The Monthly talks to musician, Michelle Wooderson (Starlyng), about her book and album “A Little Herbal Hymnal” – Part 2 – Starlyng

How did Starlyng come about?

I met John Fitzpatrick in 2018, when we were both booked to play a gig. We ended up on stage beside each other and afterwards we got chatting about writing music and I got to listen to some of his compositions. I thought they were phenomenal. They moved me to tears, such was his gift.

John was an incredible violinist, studio musician and string arranger. He’d worked with some of the finest musicians in Ireland and beyond, and was held in the highest regard in the music industry. Regardless of this, there was no ego with John. He was very humble and understated, funny and self-deprecating. You couldn’t meet him and not warm to him. I adored him instantly.

Around that time, I had been asked to write the theme music for a TV show which was being made and would be aired on RTE. I thought it would be great to collaborate with John, so we started to meet every few weeks down at St. Christopher’s Church on Mersey Street. There was a dusty old piano there, a lovely big wood burning stove and great natural acoustics in the room. We’d light the fire and improvise for a bit, and we’d write and record some ideas together. Then Lockdown happened and everything stopped. The TV show was cancelled and so was the music. I lost touch with John until much later on in 2020.

What happens then?

John and I reconnected about 9 months into the Pandemic. By that stage, he had lost everything, all his work, just like so many other professional musicians. So he wasn’t doing very well at that point. I was still working as a music therapist in NI Hospice and managing to keep my head above water, but he was really struggling mentally.

I suggested that we should just keep writing, just for fun really, we could work on his material and my material. That started a weekly thing where we’d go to our friend Rick Bleakley’s studio in east Belfast and chat, play and work on each other’s compositions. It was such a creative, fun time and definitely got us through the pandemic. We decided to call ourselves ‘Starlying’ and we put out our first track in 2023 around summer solstice. Tragically, just three weeks after this, John died very unexpectedly.

How did you deal with that situation?

It was very difficult, because our lives were so interconnected. John had become the person I loved most in the world. We were pretty inseparable. And because music was such a huge part of our relationship, in the shock of losing him I just couldn’t face playing or hearing music for a while. I had to pack in a lot of my work because I was in such a state. I went underground and completely immersed myself in nature and plants and everything that comes with that wildness. It really helped me find a way through the difficult period after his death.

How do you move forward?

John and I had made a plan that we would release one track every quarter turn of the year, basically mapping the seasons, Spring Equinox, Summer Solstice, Autumn Equinox and the Winter Solstice.
Once the initial shock of losing him began to lift a number of months later, I started to think that I needed to honour that plan. By that stage I had begun writing again, and that helped the grieving process.

I didn’t start out thinking I was going to write a book. I was just thinking I would put individual tracks out. But because I was studying Community Herbalism and writing about plants as I was writing music, it all seemed to fit together. The plants were helping me rebuild a sense of a world without John and I ended up writing about that. It was all connected and cathartic.