Varo and Lankum’s Ian Lynch – ‘Sweet Liberty’
The trad duo are rolling out songs from their collaborative album featuring Lankum, John Francis Flynn, Anna Mieke, Junior Brother, Lemoncello and more.
The Dublin duo of Lucie Azconaga and Consuelo Nerea Breschi have a new album out on May 9th featuring a huge cast of Irish folkies.
The World That I Knew is released Friday May 9th 2025.
VARO have previously released their collaborations with Alannah Thornburgh and John Francis Flynn.
‘Sweet Liberty’ is the third song from the record featuring Ian Lynch of Lankum, One Leg One Eye and the Irish traditional music and folklore podcast Fire Draw Near.
“When he suggested this song for the project, we loved it straight away,” Lucie Azconaga and Consuelo Nerea Breschi of VARO said of working with Ian. “It carries a powerful anti- racist message and a call to unite people.”
“As we began working on it, it became clear that the lyrics were so powerful that the arrangement didn’t need to be overly intricate. Instead, we focused on creating an open space where these words could truly resonate.
“For the final line of the song, we chose to shift the harmony to a minor key. There is quite a bitterness in knowing that such a song was written 200 years ago and still, the need for these words to be sung and repeated today is depressingly vivid.”
“The poet and weaver John Sheil had perhaps the biggest impact of any songwriter in 19th Century Ireland and many of his songs are still extant in the oral tradition, especially in and around Drogheda where he died in 1872. This song was learned from the singing of Pat Usher of Tinure, Co. Louth in the 1970s and it appears on a 3 CD release entitled The Usher Family, which came out in 2019. I first heard it here and was particularly taken by its humanitarian message of racial equality and freedom of all from oppression. It is quite remarkable that it was written in Ireland in the 1800s.”
Ian Lynch
The World That I Knew was produced by John ‘Spud’ Murphy and was five years in the making.
It features Ian Lynch (Lankum), John Francis Flynn, Anna Mieke, Alannah Thornburgh, Junior Brother, Slow Moving Clouds, Niamh Bury, Inni-K, Ruth Clinton and Cormac MacDiarmada (Poor Creature), Lemoncello and Branwen. The album is available to pre-order here.
