Compare “the loves to love the love’s to love the love that loves…” of Morrison’s ‘Madame George’ to O’Hara’s “Joy is aim-eh, joy is the aim-eh, joy…” from ‘Year In Song’, the oldest tune here, written on the cusp of the 1980s. In their mutual search for spiritual ecstasy, the parallels between O’Hara and Morrison are obvious. However, a more obvious touchstone would be Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. He has spoken very candidly about this elsewhere ( )Įventually, the production credits would go to Michael Brook, who had already worked with Eno, David Sylvian and the late Pakistani superstar, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, a devotional singer of such strength and singularity who could attain similarly feverish trancelike states. Almost all of the songs you hear on the album date from the sessions he oversaw at Rockfield Studios in South Wales in 1984, but remarkably, by the time the album finally saw the light of day, Boyd was uncredited on the sleeve. Enter the formidable figure of Joe Boyd, producer of more classic folk roots albums than it is possible to count. Partridge, unable to fit in with her modus operandi, reputedly lasted one day.
Andy Partridge of XTC had been tasked with its production, but it soon became clear that the pair could not work together. After being signed by Virgin, O’Hara was given creative carte blanche, but from the very beginning the problems mounted up. Certainly, the album had a complicated evolution. Recorded in 1983-84, but not released until 1988, one might imagine Miss America to have drained Toronto’s Mary Margaret O’Hara both emotionally and physically.
If the vocal performances sound raw and spontaneous, the instrumental arrangements by contrast, suggest a creative process of painstaking precision: clearly envisioned, perfectly measured. Throughout its shifting moods and styles, one savours that voice: one moment floating upon starsailing crescendos, the next a crumbling interior avalanche, buckling breathlessly beneath a stream of consciousness deluge of jagged emotion. It is an album whose incubation is shrouded in mystery.
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