I’ve long been a fan of Amelia Hogan’s haunting voice. The first time I heard it was at a FAR-West Campfire; the next day I couldn’t remember her name but her voice wouldn’t leave my head. We cheered when she came back to sing for us again.

I heard “Rolling In the Gold” – the first track and Amelia’s original composition – in a private showcase at FAR-West 2024 hosted by Mother Hen Promotions. This fourth-generation Californian told us how she loves her home state. The album’s title, Burnished, is a single word from that song: its burnished wildflowers / in each gilded beam.

Amelia’s whole  heart and identity are in that first song. As she says herself, many traditional songs about California come from the perspective of outsiders looking for glory and gold in a strange land, maybe finding something else. Amelia Hogan sings California a love song.

This album is loaded with talented traditional musicians like guitarist Jimmy Murphy, harpist Maureen Brennan, and multi-instrumentalist Christa Burch. Amelia herself can play bodhran and a small 22-string Welsh lap harp, as well as the South Asian curiosity known as Shruti-box which graces track 7: a dying freedom fighter’s plea to continue the fight, called “Little Yellow Roses.”

Burnished is an exercise in the preservation of folklore: The album threads Celtic mythology like “Blue is the Eye” – track 2 – with the Old West in “They Call the Wind Mariah” – track 3. I remember learning that one with my 3rd-grade class. Amelia was chagrined that people kept treating that song like a “hokey musical theatre cowboy song” while she recognized a mournful pleading with the wind to bring the singer’s lover back.

“…so, on an album about songs of place and human relationships to place… that song had to come in. I want to sing it the way I’ve always felt it, like there’s space for the wind in it.”

The penultimate track, “Dh’eirich Mi Moch Madainn Chetein,” is Amelia flexing all her skills, research, and education in singing sean–nós, which means ‘old way’, paying tribute to her paternal Irish lineage. The song is a Scottish wool-waulking song, sung by women as they beat wool into malleability for the making of tartan cloth. Within the lyrics you’ll hear praise for Alastair McAlastair, a traveling teacher who helped preserve the Gaelic language. It feels like a great final song for an album, but wait…

Amelia brings the journey back to herself with “Who Will Watch the Homeplace” – sung a cappella. Kate Long’s award-winning Americana song brings the tradition of Ireland through Appalachia to California, embodying the question: What will we do when we can’t come home?

Burnished releases on April 1st. Keep yourself apprised of updates at Amelia Hogan’s Website.