It has been a hard year for those who love music.
In the wake of Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, many of us have paused to reflect on her extraordinary legacy and the unmistakable goodness she carried into the world. Although she remained connected to her Tennessee roots, her life transcended borders and generations. She made people laugh, gave voice to the overlooked, and opened doors for children through literacy all across the world, including children growing up in rural communities in Ireland. She was a remarkable woman in so many ways, and her loss in the American music landscape will be sorely felt.
Ireland, too, has been walking its own path of farewell.
In recent years, we have said goodbye to Shane MacGowan, Sinéad O’Connor, Dolores O’Riordan, Glen Hansard and Moya Brennan, artists whose voices stitched themselves into the fabric of our days and, in no small way, into the story of modern Ireland and America.
This year, as tributes poured out for Moya Brennan of Clannad and Glen Hansard, the Oscar-winning musician and songwriter, I noticed the way people spoke about their passing. Again and again came the sentiment: How blessed we are.
Blessed to have been given these unique voices and to have inherited such a rich tradition of music, poetry and storytelling. Blessed to belong to a people who know how to celebrate both life and death with such dignity through our Irish wake and funeral traditions.
For many of us, the music of these artists was the soundtrack of our youth and adulthood. They played in pubs and kitchens, on cassette tapes and car radios, at weddings and wakes, and on long drives home. They gave voice to experiences and relationships for which we did not have words, and the memory of their music shaped our experiences of love, loss and life itself.
The traditional sounds of Clannad, the perfect pitch and unmistakable warmth of Dolly, the haunting clarity of Sinéad, the raw storytelling of Shane — all of them found their way into the inner landscape of our lives.
This is often why losing an artist can feel strangely personal. We are not only saying goodbye to a person. We are saying goodbye to a voice that accompanied us through our childhood, our first love, a broken heart, a season of loneliness, or the memory of a perfect moment in a kitchen filled with family and friends.
Losing an artist can feel strangely personal. We are not only saying goodbye to a person. We are saying goodbye to a voice that accompanied us through our childhood.
It is in this way that music becomes a sacred vessel for memory. We hear the opening notes, and suddenly we are transported somewhere else entirely. We are back in our bedroom daydreaming, or in a car with our parents or on a bus coming home from a trip. Music can take us back into the past in an instant and yet root us in the present moment when we find a tune within our hearts to sing. In an era of autotuning, algorithms and AI-generated music, these artists remind us of something we desperately need to remember: that creativity is born in the authentic, messy and unpolished places of the human heart.
Real artists do not simply sing about life.
They sing from it.
Even beneath Dolly’s rhinestones and sequins, her truest shimmer was always her honesty and her ability to tell a great story. She was never embarrassed by where she came from, nor did she downplay the reality of her early years. Instead, she gave us a window into the places and the people that shaped her. She carried her story and her guitar with her and shared her soul stories with all of us.
She sang from poverty, trauma and grief, but also from those resilient places where joy, love, hope and goodness gained an inner foothold and refused to be extinguished. She understood that where we come from does not have to determine where we are going.
These artists sang from the wound, and that may be one of the greatest gifts they gave us: a reminder that our deepest wounds do not have to silence us.
That kind of creativity is not born from having a perfect life. It is born from having a real one.
For all their differences, the artists I’ve mentioned here shared a remarkable vulnerability. Their lives were complicated, and their stories were sometimes messy. Their relationship with faith and God was not always simple or easily defined. But beneath the music was a restless searching, a reaching for healing, meaning, belonging and love. They carried beauty and brokenness in equal measure, and maybe that is what made their music so powerful. It is because we see ourselves in it.
We know what it is to be wounded. We know what it is to lose someone. We know what it is to carry questions we cannot answer and grief we cannot explain. In a world that often teaches us that our wounds should be hidden, our favorite artists remind us that wounds do not necessarily disqualify us from creating something beautiful. Instead, they become the place from which the most beautiful things emerge.
At its heart, this is our Christian heritage. We love a God who does not discard wounded things. Christ himself, who comes into the Upper Room to uproot the disciples’ fear, retains the wounds of his suffering in his risen body. His scars remain visible to show the disciples, not as signs of defeat, but as testimony that suffering does not have the final word.
Real artists do not simply sing about life. They sing from it.
Similarly, the songs of our childhood that stay with us are rarely the polished ones. They are the honest ones that tell the truth and remind us of goodness, possibility and hope in the midst of the weary wonder of life.
These artists sang from the wound, and that may be one of the greatest gifts they gave us: a reminder that our deepest wounds do not have to silence us.
But instead, they become the spaces where our song begins.