Musician Oscar McLennan on the impact of his young son’s death: ‘I completely lost the power of words’

Sitting in Cumiskey’s pub at the top of Dominick Street in Dublin – having just flown in from Italy for rehearsals – McLennan reflects on the devastating incident that took his son’s life. The Glasgow -born writer and performance artist says it “changed the whole nature of the music”. In the face of immense loss, words failed McLennan.

For the past 10 years, he has lived with his wife Erica in her native Italy. The couple moved to the small town of Salorno, in the north of the country, after meeting in Dublin, where McLennan was teaching English. “It was a terrible thing.



It turned our whole world upside down,” he says. Ian was killed when a 400kg kitchen unit fell on him. “To be honest, since then I have completely lost the power of words,” says McLennan.

“Words seemed absurd and ridiculous. I wasn’t able to express what I was feeling with words.” Although primarily a lyricist, he “still [hasn’t] been able to write”, he says.

“Maybe it’ll come back at some point but I don’t miss it really. I think I’ve found my voice more now in the music.” Snow on the River, which McLennan describes as a celebration of Ian’s life, will premiere this weekend, with candlelit concerts taking place in Sligo Presbyterian Church on Saturday, April 19th, and in St Finian’s Lutheran Church in Dublin on Sunday, April 20th.

Featuring almost 30 musicians gathered from Italy, Ireland and Scotland, the album was created in close collaboration with composer Martin Tourish. McLennan first came across the Donegal accordionist, who soon joins us in Cumiskey’s, at around the time Tourish was named young musician of the year by TG4 in 2008. The concerts will bring together their Italian brass section, an Irish harpist, guitarist and a string quartet.

Speaking of the collaboration, McLennan recalls Tourish’s early observation on the way in which the music seemed to flow out of him when Ian died. “I think the kind of state I was in, in the weeks and months after his death, I think I was living closer to death than to life. Music just started coming to me then, it was just coming one after another .

.. Martin said at the time, ‘In Donegal Irish we don’t say we wrote this music, we say this music came to me.

’ “I think the order of the tracks is important, because for each of them you could see how you were getting on and processing things, bit by bit, psychologically,” says Tourish now to McLennan, who nods in agreement. Comedian Kevin McAleer, another close friend of the songwriter’s , also made a comment that resonated with him. “When he first heard the album he said: ‘You didn’t write this music for Ian, you write this music with Ian’,” recalls McLennan.

“And that just made perfect sense to me. It was almost as if I could feel his spirit right beside me the whole time I was working on it and writing it.” [ Helping parents to pick up the pieces after the shattering loss of a child Opens in new window ] The album’s title track was the first tune that McLennan wrote after the death of his son.

Inspired by the poem Tam O’Shanter, by fellow Scot Robert Burns, the piece is a reflection on the brevity of life. McLennan recites the lines of the poem that ring most true for him: “But pleasures are like poppies spread, You seize the flow’r, its bloom is shed; Or like the snow falls in the river, A moment white – then melts forever.” The fourth track was played at Ian’s funeral.

Entitled La Cascata, it takes its name from a bar in Salorno, named after a local waterfall Ian loved to visit. The piece was a crowd pleaser at music sessions in the bar, says McLennan. “There was one tune called La Cascata, which we used to play at sessions in Italy, but more lively, and he [Tourish] slowed it right down so it became a beautiful kind of brass number, much more dignified and moving.

We played it at Ian’s funeral then; he died just a few days after it was arranged.” That November, McLennan and his wife were taken under the wings of their neighbours. “I was always a city boy.

I always loved the city and it used to drive me nuts, you know – everybody [in Salorno] knew what you were doing,” he says. But the close-knit community aspect of life in a rural Italian town that once irked McLennan turned into a welcome comfort blanket. “After Ian died it was incredible – the warmth of people.

I think we must have had lasagne to last for a year. Every person came around with a big thing of lasagne.” The cover art for Snow on the River was designed by Caroline von Pflug, a friend of McLennan’s whose house was used as one of the album’s recording locations.

“She’s married to this Austrian count and they’ve got this big amazing house ...

it was an amazing place to record. “We had a real problem coming up with the idea [for the album cover]. Nobody could agree on anything .

.. Then she had this idea, and myself and Erica just looked at each other and we were like ‘This is it’.

” Holding a copy of the album, which can be bought and streamed on Bandcamp , McLennan traces the words of the beloved poem that inspired its title, fashioned here into a row of tree-like objects, from behind which Ian’s eyes peer out. A yellow sunset glows in the corner. Each of these details in the illustration hold their own special meaning, says McLennan.

“Even down to the yellow, because yellow was Ian’s favourite colour. Everything had to be yellow.” McLennan envisions the album as a collection of memories from his son’s short life, encapsulating his personality.

Another track on the album – Yellow Nelly – pays homage to this fascination with the colour yellow and Ian’s “obsession” with elephants. “He would surround himself with them by day and sleep with them at night,” reads the song’s description, enclosed in the album’s accompanying booklet. [ Brianna Parkins: We are a different family now, the family that lost a child Opens in new window ] “He would watch, eyes agog, any documentary on them.

My wife Erica and I used to joke that he could have been an Indian Hindu priest or Buddhist monk in a previous life. The photograph on his grave shows him holding up a cardboard shape of a yellow elephant.” Capturing and memorialising his son’s sense of wonder was central to the journey McLennan went on with this project.

Several of the featured tunes take on a nursery rhyme quality. “We had such an amazing six months of writing this stuff, where we were both just totally lost in it,” says McLennan. “But the actual recording of it was no mean feat.

” Tourish and a small group of contributing musicians joined him in Italy during the summer of 2021, as Covid travel restrictions started to ease. McLennan invited the group to get to know his son as they set about the task of recording. “He was just a brilliant wee mischievous, good fun child,” says Tourish.

In arranging the music for the album, he hoped to create a mirror of “the totality of all these beautiful things; this humour and sense of fun”. Reflecting on the mood of the album, McLennan describes it as an “uplifting” listening experience. “I don’t think there’s anything at all depressing about it.

Yeah, it’s quite moving but it’s also quite uplifting and inspiring.” He says the response to the music so far has been touching, recalling one recent encounter that stands out for him. “My favourite line was from this old woman that lives at the end of the street.

And I’d never talked to her before, but she got a hold of the album and she stopped me in the street one day and said: ‘Oscar, it’s like walking into paradise.’ And I thought, that’s the most beautiful thing anyone has ever said to me. “A number of people have said they find it so calming.

It’s almost like going into space, you know. I know loads of people who use it now for psychotherapy sessions and stuff like that, for relaxing.” Tickets for this weekend’s live performances of Snow on the River are for sale on eventbrite.

ie . Sligo’s event will begin at 6pm on April 19th, while the following day’s launch in Dublin is due to take place at 7pm..