Name that tune: Irish edition

August 3, 2011 11:00 AM

Need help identifying this (possibly Irish traditional) song.

Crap one-minute recording on SoundCloud here. Lyrics (with a stab at phonetic spelling):

oh ah reo
and heave our bodies home
oh ah reo
and save our souls

The recording is from a live performance by Glen Hansard in Telc, CZ last weekend. He added it to the end of an original song. He could have just been riffing, but it seems to have the structure of a trad song. Any help is appreciated.

posted by shannonm to Media & Arts (6 answers total)

Best answer: It's got the structure/concept for a sea shanty more than exactly an Irish song, but melodically he's not treating it like a shanty. My opinion is that it's modern composed with traditional influence, but proving that something is not old is a lot harder than proving that it is. I'd readily accept a counterargument.
posted by aimedwander at 11:19 AM on August 3, 2011

Best answer: That melody is like no Irish traditional song I've ever heard, and I've heard plenty. My vote is that he's just riffing, using standard nonsense syllables (too-a-ri-yah, a lot like toora-loora and similar).
posted by LN at 11:29 AM on August 3, 2011

Best answer: My vote is for "trying out new material on the road." This could be a lyrical/melodic fragment Hansard's thinking of working into a song, and he's experimenting with treatments for it as part of his live set. I'm not a huge Glen Hansard fan, but this song sounds very much like something I'd associate with him.

Also, the fact that "heave our bodies home" turns up exactly zero hits on Google (save this very askmefi question) means I'm strongly inclined to chalk this up as a Hansard original. There's a forum posting here that suggests he's debuting a lot of new stuff on this tour.
posted by Joey Bagels at 11:41 AM on August 3, 2011

Best answer: Any chance he was messing around with Bold Riley? It has a similar structure and people change up the lyrics all the time, interspersing each line with something like "Bold Riley-o, haul away" or "Bold Riley-o, gone away."
posted by carmicha at 11:51 AM on August 3, 2011

Best answer: It's not any generally known sea chantey.
posted by Miko at 4:07 PM on August 3, 2011

Response by poster: Thanks all, for taking the time to listen and comment. Having eliminated the notion that it was a trad song or sea shanty I wasn't familiar with, it seems most likely he was just riffing. Cheers.
posted by shannonm at 9:10 AM on August 4, 2011