Who Will Listen: Moya Brennan and "No One Talks"

Our random tune for today is sung by Moya Brennan. A native to Ireland, Brennan comes from a musical family (one of her sisters, Eithne, is better known as the singer Enya) and the family's band Clannad have been credited with creating the contemporary Celtic sound. Brennan is the eldest of the siblings, and started her own solo career in 1992. She is often classified as Celtic or New Age, though she feels uncomfortable with the New Age label as her music often has Christian themes. She has recorded 25 solo albums, her music has been featured in film, and she has collaborated with numerous other musicians in a variety of genres. She has also been very candid about her life - in her autobiography The Other Side of the Rainbow she recounts her upbringing in her family and her struggles with alcohol, drugs and an abortion which made her reevaluate her life and become a committed Christian. To help others with similar problems, she has given much to philanthropic endeavors and is a Goodwill Ambassador for the Christian Blind Mission. This song, No One Talks, can be found on her album Signature (2006) and on her 2011 live album Heart Strings.

Listen to songs like this and more on the KUNM Global Music Show every Monday night from 10 pm - 1 am Mountain Standard Time. Live streaming, program information and the two-week digital archive can be found at http://www.kunm.org.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moya_Brennan

As the Black Mill Turns: Ashley MacIsaac with Mary Jane Lamond and "Sleepy Maggie"

Juno Award winning and platinum-selling fiddler Ashley MacIsaac, accompanied by singer Mary Jane Lamond, brings us the random tune today called Sleepy Maggie. A Canadian artist from Cape Breton, Ashley MacIsaac is from a family of fiddlers - his sisters are all touring fiddlers and his cousin is Canadian fiddler Natalie MacMaster. In addition to his music, he is known as an openly gay musician, his struggle with addiction to crack cocaine in the late 1990s, and occasionally eccentric behavior. He has indicated a recent desire to enter Canadian politics. Sleepy Maggie is sung in Scots Gaelic by Mary Jane Lamond, a Canadian Celtic folk musician who presents traditional Celtic tunes in contemporary musical styles. Her vocals on this song first brought her to widespread public attention. You can find Sleepy Maggie on MacIsaac's 1995 album Hi™ How Are You Today? and on the 1998 compilation CD Putumayo Presents: Celtic Tides.

Not the Movie: Gigi and "Enoralehu"

The random tune today is from Gigi, the stage name of Ethiopian singer Ejigayehu Shibabaw. Gigi learned traditional music from an Ethiopian Orthodox priest in her family home in northwest Ethiopia. After living in Kenya for a few years, she moved to San Francisco in the late 1990s where she made her first albums for the Ethiopian expatriate community. These albums brought her to the attention of Chris Blackwell, whose Island Records made reggae mainstream, and he and producer Bill Laswell matched Gigi with musicians such as Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Pharoah Sanders, among others, on her 2001 album Gigi which gained her widespread attention. A combination of traditional and modern sounds, it was a great success on the international music scene as well as a source of controversy in Ethiopia because of its radical reworking of traditional music. She later married Bill Laswell and recorded an album with him called Zion Roots. This song, Enoralehu, is from her 2006 album Gold and Wax and features a haunting vocal.