Album Notes

Catrin O'Neill was surrounded by traditional Welsh music and culture growing up in Aberdyfi in Snowdonia, but her adult life has exposed her to many new influences."I took my guitar and had five years of travel," she says. "I produced children's cabaret shows in the depths of China and was a chorus line dancer in the Bollywood film industry in India, among other things."

Now settled back in Wales, she has spent the past four years, as she says, "song writing, learning new instruments and rediscovering my undying passion for Welsh and other Celtic folk music".

Along with the traditional music, Catrin is writing her own original material in both English and Welsh. She plays solo but more often as a duo or as part of a four piece incorporating harp, fiddle, bouzouki, pipes and whistle.

Review from FATEA Magazine below: Any album with a song about drinking hard cider has got something going for it. Catrin O'Neill has put together an album of traditional classics and contemporary gems that I guess she's hoping will add to their number. "Nain's Kitchen" is an album of stoves and crock pots rather than ovens and bowls, songs of the people, not the peers, but delightfully practical with nothing going to waste. O'Neill herself can turn her voice from songs, sang almost angelically in Gaelic to rough drinking songs that seem to put you over the drink drive limit just by listening. Refreshingly direct.

From Rock 'n' Reel Magazine Mar/Apr 2010 issue.
Nain’s Kitchen
(Sparkling Wine) www.myspace.com/catrinoneill

Vivacious Welsh singer Catrin O’Neill has a passion for folk music which is refreshingly unaffected. Fortunately she has talent to match. The result is charming yet powerful. Many good live folk acts don’t fully succeed in transferring their strengths to recordings, but this is a strong debut album which does her versatile performances justice.

Catrin plays guitar and bodhran. She is well supported here by other acoustic musicians, notably Chris Knowles on Celtic harp and Mike Lease on fiddle. Four of the songs are self-penned, four traditional Welsh and five traditional Irish. Catrin’s own compositions have a gypsy romanticism, a cheering sense of the magic of love, music and nature, and a definite compatibility with the traditional material. The Welsh songs (sung in the native language) are perhaps the most beautiful, the two Irish drinking yarns are the most entertaining, while ‘I Am Stretched On Your Grave’ provides the soulful tragedy without which no true folk album would be complete.

‘Nain’ is Welsh for grandmother, and indeed the album does convey the feel of friendly folks warming themselves up with drink and music in some rural cottage on a cold winter’s night. Catrin does her nain proud.
Rychard Carrington