Burning in the Rain. Marcia Howard.
Featuring Irelands Mary Black and Marcia's song, Poison Tree recorded in Dublin with Mary Black for the album A Woman's heart, A Decade on.
Produced by Steve Cooney and recorded in Ireland with Tim O'Brien and Maria Doyle Kennedy and members of the Bothy band.
Burning in the rain
Few modern artists have bridged the musical divide between Ireland and Australia as seamlessly as Marcia Howard. Her acclaimed new album was recorded in Dublin and features friends such as Mary Black and Tim O'Brien. It may be the best work yet from this former star of Aussie rockers, Goanna.
By TJ Cranley - Irish Echo
Bringing it all back home
"If anyone can somehow unite the Anglo/Australian, Irish and Aboriginal clans, it will be the Howards. Burning In The Rain, Marcia Howard's second solo CD has an earthy sensibility that speaks from deep within the soft core of sensitive hearts. She with her brother Shane Howard, who has recently released his superb Retrospect and Another Country CDs, have settled now in country Victoria, their land, linked with their Irish predecessors and with the indigenous everywhere. Marcia Howard has the feel about her of an Earth Mother, her brother the feel of a Folk Priest for Australians.
By Martin Flanagan- The Age
Burning in The Rain
The first music Marcia Howard remembers is her mother singing her to sleep - cradle songs, lullabies."Beautiful," she says. Later her mother played the big pipe organ at the local church and she, her five brothers, and her sister sang. She says that's where she learned to harmonise. "It was the only way you could hear your own voice."
The Howards were known as the Von Trapp Family of western Victoria. They sang at the opening of BTV6 in Ballarat. They sang at Irish nights in the Shamrock Theatre in Koroit - Irish-American songs like When Irish Eyes Are Smiling. Since getting to know Irish singer Mary Black, it has intrigued Marcia to learn that Irish-American music predominated in Black's home rather than traditional Irish music. When Shipwreck Coast singer Marcia Howard cut her second solo album long after a six-year sojourn with Goanna she enjoyed the luck of the Irish. Marcia was touring Ireland with Mary Black when Nashville bluegrass aces Tim O'Brien and Jeff White-fronted in Dublin. Producer Steve Cooney enlisted the duo to play fiddle and mandolin and sing on a disc that also boasted Black and a brace of Irish musicians. The expatriate Australian also played guitar, bass percussion, and didgeridoo as Howard returned to her ancestral roots in song. And it's that beatific hybrid of folk, country, and Irish music that makes this one of those joyous sleepers of the year. Howard, like the best writers, bares her soul on a disc whose therapeutic theme may or may not be recovery from divorce and white-hot ashes of love. She exorcises faded love in the entree title track and provides shelter in the spiritual healing of Stonewall. They segue into the Howard-Black collaboration on William Blake's poem Poison Tree, reprised from the compilation disc 'A Woman's Heart - A Decade On'.
David Dawson. Beat Magazine Melbourne.
