It’s been a decade since North Carolina-born fiddler Maura Shawn Scanlin first crossed paths in Boston with Maryland guitarist Conor Hearn (she was a New England Conservatory student, he was enrolled in Tufts) and began playing together, initially as part of a quintet and then as the duo Rakish. They’ve fashioned a sound that can be contemplative and serene but also replete with bursts of energy, songs and tunes alike steeped in a set of influences and interests that extend from Irish and Scottish tradition to Americana and classical music, not to mention poetry and literature.

Rakish has appeared locally at BCMFest, Club Passim, the Burren Backroom, Front Row Boston, the Boston States Fiddle Camp, Chatham Fiddle Company, the Rockport Celtic Music Festival, and “A Christmas Celtic Sojourn”; elsewhere, Scanlin and Hearn have performed at the Bellingham (Wash.) Irish Festival, Folk Alliance International in Kansas City, and more recently, at the Celtic Colours festival in Nova Scotia. 

This fall has seen the release of Rakish’s third album, “Now, O Now,” with 10 tracks that demonstrate the pair’s increased emphasis on original works, notably in songwriting, while also continuing to experiment with arrangements beyond the fiddle-guitar dynamic. Three tracks – "Lonely Hotel Room," "Now, O Now" and "Island in the Sea" – include subtle drums and bass by Dylan McKinstry, while the reel set "765" (guest-produced by Jamie Oshima, one-half of indie pop band The Oshima Brothers) is flavored with electronica and percussion that recalls the 1990s acid-croft period in Scottish music. 

Ultimately, though, Rakish is all about the vivid chemistry between Scanlin and Hearn, such as their instrumental sets that draw on the pair’s classical/chamber stylings, like the gracefully choreographed “Time Check” (enhanced by Hearn’s shift between rhythm and melody) and “The Soldier, the King, the Peasant” (which sounds like it could be a soundtrack for a film not yet made). Likewise on the set beginning with original strathspey, “Fool’s Spring,” where Scanlin shows her Scottish fiddle prowess, transitioning to “The Tourtoise,” highlighted by Hearn’s brilliant flatpicking and Scanlin’s harmonies. 

The duo debuted their songwriting chops on their last album, “Counting Down the Hours,” and it’s become a fully realized part of their mien. Most of the songs feature Scanlin’s accompaniment on five-string banjo, which lends a comfy, back-porch Americana feel to the proceedings. Two on “Now, O Now” make for a fascinating counterpoint: “Lonely Hotel Room” is about trying to forge, and build, a connection in the midst of personal – and even global – uncertainty (“We’re getting older/But we’ve still got time”); “Lightly As the Rain Comes Down” is a gentle but plain-spoken commentary on love’s seemingly cyclical promise and peril (“Your heart it will bruise and mend/Now that she has set you free”).

Besides the Rakish originals, there are settings of two James Joyce poems, “Now, O Now” and “Lightly Come or Lightly Go,” from the 1907 collection Chamber Music, published well before the works that largely defined his legacy – Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake – and revealing a more romantic, even vulnerable side (Joyce subsequently explained that he had written Chamber Music when he was “a lonely boy, walking about by myself at night and thinking that one day a girl would love me”).

While musical adaptations of Chamber Music have been plentiful – from Samuel Barber to Syd Barrett to Julian Lennon to the RTÉ Concert Orchestra –Rakish’s acoustic-based, pastoral sound complements Joyce’s words (“The leaves, they do not sigh at all/When the year takes them in the fall”).  

In the midst of a busy fall tour, Scanlin and Hearn took time recently to reflect on the first decade of Rakish, the new album, and a very meaningful honor they just earned. Keeping true to their identity as a duo, they elected to give their answers in unison.

As you set out to make "Now, O Now," what sorts of things were foremost in your minds? Were there particular aspects of yourselves and your music that you really wanted to put out there?

One guiding principle that has moved increasingly to the forefront of our recorded work is this idea that everything is going to be original music. Of course, we both come from these traditional music backgrounds, and that is part of the origin story and model for our band; you have a fiddle/guitar duo and that comes with a certain set of roles and connotations about what those instruments do in a traditional music context. Writing everything, then, can free you from those expectations a little bit. So with the EP there were original arrangements of traditional tunes, and with “Counting Down the Hours” there were mostly original compositions and a sprinkle of traditional tunes. With “Now, O Now” we’re sort of saying “Let's come up with all the music ourselves and see what that looks like.” 

One of the major revelations on "Counting Down Hours" was the songwriting, which was then a relatively new feature of Rakish. Clearly, this is something that's continued to grow. Do you feel there are certain characteristics or elements that typify a lot of your songwriting?

One of the obvious aspects that stands out is that when Maura is engaging in songwriting as opposed to tune-writing or instrumental composition, the clawhammer banjo often becomes the vehicle for that. This doesn’t constitute a genre shift in our minds as much as a sonic and timbral one. It’s not as though we're saying “This is more of a Celtic tune and this is more of an old-time tune.” It is our hope that the value system remains the same; dynamics are important, form is important.

