Lisa O'Neill

Born in 1982 and raised in Ballyhaise, County Cavan, Ireland, Lisa O'Neill has been building a repertoire since the 2000s that sits between singer-songwriter folk and Irish traditional music. She moved to Dublin at 18 to study music at Ballyfermot College and developed a spare songwriting style, carried by a deep voice, guitar and banjo, often in acoustic settings where the songs remain central. Her discography opens with Has an Album (2009), followed by Same Cloth or Not (2013), Pothole in the Sky (2016), Heard a Long Gone Song (2018) and All of This Is Chance (2023). Her work blends narrative ballads, social observation and material drawn from traditional singing, with a marked taste for stripped-back forms and direct performances. Over the course of her career, Lisa O'Neill supported David Gray in 2011, contributed to Yorkston/Thorne/Khan's Everything Sacred (2016) and sang in the film Song of Granite (2017). Her cover of Bob Dylan's All the Tired Horses was also used in the series Peaky Blinders, extending the reach of her music beyond the folk scene.