DAIRBHRE
DAIRBHRE is the FIFTH track on RICHELE’S second EP, Eladia UNDER HER MUSICAL MONIKER, HELE.
A R T I S T ‘ S N O T E S
by Hele
MOHER WAS WHERE THE WEATHER BROKE. I stood looking out, wind battering my body in the slanted rain as it lacquered strands of hair to my face.
“In Memory of Those Lives Lost on the Cliffs”, the sign read.
I thought of Colleen.
She was my work mate and barely all of twenty-four, but already a veteran world traveler. They were driving late at night, she and her cousins, to the Cairo airport when they collided head-on with a truck. Even in the daytime, Egypt isn’t known for safe roads. If it isn’t the goats or the cows, it’s the lorries with no lights. Or just sheer bad luck, itself, wafting through the world like a plastic bag on the wind, not concerned at all about being utterly terrifying.
Dunsmore Head | 2020
When I returned from her funeral, the shoulder bag Colleen had borrowed from me a few months earlier was still slung across the back of my kitchen chair. She had used it for a trip to Ireland, land of her ancestral roots. It was a black Victorinox with a warren of secret pockets. When I loaned it to her, she had been ecstatic. A girl after my own heart, she knew a good bag; knew how to travel solo and stay on her toes. The first time she came over to my apartment, she sat, cross-legged on the living room floor, and paged through my piles of dog-eared guidebooks with a sort of feverish reverence. Friday nights at the bar, we ignored the boys peddling Cosmos and instead, poured over maps and itineraries we had surreptitiously printed out on the copier at work. Laos. Tangiers. Tibet. Senegal. Nepal.
I carried an old email from her in my purse for years.
“So ummmm … yeah …” she wrote. “I just looked at pictures of Kerala and Chennai. I AM doing that trip with you!! I can't stand that I am sitting in my dry-walled cubicle at work right now … the world is so BIG!”
Colleen at the Cliffs of Moher | 2005
By the time I finally made it to Ireland, myself, it had been fourteen years since her passing, but it felt as if the landscape had brought her spirit out of retirement. I heard her name and saw her exuberant smile in the cordial town squares, the fairy circles like loose teeth, the boxty breakfasts. I could feel her laughing at every sheep that glared at me in the rain.
Aidan and I were in Moher to take a break from writing and recording. Our EP was coming along. I was learning how to be a half-decent engineer. Friends suggested we drive the highway that curved around the Dingle peninsula and so, one weekend we shot west across the M7 and careened through it all. Thatched roofs and rainbow-hued shops, crumbling abbeys, the Kerry Cliffs. We scrambled up Dunsmore Head with its astonishing views and peacock blue waters. It was spacious at the top, only sheep and a few birds, Blasket Islands twinkling in the distance. Below, families picnicked on the beach and a pair of ant-sized priests strolled the curving road in black cassocks, hands at their backs.
Dunsmore Head + the Blasket Islands | 2020
Valentia Island | 2020
One night in Valentia (a Kerry County island known in Irish as, Dairbhre), and after a particularly good bottle of Bordeaux, we walked onto a midnight pier beneath a theater of stars and stood staring up at the blazing Milky Way. A man in a nearby boat coughed suddenly in the darkness and I screamed and nearly tumbled into the frigid water. As I did, I saw Colleen so clearly in the lowlight. For a split second, it was her pulling me back from the decking’s edge, wheezing with laughter and calling me an idiot.
with Colleen (left) | 2005
There is no punchcard for grief. We will never clock out, never be fully “done”. We will change, grow, and turn back to life, but that pang of missing someone, that alteration to our souls is forever.
A few weeks after Colleen’s funeral, I sat in in my kitchen, searching the pockets of that Victorinox bag one last time, as if I could still somehow pull some of her essence from it, when my fingers suddenly came across a tiny lump. I dug down and pulled out a small, hard object wedged inside one of the many pockets. Colleen’s silver toe ring. I almost shouted with relief. It was just what I needed: the most minuscule of of signs but a sign, nonetheless. A tangible reminder that no one is ever all the way gone.
After returning from Ireland, I wrote Dairbhre after dreaming about a coastline coming into view—a wall of emerald bluffs flying out above the waves. In the dream, I am standing in the bow of a boat with someone standing at my back. I never turn around, never see who it is. And just as I think I might, I wake up.
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P R O D U C E R ‘ S N O T E S
by Andy Dollerson
The challenge on this track was to keep the exotic, eastern vibes of the melodies without veering off the stylistic path we were committed to. I think the balance here is excellent—you’re definitely transported somewhere else geographically when you listen to this but it’s not overstated in any other instrumentation.
The percussion in this piece was already provided by Richele, but I love the fresh feel of the pattering in the percussion contrasting with the simpler kick snare pattern that comes in later, and tried to make them stand out in certain places in the mix so that the ear would be drawn to them. I took the piano ostinato and tweaked it to provide some sound design rises and falls throughout the piece.
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