Ultimately, we’re trying to write powerful stories and narratives, whether that is lyrical or instrumental.

On this new album, we have the two James Joyce poems, which echoes back to that setting of Yeats' "Stolen Child" on your EP. Looks like there's a literary thread running through the Rakish portfolio.

Yeah, we will sometimes quip that it's part of the desperate struggle to keep the humanities relevant. And then, on the subject of original music, those poems are also an interesting and hopefully less obvious way of getting at something relating to the more traditional roots of the band. A lot of groups inspired by traditional Irish music will play ballads or cover a familiar song in their own way. If we’re composing the melodies ourselves, however, having the text come from a familiar source is a different way of exploring that connection. 

We know Joyce and Yeats were very thoughtful about music in their writing, for example, but their work usually doesn’t show us these aspects in a melodic sense as much, so then we get to explore our own melodic world as it relates to the text, which is kind of a perfect union. You get to inhabit this space that is born of someone else and part of a whole tradition that is outside of you, and make it your own at the same time.

As for the instrumental composition side of things, your Irish/Scottish/Celtic, Appalachia and classical influences all seem quite evident, sometimes in the context of one medley – even in one tune. Can you walk us through a few tracks, what inspired them, how they came together?  

Maura wrote a lot of the tunes on this new record, including “The Soldier, the King, the Peasant.” We named that one for Brian O’Donovan; the title comes from the poem “Ode,” by Arthur O’Shaughnessy, which Brian was known to read from during his “St. Patrick’s Day Celtic Sojourn” show. The title isn’t meant to be extremely literal, but we liked the way the line seemed to contain so many identities/ Brian, of course, contained multitudes.

With the songs, like “Lightly Come or Lightly Go” it is often a bit of a back and forth. Conor wrote the melody for the lyrics, trying to come up with something that felt hopeful, but also kind of melancholic, and then an instrumental version or variation of that melody emerged as a hook for the song. Often, we’ll have this feeling that we want something else or new to happen in the arrangement, and that's where a new melodic idea might get introduced, which in the case of that song was a reel that Maura wrote as a sort of bridge for the song, which was supposed to make the whole thing feel a little more joyful.

And what's the story with "765"? Rakish rocks out! 

With “765,” we knew these tunes were fun and exciting for us to play, and we had so many ideas for how they could be realized during the recording process. We asked our good buddy Jamie Oshima, who is a great producer and probably a genius, to work on the tracks with us and give them a bit of a pop feel. Initially the thought was that maybe he would remix the acoustic version of us playing the tunes. We ended up liking what he added so much that the remix became the original version, and that is what you hear on the record.

Speaking of Brian O’Donovan: You’ve been named as the first Brian O'Donovan Legacy Artist, and will be artist-in-residence at BCMFest in January. Talk about Brian's impact on you, musically and otherwise. 

Man, what to say? So much of the history of our duo is inextricable from Brian’s legacy. Brian gave us our first gig together as a duo, and he didn’t stop there. He gave us a really great gig when we were starting out that provided us with some excellent high quality live video - something every act needs for booking purposes. He would ask us to come play live on WGBH or at the Boston Public Library. He played our records on his show. He had us play on his Christmas show in 2020, and since it was that year, we ended up podding together in Rockport for a few weeks. After recording all day, he would hold court and sort of regale us and the rest of the cast. It was this majestic thing to be in his presence, his gravitas, especially that year when we’d all been missing the human connection. 

He and Lindsay were always introducing us to people; he was this brilliant politician, and that's a compliment. We would get texts from him that said things like “Check your email. Important.” He really believed in us, and that isn’t to single us out; he believed in and nurtured so many young people like us – young artists who wanted to explore traditions, experiment, and create. Being named as his first Legacy Artist is such an honor, but of course it comes with knowing that we’re all part of his legacy in a broader sense. We are all immensely lucky to have lived in the era of Brian O’Donovan.

What other ongoing or occasional musical projects/collaborations have you undertaken, or plan to do? 

There is always some other stuff percolating. The Rasa String Quartet remains quite active and has a busy calendar for the rest of the season. Rasa had the good fortune to collaborate with Liz Carroll at the Rockport Celtic Festival on a suite of tunes she wrote for Brian O’Donovan. That was a true collaborative highlight of the year.

Conor made a guitar record a little while ago and wants to do more recordings like that. Maura tours her self-titled solo project with an incredible band from time to time. Conor tours with Louise Bichan, an excellent and sui generis fiddle player from Orkney.

We had a residency this past summer at Avaloch Farms where we made some live recordings of music we had arranged together for the Library of Congress American Folklife Center’s Archive Challenge. We’ve yet to dig through those recordings, but do plan to release them as a live-take album at some point – hopefully not too far into the future.