t been fortunate enough to see him perform live yet, but it’s only a matter of time! Full lyrics available here.
The Home Ruler/Gougane Barra Hornpipe
Usually The Home Ruler gets put into a set with Kitty’s Wedding (another lovely hornpipe in D). It’s one of those commonly known sets that many musicians automatically play together in sessions. Usually Irish sets change keys throughout, but occasionally you will hear two tunes in the same key played back to back. This happens more often when there are two rather than the typical three tunes in a set. I kept this idea of the same key, but wanted to surprise the listener with a different hornpipe to follow Home Ruler. So I switched up the set and included a tune that my friend Derry had written instead.
I actually got to watch Derry write the Gougane Barra Hornpipe because she was sitting right in front of me in our friend Martin’s taxi. We were on our way home from a memorable day of hiking and exploring Gougane Barra in West Cork, and I could tell that being out in nature all day had sparked her creativity! This tune is a reminder of hiking with friends in some truly beautiful areas of Cork, of our day trips, and of the wonderful people we met and interacted with on each of these outings! On the Gougane Barra trip we met a lovely couple down at the petrol station and ended up sharing brunch with them at their home! A truly special experience!
A brief hiatus on our Gougane Barra hike!
Stephanie’s Waltz
We’re now transitioning from Cork memories to more of my current Michigan music scene. Stephanie Cope, who you’ll hear playing piano on this track, wrote this lovely waltz for a Christmas Concert she and I were performing in at her church, Zion Lutheran, in Petoskey. The whole concert was Celtic-themed and we had an ensemble of six local musicians performing different winter or Christmas related tunes. I absolutely loved this waltz, and kept playing it in other gigs long afterwards. I don’t think Stephanie was expecting it to stick around after this one show, but here it is! We actually went back to Zion to record the piano line for this track, so the tune comes back full circle to its origins.
Carraig Aonair
During my studies at University College Cork I took a Sean-nós (old style) singing class with Máire ní Chéilleachair along with Derry, Kaylie and our friends Jen, Emma, and Naomi. We learned to sing in this style in both the Irish and English languages, with Carraig Aonair being one in Irish. The melody, or air, is absolutely gorgeous and heartbreaking due to the tragedy in the lyrics. The singer is a father who lost his sons to a terrible storm while they were out fishing near Fastnet Rock off the coast of County Cork. These are the lyrics along with my translations from the class (any discrepancy in translation is on me):
Carraig Aonair (Fastnet Rock)
Ó Luan dubh an áir tháinig suaimhneas ró-bhreá (Oh black Monday of the slaughter, there was a calmness)
Is do ghluaiseadar uaimse leath-uairín roim lá (And they went away from me a half hour before daybreak)
Ag iascaireacht i mbád, i gcontúirt a mbá, (Fishing in a boat in danger of drowning)
‘S go mbeidh iarsma na blian’ úd ina ndiadh go bhfaghad bás. (The memory of that year will be here after them until I die.)
Sé Dónal mo mhaoin an té ab óige dem’ chlainn (Dónal is my treasure, the youngest in my family)
Agus coicís ón lá san a thainig sé i dtír, (And a fortnight from that day, he was washed ashore)
Gan tapa gan bhrí, gan ainm ina chroí (Without any life in him, without life in his heart)
Ach a ghéaga boga gheala is iad leata ar a dtoinn. (But his soft bright limbs lay stretched out on the waves.)
Sé Cormac mo stór, ‘sé rogha na bhdear óg, (Cormac was my love, he’s the best of young men)
Bhí modhail maiseach múinte géarchumtha go leor, (He was handsome, well-mannered, and fit)
Do scríobh sé ar an gcóir leis an mbúcla ‘bhí ina bhróig (He wrote on the rudder with the buckle of his shoe)
Gurab í Carraig Aonair a chéile go deo. (That Carraig Aonair was his partner forever.)
Nuair a théimse ar an gclaí, nuair a fhéachaim uaim síos, (When I go up on the ditch, when I look down on the sea)
Nuair a chím Carraig Aonair, ‘sea phléascann mo chroí. (When I see Carraig Aonair, my heart bursts.)
Is air ais dhom arís go mullach mo thí, (And back with me again to the top of my house)
Ós is í Carraig Aonair is céile dom’ chlainn. (Since it is Carraig Aonair, my family.)
