Swift Sail Flaming

by Bring Your Own Hammer presents

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about

Bring Your Own Hammer are delighted to present Mike Smalle’s and Carol Keogh’s Swift Sail Flaming, which is inspired by Stephen Dedalus’s quatrain in the Aeolus episode of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922). Joyce’s work draws on the closing lines of Douglas Hyde’s ‘My Grief on the Sea’. This allusion by Joyce to Hyde’s poem went largely unnoticed by scholars until the 1940s but since then it has provoked much analysis and comment. For some, it is a parody intended to reflect the vampiric nature of English translations of Irish language song and poetry. For others, it reflects Stephen’s dislike of Hyde as well as Joyce’s wider engagement with a diverse range of sources from William Blake to W.B. Yeats to an illustration by William T. Horton (used as the cover image here). While others have noted the musical allusions in Joyce’s work and identified Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman as an inspiration. The release of this single, alongside its companion song, My Grief on the Sea by Michelle O’Rourke, marks the beginning of a new Bring Your Own Hammer series where we ask composers, singers and musicians to interpret the work of Irish writers from the long nineteenth century (1789-1920).

Praise:

Bold and arresting! Super performance, arrangement, production and mix!
- Mel Mercier.

For more on Bring Your Own Hammer, visit: www.byohammer.com
If you want to support us in creating new music, visit: byohammer.com/fund-the-project/

lyrics

On swift sail flaming,

From storm and south,

He comes pale vampire,

Mouth to my mouth.

credits

released April 5, 2024
Mike Smalle: vocals, guitar and electronics
Carol Keogh: vocals
Engineered & Produced by Mike Smalle
Carol Keogh vocals recorded by Carol Keogh
Words by James Joyce
Music by Mike Smalle & Carol Keogh
Publishing: Copyright Control.
Sleeve: Paul Callanan with Richard McMahon

license

about

Bring Your Own Hammer presents Limerick, Ireland

Bring Your Own Hammer is not a band, a group, an ensemble or even a collective. If anything, it is a faction but unlike nineteenth-century factions, who met, armed with sticks and wattles in fairs and markets, it is armed with voices and instruments and dedicated, as no faction before, to the re-interpretation of historical material in song form. ... more

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