Lucia Comnes - Love, Hope & Tyranny (2015)

Lucia's debut album as a songwriter, 'Love, Hope & Tyranny' showcases 13 of her original songs with an impressive list of contributors, including background vocals from the delightful T Sisters.

Having recently toured with Joan Baez and won the Dallas Songwriting Competition last year, Lucia Comnes returns to her American roots for her excellent new album Love, Hope & Tyranny. It’s a record that has been three years in the making for which Lucia called on the help of old friend and mentor Jeffrey Wood. As well producing three of the tracks Jeffrey’s also the director of the legendary Fantasy studios in California, where the majority of this record was recorded. In addition to Woods, Lucia also turned to a more recently made friend, the multi-instrumentalist and producer Gawain Mathews, who oversaw the majority of the sessions and even helped her with a couple of the songs. Together they’ve taken Lucia’s passionate, assured song craft and cooked up a superb sounding Americana record, which none the less has subtle hints of the globe-trotting musical adventure that Lucia has been on, ever since picking up the fiddle as a five year old.

While Lucia has most definitely tapped into the wellspring of American folk music for Love, Hope & Tyranny, she has always cast her musical nets much wider. That she is a 2006 graduate of Long Island University’s Global Studies program with a self-designed interdisciplinary degree called Music, Culture and Nature offers a clue. Lucia is widely travelled and has taken in the music of Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria and Ireland, with the latter finding her studying in Cork and learning the Gaelic language and sean-nos style of singing. Lucia has also developed her powerful fiddle style through studying with many of the instrument masters including Martin Hayes, Kevin Burke and Oisín MacDiarmada in the U.S. and Ireland.