With ‘All My Friends,’ Aoife O’Donovan Composes a Soulful History Lesson and Call to Action on Women’s Rights

When the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra in Central Florida asked Aoife O’Donovan to write five songs commemorating the centennial of the 19th Amendment, she sent sketches to orchestrator Tanner Porter and decided to draw on speeches and letters by activist Carrie Chapman Catt, whose work helped make it possible for women to finally gain the right to vote in 1920. A second commission from the FreshGrass Foundation gave O’Donovan the resources to record more songs and pay for sessions all around the country—in Nashville, Los Angeles, Pasadena, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Berkeley, as well as Central Florida, Vermont, and Massachusetts. The result is All My Friends, a genre-blurring album with nine songs that skillfully alternate between orchestral movements and quiet passages, blending folk/Americana and orchestral flavors for a potent mix that feels supremely relevant as the U.S. heads toward another fiercely divisive presidential election.

Given the current political climate, an album about suffrage and women’s rights could easily be, well, bleak. Instead, All My Friends is a gorgeous, exquisitely paced meditation that doubles as a call to action. The musicianship is uniformly excellent, too. On songs like “Someone to Follow” and “The Right Time,” the album gets its Americana flavor from contributions by O’Donovan touring compadres Alan Hampton (bass) and Griffin Goldsmith (drums), plus Rob Burger (accordion and keyboard), Noam Pikelny (banjo), Jim Fitting (harmonica), and Luke Reynolds (pedal steel). The young women of the San Francisco Girls Chorus, headed by Valérie Sainte-Agathe, bring their A game to songs like “All My Friends,” “Daughters,” and “America, Come.” 

Two of the many highlights are Anaïs Mitchell’s vocals on “Over the Finish Line” and Sierra Hull’s mandolin solos on “Crisis.” The 30-something-strong Knights chamber orchestra, led by Colin Jacobsen and Eric Jacobsen (who’s also O’Donovan’s husband and the music director of the Orlando Phil), turns in masterful performances; the New York-based Westerlies brass quartet contributes arrangements, swagger, and subtlety. Thanks to beautiful arrangements and a top-notch mix by Darren Schneider, O’Donovan’s singular voice and her guitar playing—on her 1934 Martin 0-17 and Collings 01 Mh—remain the focal points. Despite the wide variety of textures, one gets the impression that these songs, which range from sweeping (“Crisis”) to intimate (“Over the Finish Line”), will sound great onstage in any configuration.

Throughout, O’Donovan invites us to sit with the weight of history while immersing us in music that is soulful, and at times even playful (dig that fresh take on Bob Dylan’s classic downer “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” arranged by Gabriel Kahane). The lively intergenerational conversation between Catt, O’Donovan, and the next generation is rooted and optimistic, and especially on songs like the surging “America, Come,” taken from Catt speeches in 1917 and 1918, the overall effect is more thrillingly uplifting than one might expect. In these tumultuous times, All My Friends is a powerful masterclass in revisiting the past with an eye on the future.