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I Lose My Breath (bumped and updated)

Driving home yesterday I heard singer Melanie O’Reilly do a song titled “I Lose My Breath”, inspired by Molly Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses. Instead of using Molly’s words directly (and avoiding Kate Bush’s 20+ year odyssey), O’Reilly turned to The Irish Book of Invasions for lyrics.

If interested in the song, you can hear it at this link. The intro starts around the 1:31:50 mark. (Note–this “audio archive will be available until Saturday, September 17th 2011”.)

Update:
A clip of the song can be heard at O’Reilly’s site from one of her albums.

Update:
I contacted Melanie because I was interested with the tie-in with ancient Irish stories and received this nice reply from her:

Our song “I Lose my Breath ” first came from an idea that Sean O Nuallain had; having researched a lot on James Joyce’s own inspirations for Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, Sean found that Joyce himself was very inspired by the mythically derived Irish stories – The Book of Invasions and The Voyage of Bran.

Sean gave me a lot of pointers, and so for the Molly Bloom inspired piece, I looked at a piece within The Voyage of Bran, which Joyce actually relates to Molly Bloom’s soliloquy and then I created my own song lyrics from that. And Frank Martin (Bay Area pianist and another Bajaban!) co-wrote the music with me. A creative process!

We give credit to Sean for the idea and scholarly research, and of course to Frank Martin for co-writing with me.

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