Luka Bloom, Awake And Dreaming

By Gwen Orel

Luka Bloom is trad great Christy Moore's younger brother, Kevin Barry. Or, if you like, Christy Moore is the older brother of singer-songwriter Irish folk-rocer Luka Bloom.

He answers to Luka or Barry ("nobody calls me Kevin") - but his songs speak for themselves.

With his CD Dreams in America, out on September 28th, he revisits songs from his career, and his time in New York 20 years ago.

It's not a pre-packaged nostalgia trip, though-for one thing, as Luka writes several times on his website (www.lukabloom.com/news/Welcome-to-Dreams-In-America/), he's "allergic to nostalgia."

For another, he has re-recorded and re-interpreted eleven of his songs in a pared down, man-and-his-guitar style.

If you missed him when he had a residency at the Red Lion in Greenwich Village 20 years ago, this offers a feeling of what he was like then.

He won't be moving back to New York soon - he lives in County Kilkenny. New York ultimately offered him the world, and the world isn't giving him back.

He's touring on the East Coast through October. He's in New Jersey October 2nd, at New York's City Winery on the 3rd and the New York Irish Center in Long Island City on the 5th, in the Sellersville Theatre in Pennsylvania on the 7th (full listing with ticket info at www.lukabloom.com/gigs.php).

In Dreams in America, the songs are naked - the poetry, the ache in the melodies, the passion in the voice are unadorned. And the rhythm in the strumming guitar, particularly on his driving rap-meets-beat of his song "The Acoustic Motorbike," breathes through the words.

If you're new to his music, it's compelling intro, and a must-have for fans. It gains on repeated listening - a few spare songs that seem bare bones feel hauntingly pure the second and third time through.

The album also includes three songs recorded live at the National Concert Hall in Dublin with the National Concert Hall orchestra - and the full orchestra never overwhelms Luka's lush melodies.

And the "new" song is pure trad - Luka singing "Lord Franklin." He recorded it, he told me, to honor Micheal O'Domhnaill, whose version of the ballad with Kevin Burke on 1979's Promenade is unforgettable.

"He was a great friend, and a great man. I would never have dreamt of recording it when he was alive because I loved Micheal's version so much, but within months of his dying I thought that's what I would do to honor Micheal, learn this great song and hope that I can do justice to it," he said. Luka's version has its own shimmering authenticity to it, beautiful guitar ornaments and verses of the sad ballad with contained emotion to it. He often throws a trad song into his sets. Luka began his career by touring with his older brother Christy Moore when he was only fourteen.

He listens to Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill's Lonesome Touch once a month. "Much of the work that I listen to comes from traditional people - not so much the traditional band form, but musicians. I'm a great lover of traditional songs. Often they are lonely voices in the wilderness not given a lot of attention - but that's the way it is in Ireland. The reality is I just want to write songs, always be dipping in and out of it, always have been, since a child. I do feel a deep connection with it, particularly in my melodies, that comes from just loving traditional music over the years."

He's also listening to Tunisian oud player Anouar Brahem right now, and Deva Primal, "Because of the space that they create, they remind me of where I want my voice to go. Everything I listen to I listen to with utter selfishness. I just hear something and if I love it and it moves me I want more of it. It's from somewhere on the planet and we're all here together."

That porous approach to genre and borders reflects itself in his name.

He changed his name to Luka Bloom when he moved to America in 1987, taking "Luka" from the Suzanne Vega song from the point of view of a battered child, and "Bloom" from Leopold Bloom in James Joyce's Ulysses. But don't make too much of that, he says. "I liked the sound of the name. There is no relevance to the song, or to literary aspirations; it's a pretentious nickname with no significance whatsoever! I liked the sound of it and it's easy to remember. Barry Moore is who I am; Luka Bloom is what I do, a brand for my work. It's an anonymous identity, a band name, a brand name for my work. It's only added to my life in many ways that I could never have imagine."

Sometimes, in funny ways. "There was a woman who came up to me at a show one time in Canada and said she was shocked because, she thought I was going to be a Jewish woman!" he says with a laugh.

There's something just a teeny tiny bit disingenuous about the way he doesn't overthink things - perhaps a desire not to avoid limiting, again, with words. But when you go to his website and read his eloquent and vivid notes on the inspiration for this album, you see he is in fact a natural writer.

The album itself includes liner notes from Michael Hill, from Warner Brothers, who saw Luka perform at the Red Lion on Bleeker Street in Greenwich Village. They are nicely written and interesting, but Luka's are direct.

And he admits he has been doing some writing beyond songwriting. "I have written a lot of short stories, which probably nobody will ever read. Enough people are on my case about it to consider that maybe in the not too distant future I will do some kind of book."

Last January, he tells me, marks 20 years since the release of Riverside in New York City which transformed his whole professional landscape.

He recorded much of Dreams in America in his living room. Recently, the trad fiddlers the Kane sisters did the same thing. Is it a trend?

Technology has made it possible for musicians to do more intimate recordings if they choose to, he explains. But it depends on the project. For Eleven Songs (2008), he chose to do the exact opposite, record in a studio with many musicians.

Dreams in America called for something different. "It just seemed absolutely right to go back to the kind of setting in which these songs would have been written, and to give completely different versions, personal, intimate versions of songs that had been recorded with pretty lush versions in the studio."

Each of the songs on the CD has something to say to him now. Some remind him of particular moments. "Bridge of Sorrows," he says, was inspired by his first visit to Switzerland.

He was on tour with the Cowboy Junkies. On a night off, he went to a nightclub and met a bunch of punks who took him around the city, and brought him to a bridge where a lot of young people had jumped off to kill themselves, "quite an epidemic at the time. And it really shocked me and moved me to write this song. And unfortunately there's a lot of similar activity happening in Ireland at the moment so there's a song that was written twenty years ago that has become completely current in my country."

Where some of the songs begin with an image or a line, some seem to appear almost fully formed.

The song "Cold Comfort," he says, describes a time of living in New York and the cold winters, missing home, a sense of positivity and beauty living in America but at the same time really missing the people from home. "I love that song, and I love singing it," he says.

It's particularly beautiful in this incarnation - the music captures the yearning in the lyrics. Even without lyrics, you couldn't miss the homesickness in the music. "It all happened together, if I remember rightly. There was definitely something poignant in the chord structure that I was able to tap into at the time," he says.

What inspires him when he writes a song could be something somebody said, that moves him, or notes he stumbles on - "the process is about being awake."

A funny thing to say, maybe, for someone who writes about dreams. But not when you think about the fluid, shifting, in-the-moment way that dreams work-the way songs feel, too.

Luka Bloom is so very present that asked what comes next, he says, "I sing in Boston tonight, and that's as far as I can think right now. I'm booked out with shows until the end of May next year. When my current phase of performing is over I'll review where I've been, look to where I want to be and see where songs and music take me."

Luka Bloom plays City Winery, NYC, October 3rd, 212-608-055, and the New York Irish Center, Long Island City, October 5th, www.nyirish.org. For other dates check www.lukabloom.com/gigs.php.