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Silver In Your Hair

by Andrew Lawlor & Anna Fisher-Roberts

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about

Today I am launching special song.

40 years ago today, my mother died from cancer.

Over the past week I wrote and recorded this song, a process that was made all the more special by the involvement of Anna Fisher-Roberts, a flautist from Arizona, whom I literally stumbled across on a wet and windy Sunday night in Doolin, Co. Clare at the beginning of August this year.
Anna, very graciously, agreed to record some flute tracks for me in Boston, Massachusetts, sending me the raw tracks via WhatsApp. I was blown away by how she cut to the very heart of the lyric, (a process she calls Word Painting), and her playing has certainly lifted the song to another level.

I am committing here that all funds generated from Bandcamp sales of this song will go directly to LARCC (Lake Area Retreat and Cancer Centre), in Multyfarnham, Co. Westmeath.
I have long been an admirer of the great work that Bernie McHugh and her team do at LARCC.
To find out more about their work, visit www.cancersupport.ie

The song tells the story of my personal 40 year journey, as a child who lost a parent, growing to adulthood and eventually finding peace with my grief.
I have dreamed of my mother sporadically, two or three times a year, since her death. For nearly forty years my mother in my dreams was always the forty-year-old woman that I recall from 1981.
Waking from these dreams was always difficult. In the brief moments between sleep and wake my mother was alive. The sudden realisation that I had been dreaming always left me disconcerted, feeling all over again the pain of her loss.
Earlier this year, a friend, who had lost her father 17 years ago, told me that she calls these dreams visits. Although I am not a spiritual person, it gave me great comfort to think of dreams of my mother in this way.
Then, in June of this year, around my mother's 80th birthday, I dreamed of her again. For the first time in almost forty years I dreamed of my mother being the age she would have been now.
In my dream, my mother was a sweet, silver haired, eighty-year-old woman, sitting in a chair by the fire in my childhood home.
On waking from this dream, I did not feel the usual discombobulation or grief that I had always felt before.
I simply felt at peace.

lyrics

The autumn winds are blowing in
The leaves are coming down
I'll sit here in the evening sun
Until the moon comes around

You visit sometimes when I sleep
I feel your spirit in the air
The last time that you came to me
You had silver in your hair

I know that time can be a thief
It can steal your life away
If you wish upon a fallen star
Instead of living day to day

I think about the times we've missed
The things we never got to share
How I never got to be your friend
Or see the silver in your hair

But, life, they say, must carry on
What else is there to do
Your grandchildren fill my world
And make me often think of you

And now that it's been forty years
Since you left me in despair
I can think of you and smile and laugh
And I've got silver in my hair

credits

released September 11, 2021
Guitar and Vocals by Andrew Lawlor
Flute by Anna Fisher-Roberts

Lyrics by Andrew Lawlor
Music by Andrew Lawlor & Anna Fisher-Roberts

Produced & Mixed by Andrew Lawlor
Cover Photo by Andrew Lawlor

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Andrew Lawlor WH, Ireland

Singer/Songwriter from Delvin, Co. Westmeath, Ireland.
Writing mostly in a folk tradition with a leaning towards country, with occasional forays into rock.
Recently working on a series of collaborations with the outrageously talented Anna Fisher-Roberts. ... more

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