The Sean-nós crew! Derry, Naomi, Jen, Emma, Kaylie
My Cousin the Dancer/A Pleasant Surprise
I wrote this tune for my cousin, Jennifer, during her final days of battling glioblastoma. Dancing was always a big part of her life, and she always let me try on her fun costumes whenever I visited — some of those dresses were way too long for me, so she would pick me up and carry me around in them! Her strength, resilience and positivity really stood out to me in this time, and I believe her determined mindset helped her live several months beyond what the doctors gave her. I wanted to capture a melody for her that reflected that mixture of positivity and hardship, so I wrote the tune in the key of A major, which is known as one of the happier keys in music. However, I snuck in some F sharp minor in the B part to hint at the underlying darkness she was facing. RIP Jennifer.
After Jennifer died, I became more determined than ever to pursue my dream career and aim for big goals. As part of my music business framework, I spend a lot of time on Instagram getting to know, like and trust other musicians in the online community. Enter this tune from my friend, Anders Lillebo! He is a wonderful multi-instrumentalist from Norway with a mutual passion for filling the online world with traditional music content. He wrote this tune in Spring 2019 and made a post challenging his fiddle followers to learn it! I loved the tune and instantly got to work. Eventually I added it on to Jennifer’s tune, and so this set was born! The title refers to a bottle of wine that “wasn’t too bad after all.”
The Glen Cottage Polka No. 1/Cutting Bracken/Little Diamond Polka
Polkas are one of my favorite tune types to play! It’s so easy to launch into a set of them in a session — half an hour later you’re still skimming the surface of the ones you know, but the guitarist is glaring daggers at you. Why? Well polka melodies are simple enough, but they are backed in double time. This makes them one of the more challenging tune types to accompany! I knew I had to include polkas in my CD, so I selected ones that reminded me of friends in Cork.
Side note: Cutting Bracken is usually played in the key of A minor, but by now you know I like to switch things up! So I recorded it in my favorite key, B minor!
Peeling Potatoes/The Man From Dunblane
I wrote Peeling Potatoes for my late godmother, Frieda. She always had the best sense of humor mixed with a love for showing children how to be kind and respectful of others. Years ago, she and I were helping my mom fix mashed potatoes. Peeling potato skins was not a fun process for me as a teenager — I guess I didn’t like how it was so easy to lose your grip and send a wet potato flying into the dirty kitchen sink. Frieda took pity on me and said if I finished the one I was working on, she would peel the final two. Being Frieda, she also said that she would only do this on the condition that I never, ever forgot she loved me so much that she peeled a potato for me. Now years later, I’ve made sure it’s part of my legacy. ;) Kudos to Stephanie Cope for once again working her arranging magic and coming up with this awesome fiddle harmony line!
I like to set myself different challenges when I’m learning new fiddle music. For my 2019 project I decided to pick a different album every month and try to learn all of the tunes off it by ear. My April challenge was the wonderful Mayo fiddler David Doocey’s album, Changing Time. In the first track he paired one of my favorite reels, Martin Wynne’s No. 2 (see Track 1) with one of his own compositions, The Man From Dunblane. It’s a delightful B minor reel that caught my ear from the moment I heard it! When I was going through different tunes to pair with Peeling Potatoes, this one fell in naturally!
Tuesday Night/The Glen of Aherlow/Sweater Weather
While I was studying in Cork, I would regularly go to the Blarney Castle Hotel sessions. Derry and Emma were taking dance classes with Mags MacCarthy, and she liked for her students to get some extracurricular experience going to this session every Tuesday. Derry told Kaylie, Jen and I about these, and we signed up! Every Tuesday evening Mags’ friend Martin took us up to Blarney for a flat taxi rate, and we’d join the session! It was a totally different vibe from the Spáilpín group, but no less enjoyable! At the start of the album process I asked Derry to send me some tunes she’d written. This reel was included but didn’t have a name yet — once I’d chosen the tune and recorded it, I asked her what she’d like me to call it. She thought for a bit, and our minds went to the same place: the Tuesday Night Blarney Castle Hotel Sessions!
The Glen of Aherlow is a reel I first heard on Cathal Hayden’s album Live in Belfast. This was yet another album I decided to learn in my 2019 challenge, and I fell in love with this E minor tune!
