New from Compass Records:

For her Spring 2007 Compass Records release entitled The New Shoes, Kennedy has assembled a new band by the same name, and together they have captured a wonderful collection of traditional music with an excitingly fresh feel. Brought together when producer Bob Kenyan asked Kennedy to put together a band of musicians for a Gaelic television show, their rich and luscious sounds bear testimony to the creative imagination and depth of experience harnessed in this ensemble.

The New Shoes begins with a rousing jig that sets a level of musicianship that is sustained throughout the record. Where Kennedy’s apt flute playing is made obvious in the first track, the listener gets a taste of her startlingly focused and beautiful vocal timbre in “Cait I nGarrain a Bhile”. Other highlights include the swinging “Highlands and Islands” and the closing title track, complex and upbeat melodies filled with a wonderful combination of tension and resolution.

' A Dazzling debut. She is not only an exceptional interpreter of
the tradition: her own tunes glisten with freshness."
The Irish Times, May 2007

Irish Times Interview:
Spellbinding songs and a floating flute    
by Siobhán Long(Friday, May 04, 2007) Rated: 4 out of 5 stars         

Trad CD of the week: Nuala Kennedy, The New Shoes,
Compass Records

Louth flute player and singer Nuala Kennedy trades in a subtlety that's all too rare among debutantes eager to flounce and shimmy when they come within shouting distance of the recording studio.

Kennedy possesses a languid flute style, unhurried yet freewheeling, loose-limbed yet disciplined. She breathes fresh life into the well-worn Hop Jig (with her cap duly doffed to Lúnasa) and straddles the Cape Bretonesque Dolphin School (with wonderfully scratchy melodeon from Julian Sutton) and the Scots trio Slippy with the effortlessness of a musician who's no stranger to cross-fertilisation.

Kennedy doesn't so much imbibe or inhale as swallow, whole and unadulterated, melodic and rhythmic influences from beyond her kith and kin. From the sinuous opening jig,

The Pink Flamingo, Kennedy's flute wraps serpentine-like around Claire Mann's fellow flute and Marc Clement's fine-fingered guitar lines.

She is not only an exceptional interpreter of the tradition; her own tunes glisten with freshness, and the closing duo, responsible for the CD's title, are masterclasses in inventive canoodling, with Sutton's The Buddha's Delight betraying more than a passing acquaintance with Mel Mercier and Micheál Ó Suilleabháin's Music Be More Crispy. Kennedy's Seachdain nan Deuchainn and El Paso suggest a life bathed in sounds, from Allihies to Andalucia and on to Ankara, with barely a beat skipped en route from one to the next.

And, as if her flute playing wasn't spellbinding enough, Nuala Kennedy has the audacity to secrete a few songs into the mix, her voice a natural, earthy instrument entirely in concert with her woody flute lines. Her plainsong treatment of Cáit i nGarráin a Bhile should be on every trad singing primer, free as it is of the vocal quirks and chinks that can unhinge the finest of singers when they attempt to take a hold of songs with a history such as this. A final hidden track suggests the strangest kinship with Björk at her irrepressible best.
A dazzling debut.

New Shoes Video
Nuala Kennedy and the New Shoes
Celtic Connections 2008 'Dolphin School Live'

New Shoes Video
Celtic Connections 2008

Review: Nuala Kennedy – The New Shoes
David Ingram, Rogue magazine, 2007

‘warm and brilliant…..articulate and accomplished music’
David Ingram Rogue Magazine – Album of the Month

Nuala Kennedy was born and raised in Ireland, has spent the last decade in Scotland playing music with a variety of groups, and is currently a member of Anam. This began as a solo album, with ace musicians Claire Mann, Julian Sutton and Marc Clement joining her. It has spawned a fine band named after the cd title ‘the New Shoes’.

Nuala offers up tunes and songs and together they make up a fine body of work. The level of musicianship is very high, but the players are clearly there to serve the music, and don’t try to bludgeon listeners with any excess of virtuoso displays. Instead there is a quiet confidence and a high level of class about this new outfit that results in a very listenable album full of energy and inventiveness. Nuala’s warm and brilliant flute is prominent, but there is plenty of fiddle, melodeon, guitar, piano and percussion in there too, and in some intricate interplay too. A lot of the material is traditional, augmented with a few excellent compositions from both Kennedy and Sutton. There are also four songs. Ms K is a very good singer as well, sharing the microphone on one track with Cathal McConnell of the Boys of the Lough.

The New Shoes is a well put together box of treats and Nuala Kennedy and band-mates are purveyors of some articulate and accomplished music – very enjoyable.

Click here for track listing information, lyrics and soundclips

Below is an excerpt from the inside sleeve, written by
Canadian composer and producer Oliver Schroer:

"What is it about new shoes when they are right? They are absolutely comfortable, they fill you with a sense of adventure, new roads to be traveled? and they bring a smile to your face. Nuala Kennedy’s New Shoes CD is much like that. It is solidly in the tradition. No tricks or sleight of hand here. Just exquisite playing, great tunes that will not leave you alone, classy and imaginative arrangements and singing that will melt your heart. It is not often you hear an album that feels so beautifully at ease with itself, and at the same time so fresh and exciting. And it can be daunting to add something worth saying to a tradition as rich as Celtic music, but Kennedy and crew have pulled it off in style. New Shoes is an album that rings unerringly true and passionate  from the heart, the head and the feet."

Oliver Schroer, February 2007

	Featured on the New Shoes album are:
	Nuala Kennedy flute/vocals [Bio & photo]	Claire Mann flute/fiddle/vocals [Bio & photo]
	Marc Clement guitar/vocals [Bio & photo]	Julian Sutton melodeons [Bio & photo]
	Mhairi Hall (piano) Donald Hay (percussion) Mario Caribe (double bass) Daniel Lapp (trumpet) Cathal Connell (vocals)