New Album From Aoife O’Donovan Reflects on Women’s Experience in America

For her new album, All My Friends, singer-songwriter Aoife O’Donovan drew inspiration from a collaborator whose best work was 100 years ago.

In original songs inspired by speeches and letters written by suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt, O’Donovan brings a modern, personal perspective to being a woman in America, reflecting on what’s changed and what hasn’t in the century or so since the 19th Amendment enshrined women’s right to vote.

All My Friends, coming March 22 on Yep Roc Records, is the first album O’Donovan had a hand in producing, along with her husband, Eric Jacobson, and Darren Schneider. Many of the songs stem from two recent commissions — one from the Orlando Philharmonic and the other from the FreshGrass Foundation, No Depression’s publisher, which included a performance at last September’s FreshGrass Festival in North Adams, Massachusetts. Guests on the album include Anaïs Mitchell, Sierra Hull, Noam Pikelny, Griffin Goldsmith, chamber orchestra The Knights, brass quartet The Westerlies, and the San Francisco Girls Chorus.

The first single from the album, the title track, lands on Chapman Catt’s birthday and marks the suffragist movement’s 1920 battle to get Tennessee to become the final signatory to make the proposed amendment become law. A lyric video for the song was made by filmmakers Steph Jenkins and Brian Lee using historical footage:

“The seeds of this song predate the entire project as a whole,” O’Donovan says in a press release announcing the album and its first single. “[‘All My Friends’] is about camaraderie, companionship, people united in common struggle against oppression. I imagine the women literally marching in Tennessee as the dawn lifted over the fields. I imagine the struggle of needing just one more state to ratify, and just how much weight that final vote held. I imagine the collective longing for the country of our birth to open her arms. The opening, featuring my voice in harmony with The Westerlies, sets the tone for the record. Slowly, the strings enter, enveloping the chorale in rich tones, and then when the band kicks in after that first verse, we hear the gorgeous aching sound of the San Francisco Girls Chorus.”

All My Friends follows O’Donovan’s 2022 album, Age of Apathy (ND review), which landed on No Depression’s Readers Poll and Critics Poll of best roots music albums of that year. Last year she released a vinyl recording of Aoife O’Donovan Plays Nebraska, a project first conceived for a set early in her solo career and then revisited during the pandemic lockdown to honor the landmark Bruce Springsteen album (ND story).

O’Donovan has several shows planned this spring to showcase All My Friends, including with the Knoxville Chamber Orchestra at the Big Ears Festival in March and at FreshGrass | Bentonville in May. Her debut performance at London’s Barbican Hall happens in June, with Jacobsen conducting the Guildhall Session Orchestra and Music Centre London Choir. Find her full tour schedule here.