Edinburgh-via-Dublin musician Iona Zajac has a voice that can alter the geography of mountains. It’s confident, cathedral, persuasive. And it allows for a spectrum of emotional reckoning. She was invited to sing with The Pogues for a how in Dublin last December, and the band was so impressed that they invited her to perform with them on their May UK tour dates. Her latest single, “Summer” gives ample room for her voice to command your attention, cushioned in this ghostly atmosphere of phantom folk musings. Crystalline guitar tones and subtle synth drapery adorn this gorgeous bit of rhythmic wandering.
“As Jack’s mother says in the fable Death in the Nut: ‘without death there can be no life’,” Zajac says, speaking of her new single. “’Summer’ starts with a dream as many of my songs do, and a morning penny-drop realisation that we need more than love to be good for someone. It’s about my tendency to bury sadness in order to continue. It’s about the necessary fragility of life and forcing hard feelings in to make way for the good. Emily Dickinson’s poem got inside my head like the drum that beats at her own imagined funeral march. I give a verse to her.”
She continues: “It is a song for those dreaming of better days, of wars to end, of lovers to return, of heads to leave the fog. And when Summer finally comes, we might have found enough strength from the bad to make it last.”
Listen below.
“Summer” is out now. Follow Zajac on Facebook, X, and Instagram.
