First published on The Journal of Music in Ireland on 18 March 2026.

I wasn’t there at the Gradam Ceoil TG4 awards that Easter Sunday evening at the National Concert Hall in 2022, when Dolores Keane sang ‘Caledonia’, but I watched it on television. I remember standing in my sitting room as she took the song at a slightly slower pace, standing at a podium with her Gradam Saoil award beside her. Dougie MacLean’s ‘Caledonia’ was a song she had sung thousands of times since she recorded it in 1988, but this felt different. There was a freedom and intimacy to the performance, like she was telling a story to friends. She looked at the crowd, pausing over lines like ‘I proved the points that I needed proving’, lifting out her arm to them when she sang ‘I think about you all the time’, keeping her eyes closed for just a little bit longer when she sang the line about losing friends and finding new ones. I don’t know if I was reading too much into her singing that night, but it was a performance I never forgot.