Defy All

We're sitting here in our home in County Kerry Ireland, looking out on a beautiful wild garden that our Mom created with her bare hands over the last twenty or so years. It's early August and the sky has the familiar Irish grey hue that never seems to change as though its completely incapable of making up its mind on whether it wants to let the sun shine through or pour down buckets of rain. We're trying to write our biography, the story of us, but everything we write seems to be coming out like a list of facts and figures about our life. We're three sisters…we're from Ireland… we've been performing and playing music since we were small…blah di blahall terribly trivial and completely devoid of any sense of us. There's no passion coming through at all and that's what our life is all about.
We're like any other family of course, growing up in a rural Irish home, a childhood spent playing make believe down old dirt roads and in overgrown fields, going to church on Sundays and eating Mom's delicious roast dinners with homemade apple pie, Summers spent on Dad's tractors helping him collect hay, and Winters where storms would leave us in darkness and we would sit by the open fire and hear stories of the past from our elders. We've had days where we were the best of friends, and days when we "hated" each other and vowed we'd never speak again (which of course would only last a few hours at most). We've cried and fought and laughed and hugged and loved. And somewhere along that line, we started singing.
It's probably an inherited thing for us though. Singing together in harmony. Our Mom and her two sisters had been a singing sister group in the seventies and so whenever we had family gatherings, the three of them would break open a bottle of wine, (or two!) pull out the guitar and sing song after song in harmony, Irish, folk, pop didn't matter, all into the late hours of the night. So in a way, I guess we could say music pretty much represents family for us.
Ever since we started performing and playing music we have had dreams bigger than our wellington boots and our Mom was right there beside us, like any good mother, telling us we could achieve anything and to follow our hearts wherever they may lead. And despite many people who told us otherwise, we did. From winning our first talent competition together, to releasing our first album of Irish songs, to spending years traveling to New York and Los Angeles and getting to work with amazing award winning songwriters and producers, to walking red carpets and meeting Tom Cruise and Bruce Willis and even writing a song that Vanity Fair used as a theme song for the Oscars, we've done it so much already…the three of us together. And so when the time came for us to make the album we've always dreamed of, with songs of our own and songs written by our Mom and Aunt and even covers we've loved since we were small, we knew there was only one place to make it. At home.
So in thirteen days, in a beautiful studio in Killarney looking out onto this huge magical-looking lake, we, and a few local musicians created an album all our own, that has a little Fogelberg, a little Dylan, a little of our Mom and Aunts and a whole lot of us. When we listen back to it, we think it pretty much sounds like the soundtrack to our life which is why we could only have named the album "No Place Like Home". (Plus we have always had quite an affinity with Dorothy and her red shoes!)
Well the sun has finally decided to come out now, and it's such a rare thing here that we must get outside for a while. There's nothing like Ireland when it's sunny. We hope the sun is out wherever you are, and of course thank you for taking time to read this, and listen to our music. It means more than you'll ever know. If we weren't making music we'd probably be out chasing rainbows, catching leprechauns and digging up pots of gold and honestly that's just a whole lot of hard work!
We hope to see you soon,
The O'Neill Sisters