Across recent years, Connor McCann has quietly carved out a rare space as one of Ireland’s most potent songwriting voices. Not simply admired within Belfast’s folk and session circles, he’s someone whose craft speaks directly to that uneasy place where memory, melancholy and perseverance meet. Whether threading grand themes through hushed confessionals or finding wry humour in post-crisis survival, McCann has shown again and again that he’s not just in the business of writing songs: he’s offering an ongoing document of what it means to live honestly, awkwardly, and sometimes gloriously, in this place and time.
With After the End, a three-track EP that’s as incisive as it is quietly disarming, McCann distils that vision to a fine point. These are songs that reckon with what comes after the end – of lockdown, of youth, of big plans – with McCann bringing sharpness, soul and deep generosity to every line. Crucially, it’s work made all the more resonant by the presence of The Heroine Choir and more: a constellation of collaborators whose individual brilliance reflects the sheer depth of Belfast’s world-class scene. From Joel Harkin’s lap steel to the sweeping strings of Solstice Ribianszky Bihler and Zarah Fleming, and the harmonic lift of Kira Topalian and Kristen Hansen, this is a collective endeavour with a singular voice at its heart. It’s further proof that McCann is continuing to say something wellworth listening to – carefully, clearly and in his own inimitable way.
I should begin with the front cover – After the End. Titled referencing the collective psychosis, survivors’ guilt and odd feeling after coming out of lockdown: some of us with new talents, new career paths after deciding that we’re not going to waste any more time, others of us asked to go back to excel spreadsheets, slinging pints, sending emails, driving cabs, laying a brick. Whatever it may be, it seems absurd to go back to it.
After many tears, proclamations and promises to do so much with the time we are given, the elevator doors have opened, the cable didn’t snap, we didn’t fall to our deaths and the situation has grown awkward.
We’re a little embarrassed about what we said but at the time the situation was quite dire. Some of us threw ourselves into work, some conspiracies over who was to blame and the best of us just got really into our hobbies.
I have no real wisdom to part here, just explaining the title. I survived and so did you, we have so much to do and so little time, but I’m also skint. There’s work on Monday and the match starts at 3.
At the End of All Things
‘I’m glad you’re here with me Sam, here at the end of all things’ – Frodo Baggins, Mount Doom (November 3rd, 3019)
A lockdown ballad, explaining the new normal after the end of days. There is nothing to share but smoke, there’s no light in the morning, no leaders but the King of the Ashes, no song but this one, here at the End of All Things.
I first played this song near my lockdown partner, confidant and hostage who asked me what it was, and I said I didn’t know yet. I later played it at my Folk Club which was no longer held at The American Bar but on Zoom, not with friends but with 10 faces on a computer screen, conversations had one a time with care not to talk over each other and that was the highlight of the week.
Strings by Solstice Ribiensky Bihler and Zarah Fleming, and horns by Johnny Stewart, Hannah Bevan Woolley and Mark Hamilton, set the scene for the end.
However, in the end there is no grand death, no ‘once more unto the breach,’ we survive for reasons unclear and keep going, A light breeze, a refrain for me, here at the end of all things.
Elegant Dream
This is a song of people watching, I played no part in the action besides the framing. Maybe you were there but there was a couple being high, loudly. And breaking up, loudly.
At least, I assume so, they moved in different directions at the end to be sure.
This was recorded at HalfBap studios, with beautiful strings in a great room with talented players. To class up the fact that this chronicles a bitter dispute over drugs in a carrier bag at 3pm on a Wednesday in Ballymena. But it doesn’t have to be, the setting is irrelevant, the cast and writer are irrelevant. Please set it in Paris about their irredeemable differences between the way things are, and the way they believe they could be, one a social democrat and the other a democratic socialist, both trying to save the world and disagreeing on the means.
Is this It?
A song about it being better to be over the hill than buried under it. However, on Sunday mornings, after a big night, it’s both. I could hear this song finished as I wrote it, as an emo rock country song about your second to last rodeo.
We all landed in Belfast fresh faced and creative. To conquer uni, Belfast then the world. We all walked into the party like walking onto a yacht, now we’re 30 and still writing despite the handicap of being very, very tired.
‘When this first started we were young and beautiful, the whole world lost in your grace,
In the fettered curls of your skirts, and the glow of your embrace.’
This song was the most fun to create in the studio, from the fun pedal steel to the big silly horn section, every aspect as upbeat and uplifting to mask the repeated
interrogation, in the form of a devastating question: Are you even having fun anymore?
This line can be about anyone or anything and it doesn’t seem to lose its sharp edge, a couple going through the motions, a team who are only still doing it to do it, because none of them would know what else to be at. This song is really fun to play but not fun to ask yourself, and for that I apologise.
Final note, huge thanks to the Arts Council who do great work and should be supported more, especially when trying to support the creative boiling pot that is Northern Ireland.
To close, huge thanks to the Arts Council NI, who do great work supporting the brilliant and resilient creative community that is Northern Ireland.
To close, huge thanks to the Arts Council NI, ACNI do great work supporting the brilliant and resilient creative community that is Northern Ireland. Their support made it possible for us to collaborate with the talented George Sloan at HalfBap Studios, Joel Harkin at Ayesound Mastering, and get to record our last single, ‘Cold Letters,’ with Joshua Burnside. It was a refreshing delight to be able to pay our creative friends with money instead of pints and favours. (fund the arts!!)
