Here is my second encounter with San Francisco-based Amelia Hogan. I reviewed her first album, Taking Flight, in this space on 25 February 2023. An outstanding recording, it stood refreshingly outside the exhausting singer-songwriter school that had, and has, dominated the "folk" scene. The album went on to meet acclaim and win awards on the international Irish-music network.

The tastefully produced Burnished -- only mildly like the semi-orchestral "Celtic music" popular within living memory -- opens misleadingly with an original, "Rolling in the Gold," a lovely song that could have been sung during the gold rush in the middle of the 19th century. That accomplished, Hogan's self-penned material vanishes into the ether, and other writers take over the show. Thirteen trad and in-the-tradition numbers follow, commanding listeners' attention and holding on to it. The only thing wrong with this is that unlike most recordings it is not to be lost in the background while you're doing something else. You'll want to sit down and let it work its aura on you. In other words, it's as far from disposable pop as you're going to find yourself.

This, I hasten to add, even though it features a song I've detested since the first time it burrowed into my ears when I was a little kid: "They Call the Wind Maria." Written by the celebrated stage composers Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe for Paint Your Wagon (1951), a Western-themed musical, it is an ersatz folk song by two men whose knowledge of true earth-bred sounds could have been no more than vaporous. As if to underscore their own inauthenticity, the folk-pop harmony groups of the early 1960s brought it into their repertoires. Even then, callow child that I was, I remember wondering, "Why would they call the wind Maria?" Or, for that matter, the rain Tess and the fire Joe? (The answer, my friend, is blowing in Maria.)

Hogan forces me to contemplate the unthinkable: maybe the problem is not so much the song as the way it's been produced and sung. Against all reason it feels decent enough in Hogan's voice and arrangement, and it goes so far as to communicate something that resembles genuine emotion. Hmm.

There are songs here, too, that I have always adored: the magnificent old American hymn "Wayfaring Stranger," Gordon Bok's dark maritime classic "Bay of Fundy," the ghost ballad "Haunted Hunter" (aka "The Walker in the Snow"), not exactly traditional but first set to recorded music by Billie "The Cow Girl Singer" Maxwell in 1929, based on a verse narrative by Charles Dawson Shanley and set on the Yukon frontier. Hogan's liner notes place the events near the opposite coast of Canada, in New Brunswick. No matter. The song will whiten your hair in either location.

Though I've been attracted to Irish-and-adjacent songs since the Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem more than half a century ago, Hogan manages to track down traditionals heretofore unknown to me, among them "Home by Bearna," which I am delighted to welcome into my psychic library.

Perhaps the most familiar song here is Dominic Behan's "The Patriot Game," a true story about the death of teenaged rebel Fergal O'Hanlon. Though usually judged to be blood-soaked Irish-nationalist propaganda, Hogan takes the optimistic view that it's instead a morality tale about "the consequences of blind patriotism." (Contrast this with the assessment on page 221 of Fintan O'Toole's skeptical 2021 opus We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland.) Anyway, "Game" is so irresistibly imagined that even an infuriated listener who knows he or she is being manipulated is usually drawn into it.

There are also songs by masters of the neo-traditional Scottish and Irish, especially Karine Polwart and Brian McNeill. The former contributes the stirring "Come Away In," a warm-hearted greeting of refugees and immigrants. Fortunately, Polwart, who is Scottish, presumably will not have to fear the wrath of MAGA enforcers.

[ visit Amelia Hogan's website ]