Kings Place welcomes Aoife O’Donovan for a special solo appearance, performing songs from her 3x Grammy-nominated album Age of Apathy, plus a performance of Bruce Springsteen’s album Nebraska from start to finish, which The New York Times described as “saluting Springsteen’s songcraft with clear, pitch-perfect articulation and affable delivery”. Support on the evening comes from Violet Bell.

Set Times:
Doors: 7:00pm
Violet Bell: 7:30pm
Interval: 8pm
Aoife O’Donovan: 8:20pm
End: 9:50pm

Reflection, remembrances, and self-reckoning combine on Aoife O’Donovan’s third solo album, where her gift for tantalizing poetry is woven into a soundscape more rich and vivid than any she’s created before. Age of Apathy is an album that traces a journey through grown-up life and ponders the question facing both singer and listener alike: what do you want from yourself?

O’Donovan is an Irish-American singer and Grammy award-winning songwriter. She is best known as the lead singer for the string band Crooked Still and she also co-founded the Grammy Award-winning female folk trio I’m with Her. She has released three critically acclaimed studio albums: Fossils (2013), In the Magic Hour (2016), and Man in a Neon Coat: Live from Cambridge (2016), as well as multiple noteworthy EPs, including Blue Light (2010), Peachstone (2012), In the Magic Hour: Solo Sessions (2019), and Bull Frog’s Croon (and Other Songs) (2020). She also spent a decade contributing to the radio variety shows Live from Here and A Prairie Home Companion. Her first professional engagement was singing lead for the folk group The Wayfaring Strangers.

She has performed, recorded and collaborated with a large variety of acclaimed musicians including Karan Casey, Jerry Douglas, Jim Lauderdale, Darol Anger, Sarah Jarosz, Sara Watkins, Christina Courtin, Chris Thile (Nickel Creek, Punch Brothers), Edgar Meyer, Kronos Quartet and Yo-Yo Ma. Her songwriting has also led her to be featured in films and television and came to the attention of Alison Krauss, who recorded Aoife’s song ‘Lay My Burden Down’ on her album Paper Airplane and is used in the film Get Low (2010 Sony Pictures).

This event will last approximately 2hrs including an interval. 
 

Reviews

‘A set of quietly startling songs that are at once intimate and ambitious, autobiographic and metaphysical’ — The New York Times

‘Stunning’ — Rolling Stone

‘The Irish American singer-songwriter taps into the propulsion of prime Joni Mitchell: a restless mind bouncing against the blur of one’s surroundings’ — Pitchfork

Americana duo Violet Bell‘s new album Shapeshifter tells a story of the mythological selkie, a creature from Celtic folklore that’s part woman, part seal. In their retelling and reshaping of this ancient folk narrative, they tease out its connections to the transatlantic journey of American roots music, to the cultural and social melting pot of the “New World,” and to agency, intention, and self-possession.