Grá agus Bás, the Nonesuch Records debut from Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy, is due out tomorrow. The album—which includes the title piece, inspired by sean-nós "old style" Irish vocal music, as well as the composer’s song cycle That the Night Come, comprising six settings of poems by W.B. Yeats—was featured on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday.

On the title piece, says NPR's Jeff Lunden, "The singer's plaintive cries sound very much like phrases from Irish folk music, while the accompaniment features a kind of pulsating minimalist shimmer, played by a classical music group called Crash Ensemble."

Lunden talks with the composer about finding inspiration for the title piece in "long, all-night sessions" of singing and poetry at his grandmother's home, and connecting with Irish singer Iarla O’Lionáird, a well-known performer of old-style music, to collaborate on the new piece. Lunden also speaks with Dawn Upshaw, for whom Dennehy wrote the album's other piece, That the Night Come, and with Dennehy about it's "classically Irish" source material, the poems of Yeats.

Dennehy, who recently led a Professional Training Workshop with Upshaw at Carnegie Hall for young singers and composers, explains how, when writing the piece for her, he wrote for the entire range of her voice. "There's this kind of deep intensity that Dawn has now which people don't automatically associate with her. They associate just the pure floating tone," he says. "But there's a lot of complexity there in Dawn, and I really wanted to use all that."

For her part, Upshaw says of the piece: "I hear in his music the struggle; the sense of needing to find release, this feeling of needing to break free of something."

You can hear the complete Weekend Edition piece at npr.org. And there's one more day to hear the complete album, Grá agus Bás, as an NPR First Listen at npr.org. To pick up a copy of the album, head to the Nonesuch Store, where orders include high-quality, 320 kbps MP3s of the complete album upon release date.