Runa
It started with a double tap of a beautiful sunset photograph on Instagram. Just a few days later, we joined these five Celtic musicians as they recorded their fourth album.
Who would have thought it? An award-winning Celtic band choosing North Cape May in the dead of winter to record its fourth album? What are the odds?
The pieces began to fit together, however, when we discovered that the lead singer’s grandparents have a home here and she’s been coming to Cape May since she was a little girl.
It’s a wintry day at the end of January, not long after snow has fallen and the temperatures have plunged to the point that the Bay looks like something out of the movie Titanic—mini-icebergs floating into shore and scattering about the beach like they own the place.
RUNA is hard at work on a fourth album. (Title, at press time, is still to be determined.) It is an unlikely place to set up a recording studio, even if it is a temporary one. The chalet is on loan to them for one week. Lead vocalist Shannon Lambert-Ryan’s grandparents graciously offered to vacate their home to allow the five-member band to record there, uninterrupted.
“We call our fans RUNAtics,” says Shannon, “and my grandparents are two of our biggest fans.”
Every room in the “studio” is dedicated to a musician and the equipment, which includes an impressive assortment of sound equipment and musical instruments as well as music and lyrics which are taped to the closet doors. Some of the words are in English, some in Irish Gaelic.
They are a geographically eclectic group, hailing from Ireland, Canada, Philadelphia and Tennessee. Shannon is the band’s co-founder, along with her husband Fionán de Barra. She is from Philadelphia and sometimes Cape May. In addition to vocals, she also performs the traditional Irish step-dance at the end of every performance. Before plunging into music full-time, she worked as an actor, appearing in a number of theater venues and in M. Night Shyamalan’s movie The Village. She was honored by the Irish Music Awards with a nomination for Best Female Vocalist for 2012.
Fionán de Barra is from Dublin, Ireland. He plays guitar and vocals. He started playing guitar professionally with Riverdance here in America in 1999. Since then, he has worked as musical director for Moya Brennan of Clannad and her band. He performed, co-wrote, arranged and recorded songs for three of her albums.
He met his bride-to-be at the Philadelphia Folk Festival in 2006. Well, that explains their union, but how did the rest of the group form?
Cheryl Prashker, a Canadian-born percussionist for the group, finally sheds light on the subject. “We were all back-up musicians with other groups within the folk community, and we’d all seen each other playing with other groups. Shannon and Fionán actually got together first and produced a CD in Dublin.”
That 2008 album, Across the Pond, featured Shannon singing Celtic songs with Fionán as producer. The photos used in it were of Ireland and Cape May, hence the title. “And at the end [of the production],” says Shannon, “Fionán asked, what I thought was jokingly, ‘Would you like to tour the world with me singing Celtic music?’” Clearly, the answer was yes. RUNA was formed in August of that year. The couple married the following year and will celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary in April.
“I had met Cheryl around the same time,” Shannon explains. “And we kept in touch through the folk community.”
Cheryl sat in with them one night early on and RUNA became a trio. In 2011, they formed a quintet and have remained so. The other two members are David Curley from Galway, Ireland, a multi-instrumentalist (guitar, banjo, mandolin, bodhrán and more) who assists on vocals and a bit of step-dancing as well.
Rounding out the group is the youngest member, Maggie Estes, who replaced the original fiddle player in 2013. She is a native Tennessean, who recently moved to Nashville, where Fionán recruited her.
But getting back to the choice of North Cape May as a recording studio site, Fionán said the house by the bay is good for the soul. “It’s very invigorating to be able to just go down to the beach for a walk. When you’re in the city, you can’t really do that.”
Bands must often rent studio time. This greatly narrows the scope of how much time they will have to get the job done. Noting that, Shannon said, “The other huge point about it is that creatively, it doesn’t always happen on the clock. Whether it’s a physical thing, or maybe vocally, I may not be having a good day at one in afternoon. If you want to be up in at one in the morning, you’re not disturbing anybody. And you can do that, and we have done that. And say, ‘This really isn’t working,’ when we thought it would work. It’s really helped the creative process for us.”
RUNA’s first two albums, Jealousy (2009) and Stretched On Your Grave (2011) were studio albums. Shannon explained that they were trying to build a repertoire as a band. Therefore, many of the songs were performed in concert and then recorded as an album. “In some respects,” she said, “that is great because you get a lot of practice, and you can change the arrangements and see what works and what doesn’t; but at the same time, by the time you are making an album, a lot of people have already heard those songs already.”
They had a different philosophy in recording their next album Somewhere Along the Road, released in 2012. In an effort keep the material fresh for the audience and also to keep it interesting and exciting for the band, RUNA began researching and recording the songs before going on tour with them.
“From a promotional point of view,” said Shannon, “we were trying to bring new stuff and have it available as we were performing it for the first time. It gave us a bit of a different goal. Rather than having all those songs ready to go, we decided to work on them as we were recording them, which is wonderfully exiting, but daunting as well.”
Fionán and Shannon discovered, quite by accident, that the bay house would be perfect as a studio. They were playing songs for Shannon’s grandparents during a visit and noticed how vibrant the sound was. Shannon explained that where one space might be acoustically perfect for performing, it might not be as good for recording, and to their surprise the North Cape May retreat proved to be the ticket which allowed them to record in optimum conditions and afford them the time to experiment and rehearse. The first album recorded at the North Cape May venue was Somewhere Along the Road.
Until the release of the new album will any of the new songs be part of a show they had scheduled?
“As many as we can,” Fionán says, “but at the same time, having done all that work, you don’t want to preempt it too much ahead of time. This album won’t be ready to be manufactured until at least April, and you want to wait until May or June to make a big splash. With that in mind, you don’t want to release too much. Maybe one or two.”
RUNA keeps on a strict schedule. There’s much more work to do before calling it a wrap. Since the quintet is geographically split, the pressure to get as much accomplished as possible is always looming. Maggie will return to Nashville. Dave to State College, Pennsylvania. Cheryl, Shannon and Fionán will head back to Philadelphia, only to reassemble soon to resume their tight performing schedule.
It all goes to show, you never know what creative journeys are happening in Cape May, even in the dead of winter.
