Lisa Hannigan

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Lisa Hannigan

Lisa Hannigan "Passenger" album

- Release date : September 2011 -

Passenger is the second LP from Irish singer/songwriter Lisa Hannigan. The album was released in the US and Canada on September 20, 2011 and in the Republic of Ireland on October 7, 2011 (brought forward from the originally scheduled date, 21 October).

"Passenger" album tracks and lyrics

"Passenger" album reviews

Irish singer/songwriter Lisa Hannigan's second studio album, the lush yet hushed and evocative Passenger, firmly establishes the former Damien Rice accompanist as a formidable solo artist in her own right. Bolder than her 2009 Mercury Prize-nominated debut and cut with an effortless blend of defiance and sweetness, the ten-track collection stays true to Hannigan's folksy roots while establishing a more expansive pop sound. Throughout it all, it’s her mercurial voice that dominates, a croon that can go from the whispery, back-of-the-throat moan of Jesse Sykes and Vashti Bunyan to the crystal-clear, goosebump-inducing rallying cries of Florence + the Machine and Sandy Denny in a heartbeat. Hannigan marches through the gate triumphantly with “Home,” a soulful, heavily orchestrated anthem built on the notion that “Every falling flake of snow, it has to give in, oh but we spin, and we spin and we spin.” If anything, it’s that fine line between grace and futility that propels Passenger's finest moments, like the honest, post-breakup nostalgia of “Little Bird” and “Paper House” and the sinister north-country stomp of “Knots,” the latter of which skillfully entwines the woodsy defiance of Gillian Welch with the bluesy windswept angst of Fiona Apple. Solid yet understated, it's Hannigan's obvious gift for melody, tasteful arrangements, and remarkably emotive elocution (when her voice breaks, the heart follows suit) that keeps Passenger afloat, while the world schemes and churns beneath.

*** by James Christopher Monger, All Music Guide ***

County Meath’s Lisa Hannigan once harboured theatrical ambitions but first came to public attention not as a thespian but as the counterpoint voice (and occasional lead) in Damien Rice’s band. Quitting that successful, but for a fledgling songwriter, increasingly frustrating franchise in 2007, Hannigan’s hastily recorded solo debut of 2008, See Sew, gained her a Mercury Music Prize nomination and platinum sales. With the release of Passenger, Hannigan, now 30, seems to be drawing a line under all that, or at least signalling the end of a lengthy apprenticeship and the arrival of a mature singer-songwriter possessed of an idiosyncratic yet thoroughly accessible gift.

Produced (in Wales, curiously) by US troubadour and sometime Solomon Burke and Loudon Wainwright knob-twiddler Joe Henry, Passenger proffers 10 by turns vigorous and softly spun essays on ‘journeys’, both literal and metaphorical, couched in often lavish but oddly askew chamber arrangements that can strum up a storm or weave delicate filigrees while always circumventing Celtic or generic folk-rock cliché. At its core lies Hannigan’s voice, a thing of velvety, husky seduction, able to invoke innocence and world-weariness with equal alacrity (sometimes both simultaneously), oscillating deliriously between kittenish, Beth Gibbons-like mewl, soaring, Emmylou Harris descant and introverted Joni Mitchell-ism, while always retaining her own, slightly puckish identity.

The lime in the coconut is Hannigan’s predilection for a dark lyrical apercu. Thus, the superficially sunny Southern stomper Knots is riddled with allusions to choking, spluttering and chalk lines drawn around murder victims, while the pounding, euphorically piano-driven Home is beautifully undermined by the ambiguity of its chorus lyric: "Hold on, there’s nothing to pack / We know we’re not coming back". Only the genteel waltz O Sleep, a duet with Ray LaMontagne, seems over-enamoured with its own cuteness.

That caveat aside, for all its deft arrangements and catchy chorus hook lines, Passenger feels unforced, spontaneous and timeless; indeed, such is its unaffected delivery that it might have been recorded 30 years ago or last month. Like all good actresses, Hannigan is not just telling stories here, she’s mapping the absurd, mischievous, troubling but always potentially transcendent landscape of human emotion in which we are all journeying.

*** by David Sheppard, BBC Music ***