Hesperus by Bring Your Own Hammer presents

The Song and the Poet
On 25 April 2025, we release a new digital single, ‘Hesperus’, by the superb Irish folk artist SJ McArdle. The release is part of an ongoing Bring Your Own Hammer series where we ask composers, singers and musicians to create songs rooted in the work of Irish writers born in the nineteenth century. We are particularly delighted to be partnering with the Irish Women’s Writing (1880-1920) Network for this release. The Network was co-founded in 2016 by Kathryn Laing and Sinéad Mooney with the aim of making the works and profiles of a rich diversity of turn-of-the twentieth-century Irish women writers more visible and accessible. Now a vibrant international network of scholars and interested readers, it promotes new research on Irish women’s writing, fostering collaboration and connections via a website and other social media platforms.
‘Hesperus’ is inspired by three poems, “Fiametta”, “Sunset” and “Greeting” by the Irish poet Ella Young (1867–1956). She was a prominent figure in both the Irish cultural revival and in republican movements of the early twentieth century. She learned Irish and visited the west of Ireland to collect folklore and was particularly interested in fairies and, more broadly, the supernatural. Her memoirs contain recollections of psychic experiences and she described, in her writing, the travels of her astral body. She published poems from 1906 onwards and went on to publish her interpretations of Celtic myth in The coming of Lugh (1909) and Celtic wonder tales (1910). She also co-founded Cumann na mBan (League of Women), a woman’s republican organisation. She was opposed to the Anglo–Irish treaty and was later interned in Mountjoy jail. From 1925, she was James D. Phelan lecturer in Irish myth and lore at the University of California, Berkeley. She also lived in a theosophical settlement in California and in Taos, New Mexico, among other artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe and Frieda Lawrence. She claimed to be able to hear the music of the mountains and of the sky. She died on 23 July 1956 and her ashes were later scattered among redwood trees. The poems that inspired ‘Hesperus’ are rich, poignant and brimming with ‘strange imaginings’.
The Songwriter
Contemporary Drogheda folk artist Stephen Joseph McArdle is a songwriter, musician and curator, known for his RTÉ Radio 1 Album of the Week Old Ghosts In The Water and its accompanying song cycle/stage show PORT, (featuring Carol Keogh (Plague Monkeys), Dermot Byrne (Altan), and Graham Henderson (Moving Hearts, Sinead O’Connor, Dark Horse). The Irish Times called it “an impressive song cycle ... intriguing and evocative; rooted in folk but coloured by expansive and imaginative arrangements” and Lynette Fay (BBC) said has “all the ingredients of great folk songs”.
SJ was the songwriter and singer in award-winning Irish folk band Kern from 2013 to 2020, with whom he toured extensively and released two albums. He is also known for his career as a singer-songwriter in Nashville and Germany, which produced 2014’s critically-acclaimed Blood and Bones album (featuring Rodney Crowell). He is also in trad trio Long Woman’s Grave with Nuala Kennedy and Trevor Hutchinson.
SJ’s songs and performances have featured on radio, film and television and he has toured and recorded extensively in Ireland, Europe and North America, gathering a loyal following and critical accolades along the way. He is currently working on a project set in Ireland during World War I called All My Dream Companions Gone which features guest vocalist Lisa Lambe and producer Trevor Hutchinson, legendary double bass player with Lúnasa, The Waterboys, Natalie Merchant and countless others.
more info: sjmcardle.ie



SJ writes:
To my shame, I had not heard of Celtic Revival poet and mythologist Ella Young until Dr. Richard Mc Mahon sent me three examples of her extraordinary poetry. I fell immediately in love with the flow and the intoxicating sensuousness of her language.

The lyric came easily, inspired by two poems, “Fiametta” and “Sunset”. But the lyric in the bridge is lifted almost completely from “Greeting”, my favourite of the three.

I particularly loved her reference to the rise of Hesperus in “Sunset". I love Hesperus, star of the evening, and his brother, Phosphorous, Lucifer, the morning star. And both are personifications of Venus, planet of the goddess of love.

And Mary, the Star of the Sea. Just to balance the books.

Bring Your Own Hammer is not a band, a group, an ensemble or even a collective. If anything, it is a faction but unlike nineteenth-century factions, who met, armed with sticks and wattles in fairs and markets, it is armed with voices and instruments and dedicated, as no faction before, to the re-interpretation of historical material in song form.

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