Best songs of 2021 #6

The Celt’s Seamus Enright, Thomas Lyons, Eddie Butler, Linda O’Reilly, and Damian McCarney, sift through the releases of the last year and rank their top 10.

6. Eileen Tackney: Free Falling

Eileen Tackney's exceptional Free Falling is the highlight of her second album The Return Home. Yes it was lockdown album, but it in no way reflects the constraints of the time. Admittedly this offering is less experimental than her debut album, but it's all the better for it. In just over three and a half minutes Tackney's accomplished piano playing whisks listeners off on a trip that variously trots, canters and gallops across a synth-land. The tentative initial passages serve to amplify the exhilaration of the middle section. Brimming with melodic ideas and gear shifts, in Tackney's hands it all somehow hangs together in a beautiful, majestic epic.