Veteran Irish Trad trio Open The Door For Three announce the release of their fourth full-length album, A Prosperous Gale, set for September 13th. The album will be available on all digital platforms and CD, and available for pre-order on Bandcamp.
Open the Door for three is a road-tested, audience-approved, laughing-out-loud trio of Irish musicians, including fiddle player Liz Knowles, uilleann piper Kieran O’Hare, and Dublin-born singer and bouzouki player Pat Broaders. Their music is a rare combination of unearthed tunes from centuries-old collections, newly composed melodies, fresh arrangements of songs old and new, homages to the musicians and bands they grew up listening to, and the unmatched energy of a trio of good friends playing great Irish music together.
On A Prosperous Gale, the trio explores a fresh set of trad tunes and new arrangements, delving deep into the tradition they inhabit. The album takes its title from a line in one of the songs, ‘William Glen’, in which an ocean voyage begins with 'a fine and a prosperous gale’. "We thought it was a really rich and vivid lyric," O'Hare explains. "But it's also a great way of describing how this music works for us, and how this whole project came together. Of course we couldn't resist the low-key pun — while the wind is blowing we'd all be thrilled to become 'prosperous Gaels' at some point!”
"The way we work is different from a band that might, say, get together and write all the songs for a new project,” O'Hare continues. "We exist within the Irish tradition of musicmaking, which means that we carry hundreds and even thousands of songs and melodies around in our heads, so we have that deep well to draw from. But Open the Door for Three has always been about digging new wells too — we actively go out and source material from old albums, old archives, manuscripts, family members, friends, musical mentors, and we even learned one tune on this album from an Instragam clip!”
The track ‘Jackson and Jane’ is a departure for the band, originating in their live shows, where they've been playing with the idea of grouping seemingly unrelated tunes and songs together into suites. It's gives the trio a broader canvas of different textures and tempos to play with and contrast. It's a completely new way of taking what's essentially an oral tradition, and adapting it for presentation on the concert stage and in the recording studio.
‘Farewell, Lovely Mary’ is another suite, which begins with a song that Pat learned from an archival recording of Nora Cleary made in the 1970s. Nora was from County Clare, and she sang unaccompanied in a beautiful traditional style. Pat took that song, and added his own inventive, percussive backing on the bouzouki. The intensity of the arrangement is deepened by the melodic lines on an aggressive duo of uilleann pipes and fiddle, playing melodies that Liz shaped to fit within the song. Interwoven throughout the whole suite is a brand-new tune written by the trio’s dear friend, the legendary fiddler Liz Carroll. The whole track churns with different influences, ingredients, and connections.
“Being a bearer of this Irish musical tradition is like swimming in an ocean of music,” says O'Hare. “An ocean of history and tunes and songs, musicians and singers. That ocean is never still—it’s always in motion, ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the waves are placid and calm, but sometimes the wind whips up and you get caught up a mad gale that churns and blows and washes up something new and unexpected on shore.”
Liz, Kieran, and Pat have been mainstays of the Irish music scene around the world, having distinguished themselves over the last two decades as soloists with Riverdance, Cherish the Ladies, String Sisters, Secret Garden, Anúna, and The New York Pops. As a trio, they have played to a wide range of audiences in venues large and small, from Irish festivals, to concert halls, house concerts, and pubs. They have performed around the world: on Broadway and at Carnegie Hall, at L'Olympia and the Palais des Congrès in Paris, in Malaysian rainforest festivals, in theatres from Shanghai to São Paulo, and even in a bullring in Mallorca. They have been featured at The Kennedy Center’s Ireland 100 festival, the Celtic Colours festival in Cape Breton, at The Milwaukee Irish Festival, and in The Masters of Tradition series in Bantry, County Cork, Ireland.
Irish music is a living, breathing part of Irish and Irish-American culture, and there is no single story that can sum up its history, charm, grace, and drive. The soul of Open the Door for Three’s music is filled with connections: the connections to people and places, to teachers and heritage and audiences, and to the stories and humor that bring us all together. From these connections comes inspiration, which fills a bottomless well that keeps the trio coming back again and again—to refill, refuel, reinvent, and share.
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