New cover of Your Love's Return (Song for Stephen Foster)
 

The Cottars, from left, Bruce Timmins, Fiona MacGillivray, Claire Pettit and Ciarán MacGillivray will perform Saturday night in North Sydney. Submitted by www.thecottars.ca


The Cottars are coming to the Cape
Popular Celtic group to perform Saturday at St. Matthew Wesley United Church

LAURA JEAN GRANT
The Cape Breton Post

NORTH SYDNEY — The Cottars have sandwiched a Cape Breton show in between summer tours of western Canada, the United States and Ontario.

The renowned Celtic group will perform Saturday night at St. Matthew Wesley United Church in North Sydney at 7 p.m. as part of North Sydney’s Bartown celebrations. And the four members of The Cottars — Fiona MacGillivray, Ciarán MacGillivray, Claire Pettit and Bruce Timmins — are looking forward to performing in Cape Breton, after just coming off a mini-tour of Alberta and B.C. earlier this month with the Chieftains.

“There’s definitely a vibe from the hometown crowd,” said Fiona, noting island audiences are familiar with many of their tunes and often tap their feet and clap to the music.
Since parting ways with fellow original Cottars members Jimmy and Roseanne MacKenzie in 2006, Ciarán and Fiona have teamed up with Claire Pettit and Bruce Timmons for a new-look, new-feel group, that is set to release its first album as a foursome later this year.
“We don’t yet have a release date but the music is finished and it’s kinda going through the mastering and production right now and it should be out soon and we’re excited to have people listen and see what they think. We had a lot of fun recording it,” said Ciarán. “The main thing is we were trying to establish all sorts of new aspects of what this group can do and on this record in particular one important thing is that Fiona has a couple of original songs on it which is something we hadn’t done before. But we had a lot of fun recording those and hopefully there will be more of them in the future.”

Fiona said she’s thrilled to have two of her own original songs included on the upcoming CD.
“I wrote a lot when I was much younger and I just never did anything with them and then I sort of gave it up and I missed it such a great deal,” she recalled. “To have some songs recorded on this last CD was a great way to inspire myself to get back to it. I find (songwriting) to be very fulfilling.”

Another highlight of the new album, which includes a mix of instrumentals and vocals, is the Gordon Lightfoot tune, Your Love’s Return (Song for Stephen Foster).

“I’ve been a Lightfoot fan for years and we just found the perfect song that hadn’t been as well known as some of his other works and did an arrangement of it and I personally was very excited to try that because I was such a great follower of his,” said Ciarán.

The MacGillivray siblings both sing and stepdance, and play a wide range of instruments including the piano, guitar, tin whistle, Irish bouzouki, Irish flute, bodhrán, and Celtic harp. Pettit, the youngest member of the band, is a talented instrumentalist, singer, composer and dancer, and Timmons, the Cottars’ lead guitarist, is one of the most respected accompanists in the Maritimes having toured or recorded with renowned East Coast groups like The Men Of The Deeps and The Rankin Family.

Tickets for The Cottars performance at St. Matthew Wesley Church are available at Buffets Office Pro, the Bartown Office and North Sydney Library, all on Commercial Street in North Sydney, the Clansman Motel in North Sydney, and J.R. Rahey’s in Sydney Mines.

ljgrant@cbpost.com

25/07/08

Re: New cover of Your Love's Return (Song for Stephen Foster)
 

Annie,
Despite the far from mainstream nature of this beautiful song, I don't let that deter me at all.... it has been one of my favourites for years and years, decades actually. I am an incurable romantic, as is in my opinion Gordon, and this song has the potential for becoming a classic in terms of pure melody alone - Can you imagine the LSO playing an arrangement of this song ? And, lyrically, it is, as are so many of Gord's songs, a beautiful stand-alone poem. Such is his music, wouldn't you say ?
~geo steve

Re: New cover of Your Love's Return (Song for Stephen Foster)
 

Found this old thread, so I figured I would just add to it. The CD, Feast, was released in February of this year. I found it to be - in a word - extraordinary; not just the Lightfoot cover, but the entire CD. It's a CD I can't stop playing. If you'd like to read my review, you can find it at my web site here:The Cottars - Feast - Review.

Re: New cover of Your Love's Return (Song for Stephen Foster)
 

A1, you can tell those gals (tre-stage presence) came from musical homestead

been interesting to watch/hear them evolve since Made in Cape Breton album

http://www.rounder.com/artist/music/...3875&aid=98062

'lots of good music out east' (GL)

Re: New cover of Your Love's Return (Song for Stephen Foster)
 

Not likely in todays music scene but i still wish someone would make that and otherGord songs a hit.

Then many more people would know his music.