05.08.2025

As we drove towards Donegal where we’d be taking a more relaxed approach to tour de force, we starting thinking about unwinding, having a break, going for walks and so forth. We listened to tapes and followed the winding R263 towards Glencolmcille.

Of the various genres and collections of cassettes we’d taken with us in the Quatrelle for musical accompaniment, we had a few that we’d put aside for the right moment. We called these ones mystery tapes since they had no sleeve notes, labels or information with them, they were mixtapes found or lost here and there over the years. During the trip around Ireland, and on a previous pilot of the trip in France, we took to playing these mystery tapes from time to time, enjoying the surprise element and maybe a moment of serendipity or synchronicity. One such mystery tape was System of a Down’s 2001 album Toxicity, while we were on a night drive between Bourges and Nevers.

Conversion, software version 7.0
Looking at life through the eyes of a tire hub

It turns out we’d both had the album as a teenager; I had the CD and Liliane had this tape which had been played frequently, then intermittently and then rarely before ending up in a box of things, in her Father’s remise.

Flashlight reveries caught in the headlights of a truck
Eating seeds as a pastime activity
The toxicity of our city, of our city

My CD had a similar fate, migrating from heavily postered box room, to the communal music shelf and eventually under the stairs with tools, spare wellies, ornaments (fall-fluties as my grandmother called them), old drawings, Christmas decorations and the Hoover. The mystery tape had opened up a common ground of music taste and formative years.

Another mystery tape transpired to be a copy I’d made of an album I had on CD. Leyla McCalla’s solo album, Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes. The CD had been given to me by Leyla herself after we met and clicked on a road trip around the Sates in 2014. Leyla is a classical and folk musician and this first album of hers, is a series of musical adaptations of Langston Hughes’ poems, interspersed with Haitian folk songs sung in Haitian Creole. It’s one of the most beautiful albums I’ve ever heard.

Throughout, she reflects on folk memory, American identity, Civil rights, colonialism, cultural preservation, linguistic revival, activism, solidarity, solitude and loneliness. The first track on the album, Heart of Gold is a stanza from Langston Hughes' poem Vari-Colored Song,

If I had a heart of gold,
As have some folks I know,
I'd up and sell my heart of gold
And head North with the dough.
But I don't have a heart of gold,
My heart's not even lead.
It's made of plain old Georgia clay,
That's why my heart is red.

This time last year Liliane and myself were headed north for Donegal, out past Killybegs, in-thru as they say, listening to Langston Hughes via Leyla McCalla.