I heard her before I knew her name.
That’s how it usually goes with voices that stay with you. “In a Lifetime” came out in 1985, a duet with Bono, and I remember thinking the woman singing with him was doing something he couldn’t quite do — something quieter and older and more certain. Bono was urgent, the way everything felt urgent in the mid-eighties. Her voice was something else. It wasn’t competing. It was just there, underneath and around the whole thing, like it had been there long before the song started.
I didn’t chase it down right away. That’s also how it goes sometimes.
The next time I really heard her was “Theme from Harry’s Game,” the 1982 single Clannad recorded for a British miniseries about the Troubles. The song is sung entirely in Irish Gaelic, and I didn’t understand a word of it. Still don’t, really. But something in the sound — the age of it, the texture — caught me and held on. It’s one of those songs you don’t analyze while it’s playing. You just let it do what it does.
She was born Máire Philomena Ní Bhraonáin — I’ve always liked the full name better, it sounds like it belongs to the landscape she came from — in County Donegal on the fourth of August, 1952. Eldest of nine. Her family was steeped in traditional Irish music, and in 1970 she helped form Clannad with two of her brothers and a pair of uncles. That’s not a band origin story, that’s a kitchen table that kept going.
What I didn’t know until recently was how to describe what her voice was actually doing. The vibrato is slower than you expect, more deliberate — like it’s not in a hurry to arrive. She uses ornamentation too, the small grace notes and slides that Irish traditional singing moves through naturally. And her breath control lets her hold phrases longer than seems reasonable, the kind of long that makes you catch your own breath without meaning to.
She also wrote about her life — an autobiography called The Other Side of the Rainbow, published in 2000. I haven’t read it yet, but what I understand is that it doesn’t flinch. She went through some genuinely hard years, the kind that leave marks, and she came out the other side with what she described simply as a faith in Jesus Christ. No elaboration required, really. Some people say things like that and you can tell it cost them something to get there. And then you notice that she spent years working with people caught in addiction and dependency — the same dark she’d walked through herself — and the faith stops being a footnote. It was load-bearing.
She died yesterday, April 13th, at her home in Gaoth Dobhair, Donegal. She was 73.
Fifty-four years with Clannad, sixteen albums with them, eighteen or more on her own. There’s a lot to go back through. I’ll put something on later and let it run.
Her full name, if you want to say it right: Máire Philomena Ní Bhraonáin. Pronounced something close to Maw-ra Nee Vree-nawn. It sounds like a secret, that ancient way.
For another beautifully performed song featuring Moya’s voice, see An Ordinary Love Lifted Into Song.
Veni. Vidi. Scripsi. 