[Image: “Ciara and Conor [Brady], acoustic set, Shadow Road Shining launch at Sugar Club, Dublin,
13 May 2011″ (from her FB page)]

The [mostly imaginary] scene: Dublin, Ireland, in the offices of a large publishing firm, sometime in the still young twenty-first century. An experienced, highly respected editor sits looking dreamily out a window of her office. Only in her 30s, she’s done the successful-professional thing and she’s also the mother of small children. She has no desire to give up those things. And yet… and yet…

From the streets below, voices whisper to her. A few moments pass. Then she realizes: they’re not speaking but singing softly, some from half a world away and some just a few blocks distant, many of them muted by the passing of decades and others still very young…

From Ciara Sidine’s Facebook page, on her influences:

I am inspired by the beautiful vocals and at times ground-breaking recordings of Emmylou Harris, by the raw vocal energy and gut-wrenching lyrics of Lucinda Williams, by the braveness and vulnerability of Beth Gibbons and the rare and ethereal sound of Portishead. The voice of Elvis Costello never ceases to make me want to lie down and surrender to its beautiful calling.

Listening to the voice of Dolores Keane always made me feel that something true and unalterable was unfolding. From Mary Black came something equally true, pure in tone and melody; from Sinead O’Connor something otherworldly, at once raw, honest, violent and soothing. From Bob Geldof, ass-kicking, rocking music that put its money where its mouth was. I’m inspired by the folk revival from the fifties on, by blues and country. Hearing Hank Williams’s voice is like a fresh awakening every time. Van Morrison speaks directly to the soul, finds his groove there and works his spell. Let the healing begin.

Johnny Cash, well I can barely even go there. His voice brings me to a different place, and it is his later American recordings that I most often revisit and find myself at home in, almost akin to being a child in those warm sing-song evenings where the night was infinite possibility and song was a democracy all of its own. Johnny’s voice reminds me of rolling thunder — rumbling, spine-tingling, exciting. How close is the lightning to where you’re standing?

Joni still reveals something fresh and lasting in every new recording, and I don’t think there’s anyone to whom I owe more in terms of inspiration. When I listen to the immediacy and singularity of records she made well over forty years ago, every strum, every chord, every harmony still goes straight to the heart.

Every generation thinks it has reinvented the world, but we only have to listen to the music of the fifties and sixties to know that our hold over any such notion is at best tenuous. What unfolds from the rock ‘n’ roll revolution has all manner of inventiveness. But rock ‘n’ roll paved the way. And its way too was paved, by roots, gospel, jazz, blues, country. It just comes around again, anew. Gillian Welch and David Rawlings make the best case for this of any contemporary performers I can think of and they, too, inspire me.

That’s quite a bit of ambition wrapped up there, hmm? But she did more than dream. She did it. Her debut album, Shadow Road Shining, came out last year to great acclaim, and you can find echoes of all those voices — and all their poetry — in every song.

Here’s “Take Me Down”:

[Below, click Play button to begin Take Me Down. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 4:30 long.]

[Lyrics]

I don’t know if she’s still editing, or plans to return to it (if indeed she has left). But the verbal dexterity is all there on open display, not just in her songs’ lyrics but in such of her prose as I’ve succeeded in digging up. Here’s an excerpt from her Web site:

At the moment, I feel that to be Irish is to have just emerged from your teenage-hood, having wrecked your parents’ gaff in a massive drug-fuelled party. Great fun, no one’s arguing, but they’re due back any minute, and you’ve woken up to an almighty hangover and an unbright future. The beautiful chick/dude from last night is nowhere to be found. Tomorrow you’re about to discover that you failed the leaving. There’s a queue stretching around the corner for a Mac-job. It’s time to sink or swim.

There’s always choice, always possibility. Maybe I’ll write a song about that.

An almighty hangover and an unbright future… You failed the leaving. It takes a real writer’s confidence with the English language — and in her choices — to fashion such cadences.

Update (2012-02-15, 2:00pm): See Froog’s comment, below, for a bit of a balloon-puncturing about one of those presumptively imaginative phrases.