Andrea Corr on grief and the faith of her father
The transcendent feeling that Andrea Corr experienced singing at a hospice inspired her Christmas EP, she tells Danny McElhinney
Andrea Corr’s four-song EP Christmas Songs was released, on schedule, exactly a month before Christmas Day. She can be thankful for that: 2020 is a year when plans have gone, if not to waste, then sent for recycling. Then again, the idea for it came almost exactly a year ago, after the youngest of the Corr singing family sang at Our Lady’s Hospice in the southside of Dublin and even Covid couldn’t get in the way of its release. So moved was the 46-year-old by the experience of singing for the residents, their relatives and staff that she and her manager resolved to make a charity record for the facility in Harold’s Cross.
‘The experience was transformative. That’s why I made this album,’ she says.
‘There is the most beautiful atmosphere in the hospice. The transition (from life to death) can actually be beautiful.
‘My mammy and daddy died quite suddenly. There was no need for palliative care. When my dad was being looked after by the nurses and doctors and likewise my mother, I do remember looking at it all, but from the outside. One time,
I HAVE TO JUST TRUST, EMBRACE THE GRIEF AND BEGIN AGAIN
there was a woman massaging Mammy’s feet; Mammy was on a ventilator at this point. I remember thinking, look at the love she is giving my mother, my loved one. Isn’t it the most loving thing, showing love to someone who is not your own?’
Andrea, like her late parents Gerry and Jean, is a woman of strong faith and she speaks movingly of the scene she beheld and how it affected her as she sang on that cold December evening last year.
‘When I sang, in my mind, I was remembering my parents and all the people I knew,’ she says.
‘The people there raised their candles up into the air; it was so very special. There was a sea of people right out into the car park all holding red candles. You would think they (people who have passed away) must be able to hear us or feel us. I’m still talking about it and feeling that feeling a year on; it has had a year-long effect.’
This season has been, in keeping with the year that preceded it, like no other. Christmas songs and hymns resonate with poignancy even beyond their usual station. When you hear Andrea sing In The
Bleak Midwinter, O Holy Night or Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas don’t be surprised, or in the least ashamed if tears roll.
Stone eyes would cry at this stage. She also recorded Begin Again, a song she wrote herself, that isn’t in any way out of place.
She says:
‘It’s a song about loss. We don’t understand what it is all about but at some point, there has to be a surrendering and you think to yourself, I have to just trust, embrace this grief and begin again. I actually wrote the song