Ollie introduces Anna and her musical history

Ollie’s introduction of Anna turns family research into a musical inheritance story: he tells Shay that an ancestor in Shay’s paternal line was an accomplished, unconventional musician whose history survives only in scattered records and a reconstructed sound. Anna’s life cannot be fully recovered, and Ollie cannot establish when or how it ended. Yet the account gives Shay more than a name. It offers a concrete point of contact between an unknown branch of his family and the music he makes himself.

A revelation within the research

The introduction comes during Ollie’s research into Shay, not into Shay’s adoptive family. Shay had not understood the project’s subject until Ollie showed him a folder bearing an unfamiliar name and clarified what he was investigating. The disclosure takes place within the tour documentary project: Shay has signed an agreement with Sky concerning the researcher’s reporting, and Ollie turns on the camera for their conversation. He says that the initial discussion will be left out and that filming will properly begin afterward. The scene therefore places a deeply personal discovery inside a documentary arrangement, while also distinguishing the private explanation from the material Ollie intends to record.

Ollie identifies Anna as briefly married to Shay’s sixth great-grandfather, three generations before Rudolph and on a different branch of the family tree from the Danish ancestry Shay had previously learned about. He explains that the Danish heritage comes through Shay’s maternal side, whereas Anna was Lithuanian. The distinction matters: this is not another detail about the Danish line but a separate family history, associated with a region whose political identity had also been complicated by its past as part of Prussia.

Anna’s musical life

Ollie describes Anna as a peasant woman who nevertheless moved among Lithuanian nobility when she was young. By eighteen, she had become principal lutist at a royal court, an unusual achievement for someone of her background. She played many instruments, a versatility Ollie explicitly connects with Shay’s own musicianship. He has not discovered how Anna acquired that range of skills as a child. One possibility is that an uncle involved in a craft made instruments for the nobility, placing her near music and instrument-making, but Ollie presents this only as a conjecture, not an established explanation.

Anna’s record then breaks off for roughly ten years. Ollie thinks she may have left the court to marry, but he cannot confirm the reason. Records that resume later place her travelling through the countryside, playing folk music on many kinds of instruments among religious sects. The available account suggests another departure after that: she eventually separated from religion, travelled alone, played in villages she encountered, and wrote poetry. Ollie has found no surviving poems. Shay notices that one of the photographs in the book shows Anna smoking a pipe, a small detail that accompanies the larger portrait of someone who did not remain within a single social, religious, or musical setting.

A sound reconstructed from fragments

Ollie offers Shay a recording of music that Anna might have played. It has no title: Lithuanian students recorded it in the 1970s from parchments held at the National Museum. The recording is thus not identified as Anna’s own performance; it is a reconstruction from historical material, offered as an informed approximation of a musical tradition associated with her. The distinction preserves the limits of what Ollie has found even as he makes the past audible.

When Shay listens, the sound develops through a deep stringed bass and layered female chanting. Its delicacy surprises him; he had expected something rougher and simpler. Ollie relates that traditional music in Lithuania was influenced by Gregorian chant after the region’s Christianisation in the thirteenth century. He also notes the presence of opera at the royal court, which may have been one of the things Anna left behind. These details place the music between overlapping traditions rather than treating it as an untouched or singular folk sound.

Ollie’s search has not recovered Anna’s later life or death. Her trail has gone cold despite his attempts to continue it over the preceding days. He has found a folk band in Vilnius that still plays music from the region where Anna was best known, but that discovery does not resolve her personal fate. The account gives Shay an audible trace and a possible cultural continuation, not a complete biography.

Inheritance carried forward

The family connection becomes specific when Ollie explains that Anna had a child during her marriage to Shay’s sixth great-grandfather. She left the baby in the capital; that child, also named Anna, became Shay’s fifth great-grandmother. The child’s place in the family line explains how Anna’s blood remained part of Shay’s ancestry even though Anna and her descendants never saw her again. The story joins a remembered musical life to a documented line of descent, while leaving the separation between the two generations intact.

The music’s later influence is not merely symbolic. At a subsequent show in Southampton, Shay plays a new penny-whistle melody that he has made up without knowing why it feels familiar. Ollie hears a resemblance to the Lithuanian folk music he had shared with him; Shay recognizes that this is where the melody came from and that the sound has been troubling him for days. The scene does not establish that Shay consciously copied Anna or the recording. Instead, it shows musical material persisting through listening and improvisation, becoming part of a new composition before Shay can name its source.

That connection also fits Shay’s established way of making music. At the first Dublin show, he follows his private pre-performance ritual by walking the unfamiliar stage and lying down on it to imagine the coming performance. At the sold-out Belfast show, he refuses the offered cajon for an encore and improvises with a harmonica rather than repeat a previous set. Later, Ollie sees him absorbed in a penny-whistle tune in Southampton. Across these moments, music emerges through preparation, spontaneous invention, and close attention to a sound that has lodged in memory. Anna’s story gives Shay a family history that can be heard and transformed, even though its original performer remains beyond recovery.

The connection recurs in a quieter setting at Ollie’s flat. Shay brings back his harmonica, penny whistle, and the unnamed instrument Ollie gave him. When he asks whether the melody Ollie plays on it is a traditional song from his unknown origins, Ollie identifies it instead as The Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Shay turns the instrument’s handle and searches for the melody on its keys. This later moment does not extend Anna’s biography, but it keeps the episode’s central distinction in view: inherited music may open a route into the past, while musical exchange between Shay and Ollie also creates meanings in the present.