Lau: Scots trad re invented

Scots trad at warp speed with a whole new energy....



Kris Drever, Martin Green, and Aidan O'Rourke bring different backgrounds to their collaboration (for more on that, there's an interview I did with the three of them in the current issue of the music magazine Dirty Linen). This four minute promo video includes some very interesting ways of getting their musical energy and connection on tape.

Gretchen Peters: England Blues

Gretchen Peters is the writer behind hits for Martina McBride, George Strait, Bonnie Raitt, Etta James, and Faith Hill, to name just a few. She's also a fine singer and performer in her own right, though that's a fact better known in Europe than in the US. Peters is releasing a holiday album this year, Northern Lights, which, as you might expect from her is not your usual take on the holidays. We've not yet been able to find any videos of songs from that project, but while we're looking here is Peters having fun in a rockin' mood, on a song called England Blues, from a concert in Nashville.

julie fowlis on the bagpipes

Julie Fowlis is a Gaelic singer who's winning awards and acclaim across the world for he work. She grew up in North Uist, in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, where she also learned to play whistles and, as you'll see in the clip below, bagpipes.

Fowlis is celebrating the US release of her second solo album, Cuilidh, with a brief tour in the United States beginning next week, which includes appearances at the Lotus Festival in Bloomington, Indiana, and Club Passim in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She's threatening to bring out the pipes at some point along the way...

tour schedule

You may also want to see

Music Road: now playing: Julie Fowlis: Mar A Tha Mo Chridhe/As My Heart Is

Music Road: now playing: eist: songs in their native language

Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

Michelle Wright, Iris DeMent, Mairead ni Mhaonaigh -- not an expected combination of voices, but a really fine one. From the first Transatlantic Sessions series, about a dozen years back. Song, singers, and musicians well worth revisiting, or checking out for the first time.

The Stairwell Sisters

How about a bit of cloggiing to go along with your music?

Here the San Francisco based Stairwell Sisters do the song Clog on Cindy in Anchorage, Alaska. The five women do a fine job with non clogging songs as well, so much so that Lloyd Maines [who should know: he's worked with Terri Hendrix, the Dixie Chicks, and just about everybody else in Texas], who co produced their latest recording, Get Off Your Money, said about the occasion when he first heard them "I happened upon this tribe of women musicians, playing old time string music, with the power and excitement of a great rock band."

They do -- I had the chance to see them in Glasgow, where they opened for Scots Gaelic singer Julie Fowlis. Quite an evening.

We Sing Star Wars

As you may have noticed, Fred and I call your attention to videos which are often both really musical and really off the edge of what you might have been expecting, for one reason or another. That works for this -- Star Wars theme run through Scottish fiddle, acid jazz, and Club Passim, all at the same time, by Hanneke Cassel and friends. Bound to give you a smile or even an outright laugh.






you might also want to see
Music Road: now playing: Hanneke Cassel and Christopher Lewis: Calm the Raging Sea

Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier/Shule Aroon

Shule Aroon, Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier: the song and many versions of bits of these verses turn up inthe music of Ireland, Scotland, and across America.

This one is a beat driven take on the song by the Rooney Family of County Antrim, Northern Ireland. They're playing in the Stratchclyde Suite of Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall during Celtic Connections in January 2008.