If you missed us playing with Mudhook at the Portsmouth Maritime Folk Festival, you’ll have another opportunity later this month. We’ll be playing a coffee house gig at the Universalist Unitarian Fellowship in Durham NH on Oct. 15. You can see details and let us know if you’re coming at the Facebook event page we set up HERE.

In the meantime, you can get your Mudhook fix with this video that our friend Jeff Murdock took of us last weekend at our PMFF performance at the Moffatt-Ladd House.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you want to catch one of our shows, stop by The Moffatt-Ladd House on Saturday at 1 p.m. for a set that will feature several new songs. A full calendar of the festival’s events are at the website, and the schedule has all our other performance times listed.

We've come to LOVE playing The Barn at The Moffatt-Ladd House...the acoustics are great!

FYI – We’ll also be playing in Prescott Park at noon on Saturday to kick off the NH Fish and Lobster Festival (known locally as The Fishtival). The PMFF and the Fishtival have been working together on some overlap during the last couple of years because they are so interwoven thematically. Ours will be a short set, but that event is well worth checking out.

• When I went to college in Manch-vegas, I spent more than a bit of time there.
• When I lived in Mont Vernon, I’d go every Thursday night to hear Marty Quirk sing.
• I became friends with some of the regulars and they invited me to join Manchester’s Ancient Order of Hibernians.
• The Rover is where I learned to play bodhran, where I first got on stage to sing, and where I had my first St. Patrick’s Day gig as part of the band, Shillelagh.

The trinity celebration

Well, I’m happy to say I’ve got a bit of a homecoming in a couple of weeks, as Dave and I will be playing the Wild Rover Celtic Festival. This is a tremendous event that includes three features:

1) The 21st Annual Halfway to St. Patrick’s Day 5K Road Race, which is benefits the Make A Wish Foundation. (I remember working a mile marker for this race when I was with the Hibos.)

2) A St. Baldrick’s fundraiser. This is a fun event that involves people shaving their heads for money, and that money goes for childhood cancer research. This local event is part of a national campaign which has seen 187,000 “shaves” raise more than $114 million since 2000.

3) And, of course, there’s live music and exhibits throughout the day. My friends Marty Quirk and Kevin Dolan will be playing earlier in the afternoon, and after we play there will be a U2 tribute band called New Years Day. There will be several schools of Irish dance taking the stage for demonstrations, and countless booths from local vendors and exhibitors to visit, including our good friends from Celtic Crossing in Portsmouth and the Seacoast Irish Cultural Association (SICA).

The race starts at 10 a.m. and the festival starts at 11 a.m. We’re tentatively scheduled to play between 4:30 and 6:30 p.m., so we hope you’ll stop by to visit and enjoy the day.

And if you decide to shave your head…lemme know and I’ll kick in a few bucks.

Would you shave YOUR head? These guys are doing it to help children with cancer.

The day kicks off with the 21st annual 5k road race to benefit the Make A Wish Foundation

Pete and Tom, on stage together at Ri Ra

This special event, which will be held at The Stone Church in Newmarket, NH, is the brainchild of Tom Lanigan and Reagh Greenleaf. They were planning a half-way to St. Pats show, but they wanted to expand it beyond just their band. They instantly thought of òran mór, since we have a mutual admiration of each others’ acts, we sit-in with each other once in awhile, and we’ve been wanting to do a double-bill sometime.

We’re thrilled that “sometime” is now going to be Sept. 16.

The doors open at 6 p.m. The gameplan for the evening is that òran mór will play for the first part of the night (7 p.m.). Then Tom, Reagh, Sue Young, and Jordan Tirrell-Wysocki will take the stage (9 p.m.). We’ll close the night with a big ol’ jam together.

Tickets are $10 each, but here’s the thing: Only 100 tickets will be sold.

Don’t be left out…you can order ticket now by getting in touch with us, or clicking HERE.

It’s gonna be a mighty night of music and craic…hope to see you there!

