Irish singer and songwriter Jennifer McMahon will release a new orchestral version of Beacon Home on 25 September, revisiting one of the most personal songs from her debut album Part of The Whole with an expansive new arrangement featuring The Soundtrack Orchestra.
Originally written in memory of her father, Beacon Home has now been expanded from its jazz band and string quartet setting into a chamber orchestral arrangement featuring almost 40 musicians. Recorded across Sierra Recording Studios in Athens and The Cooler at The Complex in Dublin during 2025, the anniversary edition gives the song a broader cinematic scale while retaining the intimacy at the heart of the original.
For McMahon, the new recording also reflects how far her own musical journey has travelled since the song was first written.
A song for her father
The beginnings of Beacon Home stretch back to a sunny January day in Valencia, where McMahon was studying at Berklee College of Music.
Returning to the city after spending Christmas at home, she found herself humming a melody while making her way towards the campus before classes had resumed. She settled into a room overlooking Valencia's City of Arts and Sciences, and the song emerged.
Her father, John, had died two years earlier.
At its heart, Beacon Home imagines something McMahon could no longer have: one more day with him. Its opening image of walking together along the shore carries particular significance. Her father loved Spain and would have loved to visit Jennifer while she was studying there. His ashes had been scattered some months earlier off the coast of Majorca.
The song became an imagined conversation and a reflection on all those questions that remain when someone is gone, the things we would ask, say or share if another day together were somehow possible.
From jazz ballad to cinematic soundscape
Eight years later, McMahon returned to the piece from a different musical perspective.
Having expanded her work into composition and scoring for film, television and video games, she began to hear Beacon Home through an orchestral palette.
The resulting arrangement retains its jazz piano trio foundation but surrounds it with the colours of a chamber orchestra. French horn and double bass add weight, while Dublin drummer Niall Crichton contributes atmospheric rumbles and washes beneath McMahon's vocal.
The combination places the music somewhere between jazz, classical and cinematic composition, an evolution that feels particularly appropriate for an artist whose work has increasingly crossed musical boundaries.
The orchestral recording grew from McMahon's time studying film scoring at Pulse College in Windmill Lane, where she had previously worked with The Soundtrack Orchestra.
An opportunity to record with the ensemble again emerged in July 2025. McMahon produced the orchestral session remotely from Paris, while fellow Berklee alumnus Vasilis Milesis was on site at Sierra Recording Studios in Athens. The orchestra rehearsed and recorded the piece within a remarkably concentrated 30-minute session.
The remaining piano, drums and vocals were subsequently captured at The Cooler in The Complex, Dublin, adding another connection to a venue that has played an important role in Dublin's independent and improvised music community.
Both sessions were also filmed, with a live video release planned for 2nd of October.
An artist continually expanding her palette
McMahon has been part of Dublin's music scene for close to two decades, working across jazz, soul, gospel, folk and more experimental forms.
Her formal training began at Newpark Music Centre's Jazz Performance BA before she completed a master's degree in music performance and production at Berklee College of Music. More recently, she completed a postgraduate diploma in scoring for film, television and video games at Pulse College.
That widening musical vocabulary has increasingly found its way into her own work.
Jazz Ireland previously featured McMahon's 2024 EP Willow, a collection which further demonstrated the emotional directness and stylistic openness that have become characteristic of her songwriting.
Her recent projects have continued to move in new directions. She has been developing a music trail in Dublin's Phoenix Park and recently completed an artist residency at Ballina Arts Centre through Improvised Music Company's Navigator Award. She has also received support through Creative Europe's Culture Moves Europe mobility programme for collaborative work in Slovenia on the Witches, Bitches & Goddesses project.
Throughout those different projects, however, the deeply personal nature of McMahon's songwriting has remained a constant.
Beacon Home brings that quality back to where it began.
The scale may have grown, from a song written alone in a room in Valencia to a recording involving almost 40 musicians across Athens and Dublin, but its centre remains a daughter remembering her father.
Listen to Beacon Home from September 25th
Watch the YouTube Premiere on October 2nd
Connect with Jennifer McMahon
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