All My Friends by Aoife O'Donovan
When American folk singer-songwriter Aoife O’Donovan got a commission to mark the centenary of the 19th Amendment, which granted United States women the right to vote in 1920 (a year that feels at least a half-century late), she dug into the work of Carrie Chapman Catt, a Ripon, Wisconsin-born suffrage activist.
She transformed what she found into All My Friends, which follows upon her last LP, 2022’s Age of Apathy, as a living exhibition about a woman and an era that were anything but apathetic. O’Donovan sings with a hushed lilt reminiscent of Shawn Colvin, but her gentleness shouldn’t be mistaken for gentility.
When she narrates as Catt during “The Right Time,” she doesn’t mention suffrage or any historical specifics beyond geographical markers; instead, she inhabits the apprehension and inner power that can be understood by any idealist who’s left home to try to change the world.
O’Donovan can’t entirely integrate history into the musical flow: she packs “Crisis” with details that get uncomfortably close to the tastefully, solemnly read missives that documentarian Ken Burns has built a career from, and some of the lines—“The woman’s hour is now”—serve as placards rather than passions.
Mostly, though, the instrumentation and organization avoid strident sloganeering. O’Donovan’s husband, Eric Jacobsen, conducts a string section, the Knights, with sweeping delicacy; the San Francisco Girls’ Chorus has the unity of arm-in-arm protest marchers; and guests like Punch Brothers banjoist Noam Pikelny and fellow folksinger Anaïs Mitchell strengthen O’Donovan’s sense of purpose.
After Mitchell helps O’Donovan bring All My Friends into the present with the plaintive “Over the Finish Line,” O’Donovan finishes with an exceptionally stately cover of Bob Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” She thereby works one last transformation on the album by turning Dylan’s observer of abuse and murder into a sister, mother, daughter, or comrade to Carroll. And to Catt.
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