BIIRD: ‘Trad music has stood the test of time, it’s bigger than all of us and it never will die’
Paddy’s Day will mark 360 days since 11-piece trad group BIIRD first officially spread their wings, but the idea was sown almost 13 years prior by the icon that is Lisa Canny. Lisa chats to Sarah Gill about the synthesis of method and magic, the value of authenticity and changing what it means to be a woman in trad.
Crystalline in their vision and masterful in their execution, BIIRD have spent their first year absolutely soaring. On St Patrick’s Day in 2024, the 11-piece group performed to a crowd of 10,000 at Trafalgar Square in London, mystifying the masses with their lively, zealous set and uncompromising dedication to Irish design.
Since then, they’ve been steadily building up their online following with the help of viral videos that bring a trad session from the corner of a pub to a global audience, packing out tents at festivals like All Together Now, and selling out headline shows. They’ve also made an appearance on The Late Late Show and released their first official music video for the tune The Rollover.
BIIRD is founded by seven-time All-Ireland champion harp and banjo player Lisa Canny, who has toured the world extensively as part of groups like Celtic Crossroads and The Young Irelanders and exists as a true force to be reckoned with in the music realm, both trad and otherwise.
First picking up her instruments at the age of four, Lisa grew up in a home that blasted Mary Black, Francis Black and Dolores Keane from the speakers. In college, she studied Irish music and dance, and went on to complete a Masters in traditional Irish music composition. By 19, she was touring the States with troupes born in direct response to the phenomenon of Riverdance, cutting her teeth on huge stages around the world.
If the culture and its people are moving towards something new, then so too is their music.
“I always felt challenged by the representation we were expected to give. We were either in the meringue dresses or in the over sexualised alternatives,” Lisa says. “There’s also the poor pay and mistreatment. Like every other female in the industry I had my own experience of that.”
Traditional Irish music was in her bones, encased by a network of veins that flowed with a love for pop music and girl power by virtue of hours spent listening to The Spice Girls and Destiny’s Child. It was an amalgamation of influences that had not yet been fused.
“I wanted to be in a girl band, but I grew up in the West of Ireland playing the banjo and harp. How do you marry those two worlds? Louis Walsh never came knocking!” Lisa tells me, “Trad music connects with everyone, and I asked myself why it wasn’t cutting through more in a contemporary way. The answer I came up with was that it needed a new image.”
So, between summer schools and festivals, at house parties and sessions, Lisa enlisted some of the most talented female musicians that were surrounding her at the time into what would eventually become BIIRD.
Tunes can ebb and flow in energy, they pull you in and leave you off — there’s no formality to it. It’s just about all of us being in that space together. It’s an energy exchange.
“I had a really clear vision of what it meant to be a BIIRD. The personality and attitude on top of the talent — and they were everywhere,” Lisa continues. “Everything fell into place. I was finding all of these incredible young musicians, some of whom I’ve been playing with since I was a teenager, and it began to take on its own identity and become this solid tangible thing.”
The flock of BIIRDs is made up of Lisa on harp, banjo, vocals; Laura Doherty on fiddle and guitar; Zoran Donohoe on concertina; Sal Heneghan on fiddle and harp; Miadhachlughain O’Donnell on flute and vocals; Nicole Lonergan on fiddle; Niamh Hinchy on vocals and synth; Aoife Kelly on cello; Ciara Ní Mhurchú on fiddle; Hannah Hiemstra on drums; and Claire Loughran on fiddle and harp.
When these women are playing together—either on stage or piled into the corner of their local—a magic flows between them. It’s like watching a starling murmuration, the intuitiveness and fluidity that seems to defy thought or explanation. I ask Lisa if that’s down to skillful calculation, a sense of connectedness, or some kind of sorcery. The answer is of course a mix of all three. “There’s no formula to it at all, it’s just innately in the music,” Lisa explains. “It’s music that has stood the test of time, it’s bigger than all of us put together. And it never will die. It’s music that comes naturally out of a people, and magic comes out of that. Tunes can ebb and flow in energy, they pull you in and leave you off — there’s no formality to it. It’s just about all of us being in that space together. It’s an energy exchange.”
Trad needs to live and breathe. Wherever the limit is, someone has always been pushing it.
So, where others might be ramping up the techno and sinking into couches come 3am, these session musicians are pulling out their instruments and playing away while shooting the breeze and making it look easy. “A lot of us have been playing since we were four or five years old, learning new tunes every single week,” Lisa says. “We’ve been playing in group settings throughout our entire lives. We’re exceptionally talented and skilled musicians, and it’s no surprise that people who have never heard traditional music before instantly connect to it. It’s music that cuts straight to the core.”
Since Lisa first began veering from the parameters of thoroughly traditional Irish music, she’s felt the strain of the purists. She was even called a disgrace to the genre, but she’s secure enough in her strength of experience and confident enough in the foot she’s putting forward to continue moving that needle. “I understand that all levels of protection and exploration need to exist in order for trad to continue to be as important in our culture as it is. It always needs to live and breathe. It needs to have a whole spectrum, from the purest traditionalists all the way to the most experimental artists using its elements. Wherever the limit is, someone has always been pushing it.”
Lisa continues: “The whole thing about traditional music is that it has to be closely related to the people and the culture in order for it to be relevant, and it cannot stay static. If the culture and its people are moving towards something new and different, then so too is the music that comes from them. As long as we have people at the gate, ensuring that we respect and appreciate what it is at its most traditional form, then we’re good.”
For the last decade, it feels like Irish people were very much looking outward, and now that focus has started to come back in. I think we’re becoming more authentic.
Our conversation turns to the Irish revival, because honestly how could it not? The reaffirmed sense of national identity and pride, language and heritage seems to be everywhere, from the music we listen to and the films we watch to the media we consume and the clothes we wear. It’s not so much that we were lacking in patriotism before, or that we thought it was ‘uncool’ to be Irish, but more so that we seemed to think the external world was a lot more alluring, outsourcing inspiration and mimicking profundity.
“For the last decade, it feels like Irish people were very much looking outward, and now that focus has started to come back in,” Lisa says. “I think we’re becoming more authentic. We spent so long building ourselves up and out into the world, trying to be a certain version of Ireland, but that wasn’t coming from our heart and soul.”
“It felt surface level, and what’s happening now is we’re creating artists who want to do what fuels their heart and soul. It’s no coincidence that it’s happening in parallel to all the sh*t that’s going on in the world. We’re watching so many of the artists we looked up to fail to speak up about Palestine, and then you’ve got the likes of Kneecap and Lankum, who are making true music and using their voices. That’s what’s breaking through now because the audience is so much more discerning.”
On Paddy’s Day this year all 11 BIIRDs will be playing the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin, before embarking on tour across Ireland in May and heading back on the festival circuit this summer. In the coming months, they’ll be stepping into the studio to record their first studio album and the collaborations that have already been confirmed are incredible.
“We obviously wanted and needed Sharon Shannon on our first album—she’s the OG BIIRD—and she immediately knew exactly what we wanted to do,” Lisa tells me. “We’ve also got Kate Nash on board, who is such a legend. She has this punk energy that’s needed to be a woman in the industry. That felt like a natural fit.”
The ultimate goal? Getting Enya out of her castle and into the studio for a collaboration to end all collaborations. We are very intently watching this space.
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