The Tracks
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The Liars AreThe MentionsA special thanks and tip of the glass to my "trusted ears" who helped guide my work on this; Steve Kritzer, Ken Hughes, Jake Schaefer, Richard Hilton.
Special thanks to our families for suffering through listening to tracking, retracking, remixes and rearrangements of these same freaking tunes in car trips and weekends month after month. Andressa, Daniela, Aidan, Charli, Conor, Liam and Quinn, Thank you. There were several other players from that music scene I wanted to have on this project but for various reasons it didn't workout. A special shout out of appreciation to Tim Bolger, Chuck MacCabe †, Sheila Drumm, Bobby Dearbacker, and Davie McCumiskey. Thank you for bringing me in and sharing the times and tunes. |
The Turf Fire Liars are themselves a collection of Irish and Scottish Immigrants as well as descendants of Irish immigrants. Hollywood, of course, has done a transformative job of making the Irish experience in America seem like the quintessential success story. Romanticized versions of Irish charm, wit and determination exist from John Wayne’s The Quiet Man to the Bruce Willis’ character John McClane, in Die Hard. All these types of images would lead us to believe the Irish and Irish Americans are a beloved group among the melting pot of America. Yet we know it wasn’t always this way. The political cartoons of the late 1800s show that most native born Americans of that time feared and loathed the alien invasion of illiterate, poverty-stricken, catholic, Irish peasants. In a time well before anti-immigration laws, political parties like the “Know-Nothings” were formed to try and stop the flow of humanity from Ireland’s desperate shores. Sound familiar? Of course it does. Because this is the story of America, told over and over again as the descendants of previous immigrant groups deny new immigrants a chance at the same opportunity. Today, to see Americans with Irish surnames lend their voices to staunch anti-immigration rhetoric shows how quickly some of us have forgotten from where we came. This album is a tribute to that journey and a reminder that we all have an immigration story.
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