Stay tuned for more details…

]]> http://www.oranmor.net/2011/08/half-way-to-st-pats-celebration-at-the-stone-church/feed/ 5 http://www.oranmor.net/2011/04/the-freedom-session/ http://www.oranmor.net/2011/04/the-freedom-session/#comments Wed, 06 Apr 2011 15:27:05 +0000 Pete Hale http://www.oranmor.net/?p=1657 Way back in 2008, when we started this little website, Dave and I talked wanting to have info both about our band and, more importantly, the Irish music happenings around the Seacoast. Our first post, in fact, was a video of our good friend Chris Vaughan singing one of the first songs he wrote, called Freedom, at Molly Malones where he was a bartender.

Jim Prendergast and Chris Vaughn, um, working...

Time has passed. Molly’s closed and became McMenemy’s. Then McMenemy’s closed.

But Chris Vaughan motored on. He kept writing songs, bringing them to the different sessions (particularly Friday nights at The Press Room), working with local musicians to polish his material. And now, at long last, he’s putting the finishing touches on a CD of his original songs, working with both Dave and our friend Jim Prendergast at Mill Pond Music Studio. But one thing was missing…until last night.

Freedom.

Friends in music, friends for life

To cap-off his CD project, Chris asked many of The Press Room session regulars to join him at Jim’s studio. So a large group of friends — including Emery Hutchins, Bob Frost, Alan Eaton, Gail McCarthy, Ramona Connelly, Bruce MacIntyre, Steve Carrigan, Dave and I — piled into Jim’s live room for some laughs and music. The live room sounded great and in two takes we got a terrific, very natural version of Chris singing with us backing.

Chris was extremely grateful for the help, and we were equally honored to be included in creating this fitting finale to his CD. Watching each other grow as musicians and artists — and encouraging and collaborating with each other along the way — are the great joys of our little musically community. Last night’s recording session was a great reminder that “this is the good stuff.”

It reminds me of a phrase Eamon Coyne once said to me: “A friend in music is a friend for life.” Just so.

Congrats to Chris on getting his songs recorded and ready to share with the world.

Emery having a laugh

Great Bay Sailor, reporting for duty

A lovely smile, indeed

Song list and back cover for our recording debut

That’s right kids … we have an early shipment of our upcoming CD in hand and we’ll have them available for the gig tomorrow at Ri Ra! We’re looking forward to making this a memorable day, and we rushed a shipment of a few just in time for St. Patrick’s Day. We’re waiting for a few things to line up before the official release (awaiting quotes on a larger duplication run, finalizing the legal mumbo-jumbo, artwork revisions,etc.), but we thought it’d be worth it to get a few to share with our friends on St. Pat’s 2011.

Actually, we’re supposed to get the CD sleeves delivered tomorrow…so we’ll be busy little beavers in the morning before we take the stage at noon. I’m planning to start the day with a traditional Irish breakfast at Rory O’Connors in Georgetown before picking up the shipping package…and then we’ll be stuffing like maniacs.

The tracks on the CD are a bunch of our favorites and ones we get requested frequently by our friends. You can clearly read the titles in the photo, but one you might not be familiar with is The King’s Highway. That was written by a friend of mine, Kevin Dolan of the fab band Acoustic Nuisance. I got his permission to do a new take on an old song of his. I’m very happy he let me play around with is creation.

If you couldn’t already guess, we recorded it at Mill Pond Music in Portsmouth with our friend Jim Prendergast, who many of you have seen play with us on occassion on Monday nights. He did a fantastic job engineering this thing and keeping Dave and I focused. We’ve posted a few samples on the website’s media player, so you can get a feel for the quality. We’re pretty proud of these recordings and think you’ll enjoy the tracks.

More on this when in a few weeks when the ‘official’ release happens…but in the meantime, HAPPY ST. PATRICK’S DAY!

