Irish folk act Hibsen will release their debut album The Stern Task of Living on Friday 26th May, which is inspired by and based on the book of short stories Dubliners by James Joyce. The seeds of The Stern Task of Living were sown in November 2020 when Irish folk artists Jim Murphy and Gráinne Hunt were paired together at an online song-writing workshop to write a song based on the short story Araby from James Joyce’s Dubliners. Despite the challenges of co-writing remotely, the song came together quickly and Gráinne and Jim were delighted with the outcome. Inspired by the experience of writing Araby together, their random pairing soon became a much bigger collaboration and they decided to write an album of songs based on all 15 short stories from Dubliners. Over the next year or so, they worked on writing the album, sharing ideas over Zoom and email. In November 2021, almost a year to the day since they were first paired up, they completed the writing process. Speaking about how they approached each song, Jim Murphy said: Our goal was to capture the essence of each story in the lyrics of the songs and to reflect each story’s sentiment in the music that we wrote for it. As a result, some of the songs are quite tender in character from a musical perspective, while others are more up tempo folk ballads. When the songs were written, Grainne and Jim began planning the recording phase of the project. They teamed up with Alex Borwick, who produced and engineered the album at Black Mountain Recording Studios and they assembled a group of musicians to perform with them on the album. In addition to Gráinne (vocals) and Jim (guitar), the recording features Laura Ryder (piano), Shay Sweeney (drums), Alex Borwick (bass), the string quartet Musici (which was founded by Beth McNinch) and Alan Doherty (whistle). Strings were arranged by Cormac Curran. Speaking about the recording process, Gráinne Hunt remarked: We really enjoyed working with Alex Borwick and the very talented musicians who performed on The Stern Task of Living. We recorded the album in 7 days, much more quickly than we had expected, which is a testament to the standard of musicianship and production on the album. The Stern Task of Living was recorded with thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland for their financial support.