Sweater Weather is what we call a dream tune, meaning the tune writer thinks of a note pattern in a dream, and scurries to write it down the following morning. Stephanie had a dream about the first half, or A part, for this tune. Incidentally it sounds like the A part of Dinny O Brien’s, but she wrote her own B and C part to follow. Since she and I live in northern Michigan, Sweater Weather is an appropriate tune to play 10 out of 12 months of the year! I suppose I could always write a follow up tune called Light Cardigan Weather, but it just doesn’t have the same ring to it…
The Banks of the Lee/Poor Man’s Toast
I got this song off of Caladh Nua’s album, Happy Days. In Cork I was taking weekly singing classes with Máire and also weekly workshops with Karan Casey, who was the UCC Artist in Residence that year. After leaving Cork, I found it difficult to incorporate a regular singing routine into my schedule, but I made an effort to continue adding songs to my repertoire. Back before we were dealing with a global pandemic, there was a Women in Harmony group here in northern Michigan that met once a month to sing — this is a song I’d like to reintroduce once we’re able to meet safely again. There is something wonderful about gathering together to sing with friends, and every time I sing this song it takes me back to those classes and sessions in Cork as well as the ones we’ve created here in the US. Lyrics available here.
Poor Man’s Toast was co-written by Derry and one of her Scottish fiddle instructors, Ryan McKasson. According to Derry, “Ryan wrote the A part of this tune by accident during one of his fiddle classes at AmWeek 2018 and I really liked it, so I decided to write a B part. In a sense, the tune is a portmanteau, ‘poor man’s toast’ as it were.” She sent it to me that summer and it was one of those tunes where you just can’t put the fiddle down!
Lord Ramsey’s/The Potato on the Door/Fresh Out of the Clouds
My good friend Michael Kennedy was always after me to learn this tune when I lived in Cork, but it was only after I left that I picked it up! But I give him full credit for putting the idea in my head! While I couldn’t find a tune-writer for “Lord Ramsey’s” specifically, there is a version of it played up a step in A major known in Scottish music as “Big John McNeill’s,” which was composed by Peter Milne.
Liz Carroll is the queen of composing traditional style tunes, and her tune “The Potato on the Door” lights me up every time I hear it. She’s a musical role model of mine so I really wanted to include one of her tunes on the album. Liz is not only a phenomenal fiddler, but also a kind and encouraging mentor. She was good enough to walk me through the cover licensing process, and has been highly supportive of Tea for Tunes since its inception! In retrospect I should have named the album after something spud-related given all the potato tunes I’m including!
Derry wrote “Fresh Out of the Clouds,” and as soon as I played through it I knew it needed to go on the album! Fortunately I was able to arrange this set to accommodate it!
Hughie’s Jig/Sliabh Russell/Raspberry Ice Cream
As I was picking tunes out for this album I knew I wanted to include tunes written by musicians I clicked well with. These are the musicians where we don’t need words to communicate — it’s all in facial expressions and listening to one another. You just blend well together from the start without much effort. Hughie is one of those people to me, and he was good enough to let me use this tune of his!
Sliabh Russell is a great traditional jig that I’ve been playing for years. I first heard Kevin Burke play it on a William Coulter album. My dad and I have been listening to this album since my early fiddling days, so it makes sense that I seem to have absorbed a lot of Kevin Burke’s fiddle nuances through repetitive listening over the years!
This is the last of Derry’s tunes to appear on the album, but no less a favorite for it! She calls this jig Raspberry Ice Cream, and I must agree it’s a tasty treat of a tune!
Lough Erne’s Shore
This is another Sean-nós air from the class with Máire. Originally I was only going to have Carraig Aonair on the album, but as an American musician I wanted to showcase both the English and Irish languages in this traditional singing style. Lough Erne’s Shore and Carraig Aonair were my two favorites from the class and incidentally represented each language. Máire taught us this song in the style of the great Irish singer, Paddy Tunney. Lyrics available here.
Julia Delaney’s/The Flavour of the Month
This is the first set John and I ever played together at a gig, and since he is responsible for all the guitar tracks on the album, I knew I had to include it! We met back in Fall 2017 and shortly after played this set at an event organized by Nic Gareiss in Ellsworth, MI.
Julia Delaney’s is a fiery D minor reel that I’ve always loved to play. It fits in well with The Flavour of the Month, which is a tune my friend Seány sent to me shortly after I returned to the States from Cork. He’s a fantastic Cork fiddler who I met at the sessions at An Spáilpín Fánach — and this brings the album full circle from Track 1 to Track 14 back to that wonderful community of people!