* fear an ti = Gaelic for “man of the house” or host

Yes, we’ve been dreadfully negligent about  keeping up our posts on the website.  Somehow, that danged ‘real life’ stuff has distracted us during the last couple of months. But we are still playing every Monday night at RiRa in Portsmouth NH from 7 – 10pm…so if you need your fix…

We call him Seamus

Actually, if you haven’t stopped in for a while, you should know that we continue to be joined by many of our musical friends on a regular basis. We’ve had a good stretch of being joined by Jim Prendergast — formerly of Nashville’s “Boys of County Nashville” and now proprietor of Mill Pond Music Studio in Portsmouth, NH. He’s a great guitar player and even better guy, so we love it when he stops in.

Of course, with the St. Patrick’s Day holiday approaching, we have several gigs lined up that we will be telling you about.

In the meantime, however, if you want to get your Irish on, we’d love to see you on a Monday night.

Mudhooking in Market Square

The festival was this past weekend and, as always, we had an absolute blast playing our sets and catching some of the great music from some of the best performers currently on the maritime scene: Ken Sweeney, Bobb Webb, David Coffin, Ken Schatz, Liam Robinson, and others.

This year, we were able to release a special festival edition of our upcoming CD entitled “First Home.” In talking about the CD, however, a couple of people have asked what the album name means.  Actually, the name works on several levels, which is why we liked it so much.

The first connection is to a specific song on the album. ”The honor of ‘first home’” is the folly of the hero in Honor & Praise, a song Mike learned from the singing of Fairport Convention. The hero pushes his ship and his crew in order to be the first merchant vessel back to the home port, which — in part — is how he loses his vessel.

But “First Home” is also how we think of Portsmouth and the Portsmouth Maritime Folk Festival particularly. We all met singing and playing at the traditional music sessions in Portsmouth and Mudhook was originally formed four years ago specifically to perform at the PMFF…so the festival is our first home. Since we’re releasing this special edition of our CD at the festival, the name just made sense.

If you were able to make the festival and were kind enough to pick up a copy of this limited release — great. But if you weren’t able to make it and would still like a copy of this special edition, we have a few left and we’d be happy to get one to you. And we’ll have copies at our gigs as long as they last.

Mudhook's first CD - a special edition for the 2010 PMFF

• I bought a house that needed some work,
• Dave’s been taking a guitar building course (where he’s building a bouzouki — clearly off the curriculum),
• we both are maintaining excellence in our respective day jobs (hi boss),
• and we’ve had a few gigs that we’ve tried to keep you informed about, (and where we’ve been happy to see many of you.)

Great session at Rory O'Connor's, with the Coyne Bros and Tony Giblin, proprietor.

The summer music definitely has been fun. I’ve been enjoying the Sunday session’s at Rory O’Connors, the new pub in Georgetown, MA that’s owned by our friend and fellow troubador Tony Giblin. He and Eamon Coyne host a nice session there on Sunday’s from 6-9 p.m., which was just featured in the local paper. Good food, a nice pint, and music with friends…is there any better way to get mentally prepared for the torture of the week ahead? (hi boss.)

Other highlights from the summer included:

• playing some tunes with Terry Coyne (Eamon’s brother) who was visiting from Liverpool…a fantastic flute and whistle player who has a fair number of songs up his sleeve,
• my getting a chance to meet and sing with THE Johnny McEvoy (I’ll write more on that later),
• Dave headed out to see on the Lannon Irish Music Cruise around Gloucester,
• making some serious headway on our first CD, as well as a CD for Mudhook (the maritime group we’re part of),
• and gearing up with some new songs for the 11th Annual Portsmouth Maritime Folk Festival (more on that to come as well).

Dave at the mike, laying down tracks

All in all, it’s been a great summer. We’re wrapping up the summer with a gig up in Wells, ME this Wednesday, Sept. 1…the last show before Labor Day!

Mike Jeanneau -- our Mudhook cohort -- and Jim Prendergast, friend and sound engineer extraordinaire

After a cautious start, Peter Hale  declared the session ‘swine flu free’

Before heading across town to our Shriners Dinner gig, we enjoyed some songs and tunes.