Aoife O’Donovan
Sasha Israel/Courtesy of the artist
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Sasha Israel/Courtesy of the artist
Aoife O’Donovan
Sasha Israel/Courtesy of the artist
- “All My Friends”
- “America, Come”
- “Someone to Follow”
- “Daughters”
- “Over the Finish Line”
- “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”
The U.S. Constitution may not be the most obvious place to look for songwriting inspiration, but Aoife O’Donovan has found the trick.
Her new album, All My Friends, draws inspiration from the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, and the fight for women’s rights over the past century. O’Donovan was commissioned in 2019 to write music to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the amendment’s passage, which she says she found overwhelming at first.
“My initial reaction was, like, ‘Why me?’ ” she tells World Cafe during a video call. “It was daunting, honestly.”
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In this session, O’Donovan talks about her decision to focus on a suffragist named Carrie Chapman Catt and how imagining the world through Catt’s eyes helped her find a personal connection to history.
“I wonder about these women who were very ahead of their time and whose ideas may have been considered controversial,” she says. “Did they always have the support of their parents or were they estranged from them? Were they going against the grain? What was that relationship like?”
O’Donovan also talks about how reaching back to the past has influenced the way she thinks about the future and her own daughter’s life.
This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Kimberly Junod. The web story was created by Miguel Perez. Our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.