Irish band pens 'Lake Winnipesaukee' song

ALTON – It was a three-day visit to Alton that inspired an Irish folk-rock band’s song, “Lake Winnipesaukee,” but it was the coronavirus pandemic that made it a single.

Barry Murphy, who plays bass and sings for the band Hermitage Green, wrote the song two years ago, thinking it would be what he called an “album song,” a track on an album that is usually forgotten about in favor of the band’s fun and energetic singles. “Lake Winnipesaukee” is a closer, softer kind of song, one for listening to in the light of early morning while thinking about the water that has passed under the bridge.

That’s exactly where Murphy was when he wrote it, he said. It was September 2018, and he and Hermitage Green had recently returned home from a tour of North America. That month is a time of transition in Ireland, and Murphy, 37 years old, said he is inclined to write during that season. One day he awoke with a song spilling out of him.

“I sat down one morning at 6 a.m.,” Murphy said, speaking from the attic of his home in Limerick. “It just came out straight away. It was straightforward writing. A week later we put a melody to it – often the best ones, there’s no thinking about it, taking exact experiences and exact lines,” and simply recording them on the page.

So it was with “Lake Winnipesaukee,” as much journal entry as song, a memory of experiences across an ocean from home, a distance drawn shorter by family bonds.

A man walks into a pub

Bruce Batchelder grew up in Alton, about 500 yards from the lake, and moved to Boston to begin his career as an engineer. In 1975, he was given a short-term project in Ireland. While there, a co-worker took him to a pub in Limerick, where he met a woman named Fidelma. By the end of his two-month assignment Batchelder had convinced the young woman to come back to Boston with him.

They spent their working years living in Boston, but with a getaway they built on the lake in Bruce’s hometown. They are now retired and live in Alton full-time.

Fidelma is Murphy’s aunt and the self-declared president of the North American chapter of the Hermitage Green Fan Club. So it was only natural that when they learned that her nephew and the band had a few days off between shows in Boston and New York two summers ago, she and Batchelder invited them to spend that time at their camp.

The quiet man

For most of the band, the trip to the lake was a novel experience. But for Murphy, it was a chance to relive childhood memories. He had been to Alton twice before, when he was 5 and again when he was 10. When he saw it again, 25 years later, he said it “immediately struck a chord. It hadn’t changed a bit, it still had the same deck, the same hammock. I was transported to when I was five.”

Rain was on the horizon, but Murphy and the boys insisted on getting into the lake as soon as they arrived. Batchelder took them to a part of the lake he had been going to since he was a boy, where a ridge of rocks allowed him to stand with just the top of his head above the water. On the other side of the ridge, the lake bottom fell away, and Batchelder told his Irish guests how he and his friends would challenge each other to dive down deep enough that they could return with a handful of sand and stones.

So was the inception of the line in the song, “Submerged to your lips, watch the rain/dancing off the lake from whence it came/hold your breath and dive as deep as you can/if you hit the bottom you’ll be a better man.”

Murphy saw something in his uncle then, a chance to better know a man he’d seen many times but never really talked to. All of their previous meetings, save Murphy’s two boyhood trips to Alton, had been in Limerick, where Batchelder's quiet nature didn’t break through.

On his own turf, though, Batchelder was more forthcoming to Murphy. “He just opened up and told me what it was like as a kid," Murphy said. "He told me what it was like to sleep at night when there’s no air conditioners. He’d go down to the dock and fall asleep looking at the stars.”

That insight was also reflected in “Lake Winnipesaukee”: “Too warm to sleep so we lay in the moonlight/to cool your breath and ignite your dreams.”

The Batchelders had been “massively” supportive of Murphy, he said, even when he was pursuing a career as a professional rugby player. He was happy to pay tribute to them in the song, but when they recorded their yet-to-be released album, he presumed the song would be largely forgotten by everyone not named Batchelder or Murphy. But then the whole world changed.

On March 13, Murphy and his bandmates stepped off a stage in Dubai and learned that the rest of their tour had been canceled. They were supposed to be boarding a plane to play a string of dates in Australia. Instead they flew back home and haven’t performed for a live audience since.

This spring, instead of playing in front of live audiences around the world, Murphy was walking the streets of his city while listening to the mastered tracks of Hermitage Green’s forthcoming album – and the song about his uncle’s lake kept resonating with him. “Lake Winnipesaukee” let his mind escape the strange prison of the coronavirus pandemic and return to a happier time. They held off on releasing the album, but Murphy felt they should give “Lake Winnipesaukee” a life of its own.

The song was released at the beginning of the summer, and a music video, in which the song was set to snapshots of Murphy’s earlier visits to Alton, was made public this month.

“I feel a lot of people can relate to that place that they were longing for – places where they have memories of when they were spending time with their family,” Murphy said. He was right, as many of their fans, even those who wouldn’t know how to pronounce “Winnipesaukee,” have responded to the song. There’s even a fan-made video, in which the music is laid over their own family vacation photos from a day on the Irish coast.

The Batchelders are hoping that the song will also catch on where people can say “Winnipesaukee,” by posting it on social media and trying to get local radio stations to play it.

“We’re trying to get it as much exposure as we can,” Bruce Batchelder said. “It sums up a summer vacation on the lake, or even the ocean. It’s not even so much about any particular place, it’s about finding yourself.”

Fidelma said that “Lake Winnipesaukee” is the right kind of song for this moment in history.

“Especially during the pandemic, I think people needed something like that song,” she said. “It’s just about looking into yourself, looking after yourself. To me, it just brings such peace and tranquility during these difficult times… It brings you to a better place, momentarily.”

Murphy said his band would be near the lake right now had the tour not been shut down, since they had a North American tour booked for this summer. All of those dates have been pushed to 2021, and he said there’s still room for another show or two in the schedule.

“Come next summer, I’d love to stick in a New Hampshire date, which is very doable,” he said.