Track List

The Shores of Newfoundland

At an after-gig party once in St. John’s, I met a man who told me the history of the Irish settlement in Newfoundland. The settlers, mainly from the South-East of Ireland, looked to the sea for their survival, and the settlements were isolated from mainland Canada for so long that the distinctive Irish accents and culture of its people prosper and survive up to the present time. Newfoundland is still a rich source of songs and tunes which have long been forgotten in Ireland. The tune at the start is the Traveller’s Reel, which Jamie Snyder learned from fiddler Rufus Guinchard of Daniel’s Harbour, Nfld.

	Exile
	A song of parting and of loss, of trying to give a sense of what it was like to have to leave with no chance of ever coming back.

	The Coffin Ships
	The ships which carried away thousand upon thousands during the famine have become infamous in Irish history for the horrors suffered by the emigrants during the voyages. The inspiration for this song came from a book about that time called “The Voyage of the Naparima”.

The Fields of Saskatchewan

I met a guy in Toronto once who was looking for work and he told me his story, and I based the song around his experiences. This song has a country feel as the Prairie Provinces have a rich tradition of country music. It struck me at the time that we hear a lot about the people who come to a new country, work hard and make good, but not a lot about the ones who arrive, work hard but are not so lucky.

	Freedom from the Barrel of a Gun
	“Justice for the people of Ireland will only come from the barrel of a gun” (A quote in the Irish Times from Dessie O’Hare, the ‘Border Fox’). The title is a play on words which reflects the role of violence in Irish history. Thankfully, events have moved on and we seem to have left that era behind us.

	Takin’ the Ferry
	I was a student in Manchester when the ferry was cheapest way to get home to Dublin. Take a train or hitch a lift to Holyhead, then cram on board the 3 am ferry with other emigrants going home for the holidays – navvies, nurses, card-sharks and assorted chancers – and arrive bleary-eyed in Dublin in the morning, dying for a feed of rashers and sausages.

	Hunger Strike
	The memory of the events in the Maze prison in Belfast, where 10 men starved themselves to death, is still too raw to be discussed very much in Ireland. Maggie Thatcher was the English prime minister whose intransigence ensured there was no was no peaceful solution to that situation.

	Wounded Soldier
	A song of love and loss.

	One Way Ticket
	When I first arrived in Canada, I lived for a time in Brantford, Ont., where at first I didn’t know a soul. It was on one of my many rambles to pass the time that I stumbled across the cemetery, where the graves of emigrants who had arrived many years before me lay long forgotten.

	Journey Round the Sun
	I suppose we all wonder at some point on the meaning of life and our part in it. I think the one thing I’ve discovered is that the more I learn, the less I seem to know.

© All songs written and composed by Kieran Wade
    www.kieranwade.com

® All songs registered  SOCAN and IMRO
www.socan.ca and www.imro.ie