Stereo Embers The Podcast 0157: Mary Black

“The Summer Sent You”

The summer sent us Mary Black. And we are better for it. And we’re so lucky to have her. The legendary Dublin-born singer doesn’t do a lot of podcasts so we’re very appreciative that she chose to do ours. And, coincidentally enough, she appears one week after her son Danny of the Coronas made his third appearance on the show. Mary Black has the kind of musical CV that is filled with so many highlights, to list them all would require a separate podcast. Over the course of her career, she’s put out 12 solo albums, including classics like Without the Fanfare, and By The Time It Gets Dark. She also found time to record two great albums with the traditional Irish folk band De Dannan and toured the world with them as well. Over the course of her winning career, Mary Black sold out the Royal Albert Hall, collaborated with Joan Baez, Steve Martin Liam Clancy, and Westlife, won IRMA’s for Entertainer of the Year and Best Female Artist and in the process of all this work, became one of the most treasured voices in music, both in her native Ireland and internationally. And speaking of that voice, What HiFi magazine once declared that Black’s voice was so pure, they used it as an audiophile benchmark for comparing the sound quality of different high fidelity systems. In this conversation, Mary talks to Alex about heading to Tasmania, the work of Bob Dylan and Shane MacGowan, being protective of her voice and what adding orchestration taught her about the songs we’ve known her for all these years…