EAMONN McCORMACK’s Storyteller: digital album release, YouTube premiere and live Q and A all on Good Friday!

It’s been merely a week since Irish bluesman Eamonn McCormack promised his fans to do all he can to make up for the enforced postponement of the physical release (now May 29th) for his upcoming highly praised and anticipated album Storyteller along with the one-week delay of its digital release. He promised specials and some surprises – and of course he wouldn’t leave them waiting for too long. Brace yourself for Friday, April 10th, which will not only mark the digital release of Storyteller but also see the video premiere of the album’s opening track The Great Famine on YouTube at 10am CEST. All good things come in threes, making this year’s Good Friday the best fans can possibly get: Eamonn will also be available for a quick Q&A on YouTube to get the first direct feedback from old and new fans and share this special day with them.

But the long weekend ahead of us is also time for thoughtfulness, a time to calm down a bit, to reflect on things and be grateful for what we have. It’s a perfect time for a song as deep and touching as The Great Famine, sung by this artist with a sentiment that stirs both grief and hope. It deals with one of the most tragic events in Irish history, as Eamonn states:

“I've wanted to write about the Great Irish Famine for a long long time. Maybe since we studied it in school before my teens. I was intrigued by an event in Irish history that literally halved the population of our country. I wanted to convey in a song the horror and seriousness of a tragedy that in fact should not have happened. There was enough food around but Ireland was a British colony so the Irish outside the main cities consisted mainly of poor farmers relying on the potato crop to pay their rent to English landlords and it was many families’ main staple diet and only means of survival. When the blithe ruined the crop, families were evicted from their small farms and perished by hunger. Those lucky enough to travel to America had the added nightmare of traveling there on so called ‘Coffin Ships’ because 30% on board these ships died of malnutrition and disease. I just ask Why? (A haunting rhetorical question!)”