16/04/2025
**NEW RELEASE**
We're delighted to announce that 'SWEET LIBERTY' featuring our dear friend and absolute legend IAN LYNCH, is the 3RD SINGLE of our upcoming album 'THE WORLD THAT I KNEW' and is OUT NOW!
Listen / Add to your playlist here : https://open.spotify.com/track/7z6eLazwkNS6W7MNz4NEoP?si=bde24a14f6e54a05
Preorder the Album here : https://varodublin.bandcamp.com/album/the-world-that-i-knew-pre-order
ALBUM RELEASE : MAY 9TH 2025
Recorded, mixed and produced by John 'Spud' Murphy at Hellfire Studio (Dublin)
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“It's been an absolute pleasure to collaborate with Ian on 'Sweet Liberty'. When he suggested this song for the project, we loved it straight away. It carries a powerful anti- racist message and a call to unite people.
As we began working on it, it became clear that the lyrics were so powerful that the arrangement didn’t need to be overly intricate. Instead, we focused on creating an open space where these words could truly resonate.
For the final line of the song, we chose to shift the harmony to a minor key. There is quite a bitterness in knowing that such a song was written 200 years ago and still, the need for these words to be sung and repeated today is depressingly vivid.”
VARO
“The poet and weaver John Sheil had perhaps the biggest impact of any songwriter in 19th Century Ireland and many of his songs are still extant in the oral tradition, especially in and around Drogheda where he died in 1872. This song was learned from the singing of Pat Usher of Tinure, Co. Louth in the 1970s and it appears on a 3 CD release entitled The Usher Family, which came out in 2019. I first heard it here and was particularly taken by its humanitarian message of racial equality and freedom of all from oppression. It is quite remarkable that it was written in Ireland in the 1800s.
This one was a real pleasure to work on and to this day one of my favourite memories of lockdown was cycling out to Consuelo and Lucie during endless hot summer days to sit in the kitchen and get lost in the harmonies to this song.”
IAN LYNCH
