B-Side Guys

The song is palindromic by design, its structure cycling back on itself the way the relationship it describes does: parent teaching child, child teaching parent, the whole thing repeating through generations until the roles blur. It’s a formal choice that most artists would mention in a press release and never actually pull off. Driven Snow pull it off.

Kieran and Emily, the Irish duo behind Driven Snow, came to this project sideways, both established musicians elsewhere (Kieran as a core member of Delorentos, Emily as a vocalist with Republic of Loose and Stars On Fire) who spent years being each other’s sounding board before deciding to make something together. They recorded in Donegal at Attica Studios with producer Tommy McLaughlin, whose credits include Villagers and Pillow Queens, and the setting shows in the unhurried patience of the arrangement.

The lyrics, drawn from a poem Emily wrote and adapted by Kieran, are spare enough to carry the weight without buckling under it. A parent and child lying side by side listening to birds, the child explaining why they sing in language that is both simple and complete: “we’re here, the sun’s there, and now it’s getting ready to wake us up.” That’s the whole inheritance being described. The spoken word performance from Emily’s actual mother turns the song’s theme into its structure, three generations in a single track.

What Driven Snow have made is a song about teaching each other how to live, delivered with enough restraint that it never tips into sentiment. The dawn chorus outside the window and the one inside the song are doing the same thing.