Pop quiz: When were women guaranteed the right to vote in the United States? … If you’re like a lot of Americans, your instinct might be to imagine that had to have been early in American history, in the 19th century, if not the 18th. Even those who paid better attention in history class may still be startled to recall that it was just barely over a hundred years ago, as impossible as that may seem in a moment when the country may be about to elect its first woman president.
The relative contemporaneousness of the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920 has come to the fore in one of 2024’s best albums. That last word is not a misprint: Singer-songwriter Aoife O’Donovan’s “All My Friends” is a bit of a history lesson (don’t worry, only a bit) as well as one of the year’s richest and most beautifully realized records.
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It started off, though, as a concert commission, for a symphonic piece that was to have been performed four years ago, to tie in with the centenary of women getting the vote. Due to the pandemic, that timing didn’t quite work out, but an even fuller fleshing out of the material resulted in O’Donovan, a favorite in the Americana music world, releasing “All My Friends” earlier this year, followed by a current tour that has her performing concerts alternately with a small, rootsy ensemble and full orchestras…