Having earned a reputation as one of Ireland’s finest singers and songwriters McCabe has performed extensively with his Folk-Soul group The Niall McCabe Band over the past decade.
Born on Clare Island, Co.Mayo, McCabe grew up in the family run pub awash with strong musical influences from traditional Irish and folk to rock and soul.
It is here that Niall discovered his musical appetite and developed a style and voice that are unquestionably his own.
As well as becoming an accomplished finger-stlye guitar player, more recently Niall has been lending his unique voice to Irish trad-fusion band Beoga touring Ireland, Europe and the USA while also playing support for Ed Sheeran, Foy Vance and Johnny Swim.
McCabe’s eagerly anticipated ‘Rituals’ album was release in February 2023 to critical acclaim and featured as RTE Album of the Week, while the song Rituals topped the RTE Radio airplay charts for five consecutive weeks.
A few words from Niall on the music:
Midas Touch started out as a song about sheep wool buyers coming to Clare Island when I was young and ended up being a song about my best friend and I navigating through our relationship from inseparable to estranged and finally finding ourselves again.
Most of the songs on this album were written during the pandemic here on Clare Island except for Valhalla which was left over from my last album ( had been preparing this for 2020 – but a certainl virus had other ideas.)
During the writing process I wanted to find voices that carried some of the isolation and anguish of that time and made a conscious effort to keep the instrumentation more sparse and less cluttered during recording.
A favourite phrase of the lockdown was ‘we’re all in the same sea, but different boats’.
As an album I hope Rituals embodies this as individual songs with singular voices, but all drawn from the same well of experience and emotion.
