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Celtic Fire is the 2017 CD of progressive Celtic music by the Brown County-based band, Celtica.
The CD’s 13 all-instrumental tracks blend contemporary interpretations of intricate, traditional folk melodies from Ireland and Scotland with the semi-classical wonders of modern Celtic music, spiced with just a little kick of rock & roll.
[Scroll down the page for streams]
I have the pleasure of being the producer/engineer of the CD, on which I also played classic guitar, bass and virtual drums, and am co-writer of its only original tune, ‘Bouzouki Stomp’ with fellow guitarist Tim Dooley.
A Bit Of Celtica History
Celtica began in the early 1990s, the brainchild of band leader Tammera Lane (hammered dulcimer, piano, keys, psaltery and field organ). This first incarnation of the band lasted for about a decade, but disbanded while Tammera pursued other interests in Wisconsin.
Upon returning to Indiana in 2006, Tammera was encouraged by guitarist Tim Dooley (acoustic guitar, bouzouki, mandolin, bodhran) to revive the band with him.
Based in Brown County, Tammera Lane is a classical-trained pianist who many years ago developed a passion for Celtic music, and branched out to include upwards of 9 instruments in her sound palette, and learning to sing in Gaelic.
Tim Dooley is Tammera’s antithesis in many ways — a rocker by trade (but like Tammera, with Irish roots) who saw Celtic music as a pleasing balance to the more raucous music he played in his bar bands. He, too, added several instruments to his arsenal for Celtica, including mandolin, bouzouki, and the quintessential Irish drum, the bodhran.
For over a decade the two of them performed primarily as a duo, often including stories about the histories of their exotic instruments in the program. Typically, Tammera would play the melodies while Tim provided the rhythmic support. The combination of hammered dulcimer and acoustic guitar is a particularly nice combination, fully covering the harmonic spectrum, yet producing a sound that is gentle and soothing — lilting (a word rooted in Gaelic, BTW) in its purity.
In 2009, the duo (along with Clancy Clements on bagpipes) recorded and released Celtica’s debut CD, Labyrinth Walk, a meditative soundtrack for the ancient spiritual practice of “Circling to the Center” (more info on the practice can be found here).
The Group Grows
In October of 2013 Tammera, seeking a bigger sound, asked me to join in on classic guitar. While i’ve always had an affection for Celtic music, it wasn’t a style I had taken much time to explore, so I accepted the challenge.
Within a couple weeks I had brought my friend and fiddler extraordinaire Carolyn Dutton to a rehearsal, and she quickly brought her considerable talents to bear, lifting up the ensemble sound several notches.
With Carolyn in the band, we now had two strong melodic instruments who could trade leads and build the intensity of our jams. I focused on laying down a polyphonic fingerstyle guitar accompaniment (playing simultaneous bass lines, rhythmic punctuations and the occasional melodic interjection), which gave Tim more freedom to set the guitar down and pick up his more exotic instruments.
But as many instruments as the band had at their disposal, there were only so many hands to play them. So Tammera added a well-known traditional music duo from Bloomington, Clancy Clements (bagpipes, whistles, and bodhran) and Tom Lozano (hurdy gurdy and various other percussion instruments) to inject their own unique sounds into the mix. Clancy and Tom’s deep knowledge of Celtic music (and world music in general) expanded Celtica’s musical palette considerably.
2017: ‘Celtic Fire’
Two years in the making, “Celtic Fire” shows a distinctively different side of the band from the first CD, ‘Labyrinth Walk‘, which was a much more contemplative musical excursion. ‘Celtic Fire‘, by contrast, is decidedly more upbeat, with the full 6-piece band contributing tracks to the album.
Production began in March of 2015 in my project studio, and by album’s end we had recorded at three different locations in Brown County, Indiana: my original studio in downtown Nashville; in Tammera’s great room at her place; and in the new location at the family homestead about three miles outside of town.
Recording the album was a rather on-again-off-again process. With six very busy people in the band, there were months that went by with nothing much going on, interspersed with several periods of focused work. After New Year 2017, things heated up considerably, as the entire band wanted to complete the album and have it ready to market during the March Saint Patrick’s Day season.
Last minute recording sessions were scheduled, and once completed I was finally armed with all the raw material for the album. I sat down in mid-January to begin mixing, at times juggling upwards of 12-14 tracks, and sharing rough mixes with the band via Dropbox, soliciting input. This process took a couple weeks of constant work, plus a group listening session in the studio that lasted an entire afternoon, when final adjustments were made. Having additional ears on a project will definitely reveal alternative perspectives, and this CD is the better for it. In a band with this much talent, consensus is vital if you want to fully leverage everyone’s skill to advantage.
Once the band gave me the nod, I shifted into mastering mode, and on February 13, 2017 delivered the master discs to Tammera to send off for duplication.
Celtic Fire – CD Song Order
1. Muineira do Areal
2. Kitchen Girl/Drowsy Maggie
3. Country Dance
4. Dunmore Lasses
5. Sailor’s Return
6. Star Of Munster
7. Kid On The Mountain
8. The Fiddler
9. Now The Green Blade Rises
10. Bouzouki Stomp
11. Road To Lisdoonvarna/Morrison’s Jig
12. Casey’s Hornpipe
13. Laride
To purchase copies of Celtic Fire, click HERE.
