For All Our Days That Tear The Heart Jessie Buckley & Bernard Butler

• 1The Eagle & The Dove05:49
• 2For All Our Days That Tear The Heart05:00
• 320 Years A-Growing04:03
• 4Babylon Days04:27
• 5Seven Red Rose Tattoos05:00
• 6Footnotes On The Map03:50
• 7We've Run The Distance03:27
• 8We Haven’t Spoke About The Weather04:18
• 9Beautiful Regret03:11
• 10I Cried Your Tears04:08
• 11Shallow The Water05:01
• 12Catch The Dust02:11
• Total Runtime50:25

Info for For All Our Days That Tear The Heart

Jessie Buckley and Bernard Butler have joined forces on For All Our Days That Tear The Heart, a collection of twelve mesmerising new songs. The meeting of an Academy Award-nominated actress and singer, and a Brit Award-winning producer and musician, feels like the tale of two distant stars coming together and forming their own constellation.

It all started with a FaceTime call from Butler’s North London kitchen to Buckley’s mountaintop residence in County Kerry, with their friendship growing from an unlikely shared love of Killarney and the small island of Valentia where Butler would go on holiday as a boy. A mutual friend had a feeling they might spark. Buckley had been listening to Old Wow by Sam Lee, produced by Bernard, in the downtime between rehearsals for the National Theatre’s televised production of Romeo and Juliet.

Butler had seen Jessie perform a song on an American chat show in promotion of 2018’s Wild Rose. “I remember clocking just how much character there was in her voice and how freely she expressed it,” recalls Bernard. If the project grew from a shared love and deep ancestral attachment to Ireland - Butler’s parents come from Dun Laoghaire, one of the coastal towns of Dublin Bay - then these songs swoop out from the Emerald Isle’s west coast, taking home Appalachian blues and delicate modal jazz from across the Atlantic, and taking in the bullfighting arenas of Andalusia along the way. The first song the pair wrote together, ‘The Eagle and the Dove’ - named after a book by the interwar proto-feminist writer Vita Sackville-West - set the tone for the project, and also set in motion a sense of adventure that permeates For All Our Days That Tear The Heart.

Invoking the passionate theatre of flamenco, augmented by Jessie’s sumptuous, soaring vocals, the pair recorded the intuitive dance moves of Juana Jimenez with a microphone placed on the floor of the Birchanger Village Hall in Essex of all places. There’s a physicality and a flow to the songs that somehow bear testament to the manner in which Jessie and Bernard threw themselves into making the album. Amid the constant exchange of ideas, songs fomented at speed. The sublime ‘20 Years A Growing’ takes its title from Maurice O’Sullivan’s celebrated 1933 account of life in Great Blasket Island off the coast of County Kerry.

The more personal, piano-led ‘Seven Red Rose Tattoos’, captures the essence of loss and longing, with Jessie’s vocal lines a counterpoint to Byron Wallen’s doleful, muted trumpet: “I wanted it to be like a conversation with the ghosts of my thoughts,” says Buckley. The dynamic title track is built around words that Jessie had written during a low period whilst in Chicago filming Fargo, with her extraordinary vocal blazing an emotional vapour trail through Bernard’s chamber-folk arrangement. And the pair draw inspiration from the ensemble work of seminal jazz-folk innovators Pentangle on songs like ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’ and ‘Sweet Child’, as the rhythm section of Misha Mullov-Abbado and Chris Vatalaro effectively converse with Jessie’s bewitching vocals. “Right now, I feel like I’ll never make another album again,” says Jessie, “because I can’t imagine another album happening the way this one did. It’s amazing that it even happened once. This obscure, organic, odd little thing that just found us.” For All Our Days That Tear The Heart is a remarkable work of windswept beauty and catharsis, and given that it seemed to come out of nowhere, it also feels like a gift. “More than anything, I wanted it to be joyous – properly joyous – because there is such joy in Jessie, there really is,” says Bernard. “In spite of the darkness and the intensity in these songs, I’m just flying when I listen back to them.”

Jessie Buckley & Bernard Butler

Jessie Buckley
is a well-known Irish actress who has starred in a host of films including Wild Rose, Judy and I’m Thinking Of Ending Things. Through her film work, she has shared the screen with legendary names such as Renee Zellweger, Toni Collette and most recently Olivia Colman. She co-stars with the latter in the film The Lost Daughter, directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, where she has picked up a slew of Best Supporting Actress nominations across the awards circuit, including BAFTA and Oscar noms. She has also recently finished a run in London’s West End starring alongside Eddie Redmayne in the stage production of Cabaret.

Bernard Butler
is an English musician, songwriter and record producer. He has been noted as one of Britain's most original and influential guitarists.

