Robin James Hurt’s “A Song, A Story Told” arrives with a sound you can almost run a thumb over, like worn corduroy. In an age of sterile, diamond-polished productions, this album is a defiantly handmade thing, tracked onto vintage cassette machines. The result is not a flaw, but an ingredient. A faint, persistent hiss breathes alongside the instruments, a ghost in the machine who seems to know all the words and hums along quietly. Hurt calls it “#lofolk,” and it’s a curiously perfect label. It’s the sound of traditional Irish earth meeting the gritty pavement of lo-fi American rock, as if a long-lost album by The Chieftains was discovered in Guided By Voices’ basement.
It’s an odd but potent concoction. The folk heart beats strong in the melodies and the ache of the stories, but the rock edge provides a restless energy, a sense that these are not museum pieces. These are lived-in songs for cluttered rooms and late-night drives, not quiet auditoriums. This is a collaboration of sensibilities, pairing Hurt’s soulful instrumentation with Tony Floyd Kenna’s rock-and-roll poetics. It’s a pub-crawl through the human condition, starting on a joyous Dublin street corner in “Hey Mary (Play A Song For Me),” where music is a purely physical command to move, and ending with the profound, homesick sigh of “Take Me Home.” On that particular track, the core solo sound is enriched by the vivid colour of Ian McTigue’s drums and Gosia Gasior’s fiddle, a sudden widening of the sky.
The album moves through states of being like a man walking through fog, moments of pure clarity breaking through the mist. There’s the dizzy, feet-off-the-ground euphoria of new attraction in “Thinking Of You,” followed by the quiet contemplation of loss in “Where Are They Now.” This last one… it does something strange. It makes me think of my grandfather’s old toolbox, the top tray filled with dozens of tarnished keys that no longer fit any locks in the house, or anywhere else for that matter. He kept them anyway. This song is the sound of rattling those keys, each one a memory of a door you can no longer open, a person you can no longer ask. It’s the weight of the unanswered.
But Hurt and Kenna don’t leave you stranded in that mist. Just when the melancholy threatens to settle in your bones, the album throws open a window. Songs like “Dont Look Down On The Day” and “When The Happines Is there” are stubborn, clear-eyed calls to attention. They are less gentle suggestions and more urgent commands: live this day, hold this joy, because the rain will come again. They aren’t anthems of blind optimism; they feel like resilience earned through experience. This is reinforced by the almost magical thinking of “Believe,” a track that insists the impossible is merely a matter of perspective, of convincing yourself you can walk on snow without leaving a trace. It’s a beautiful, slightly mad idea that feels essential to the album’s spirit.
At its core, “A Song, A Story Told” is concerned with what we carry inside us. “Room Full Of Music” posits that the richest orchestra is the one playing in your own mind, while “In The Heart Of A Rainbow” offers up a shimmering, internal sanctuary. The entire record doesn’t document a life so much as it feels like one—a collection of vivid moments, grainy recollections, sudden bursts of light, and the quiet, ever-present hum of memory.
What are we left with when it’s over? We are left with the lingering warmth of that tape hiss, the resonance of a guitar string, and a pocketful of stories. And it poses a quiet, final question. In the stories we tell ourselves, are we the hero, the ghost, or just the one holding the microphone?