In 1989 he formed the group Suede co-writing and playing guitars on every recording until 1994, 1992’s classic debut “The Drowners”, followed by hits “Metal Mickey”, the top 10 “Animal Nitrate” and the number 2 epic “Stay Together”. The Mercury Prize winning debut “Suede” became the fastest selling record in years. The defining “Dog Man Star”, a sprawling concept of rare ambition culminated in Butler’s exit. The group continued but Butler's contribution will remain the defining moment in the band’s history.

Immediately he collaborated with the singer David McAlmont on the anthemic ”Yes" bound together by experimental b-sides taking in folk, soul and art rock directions bookended as the compilation “The Sound Of…McAlmont & Butler”. The album was preceded by the torch like “You Do” leaving an intriguing footprint across Britpop’s otherwise jingoist, hedonistic landscape. The duo released the sophomore "Bring It Back" in 2003 spawning the hit title track and the euphoric "Falling". In May 2014 McAlmont & Butler played two celebrated London shows in support of the Bobath Centre assisting children with cerebral palsy. In 2015 Butler prepared an extensive reissue set for 1995's "The Sound Of..." through Demon Records followed by a short UK tour culminating in a sell out at London's Roundhouse.

Butler signed to Creation Records in 1997 releasing two solo albums, the acclaimed "People Move On" yielding the hit single "Stay", and "Friends and Lovers” before the collapse of the legendary label. He then embarked on a string of productions including the seminal debut from The Libertines and their biggest hit "Don't Look Back Into The Sun" which featured Butler's uncredited guitar as well as production. In 2004 Butler formed a new band with Brett Anderson, The Tears, releasing their debut LP, "Here Come The Tears"in June 2005. Singles include the top 10 "Refugees", and "Lovers" alongside a wealth of acclaimed b-sides.

In 2005 he was introduced to Welsh singer Duffy and contributed to her five million-selling debut album Rockferry, which received the Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Album in 2008, several Brit Awards and an Ivor Novello nomination. Butler produced and co-wrote the title track, as well as "Syrup & Honey", "Please Stay" for "Telstar - The Movie" and co-wrote "Smoke Without Fire", which was used in the 2009 film An Education. The long-standing partnership was reignited when the pair collaborated on a version of Nina Simone's "I Put A Spell On You" as accompanying score to Burberry's Black campaign. The song was recorded live in one complete take at the legendary Abbey Road Studio 1. The pair continue to collaborate on new material.

He has worked extensively as a producer and or songwriter, making records for The Libertines, Tricky, Black Kids, Kate Nash, Nerina Pallot, Teleman, Findlay Brown, Daley, The Cribs, James Morrison, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Rebecca Ferguson, Jonathan Jeremiah, Frankie & The Heartstrings, Texas, Kate Jackson, Mark Eitzel, QTY, Pace, Mull Historical Society, Roxanne De Bastion, Sam Lee, Oscar Lang and Paloma Faith. Butler won the Producer's Award at the 2009 BRIT Awards,Producer of the Year at the 2008 Music Managers Forum Awards, and was nominated for Best Producer at the 2009 Music Week Awards . He has played guitar on records by Aimee Mann, Bryan Ferry, Roy Orbison, Bert Jansch, The Libertines, Neneh Cherry and Ben Watt with whom he toured extensively during 2013-17 including the UK, USA and Japan. In October 2013, Butler's experimental project Trans released a series of EPs featuring tracks grown out of improvisational recordings made at Butler's own Studio 355, all sessions improvised, recorded in their entirety and later edited with few overdubs.

Between 2000-10 Butler played many shows with the legendary folk guitarist Bert Jansch, featuring on his albums "Crimson Moon" and "Edge Of A Dream" sometimes joined by Johnny Marr and Beth Orton. After Jansch's untimely death a Royal Festival Hall tribute concert saw Butler accompany Robert Plant amongst the pantheon of folk’s remaining heroes. Butler know acts as proud Patron to the Bert Jansch Foundation.

Since 2017 he has hosted a radio show "BB & The King". Broadcast live from North London via Boogaloo Radio each Friday, Bernard Butler and partner Mark Kingston bring 2 hours of music and conversation around an episodic theme. Each week is archived via a Mixcloud page. Butler was resident Lecturer at BIMM London acting as Module Leader, developing students weekly through their BA in Songwriting. He recently completed the original score to BBC Horizons documentary "Back From The Dead" and collaborated in songwriting camps and sessions for Warner-Chappell Publishing. He conducts audience-led PreProduction events around the country for the Musicians Union and at Abbey Road Institute, and is a Patron of the Music Venue Trust.

This album contains no booklet.