GALO: You play traditional Irish music but you put a spin on it. There are hints of bluegrass, jazz…

KC: In terms of traditional music, we’re very lucky in that it’s not that restrictive. There’s a template there, a body of material, but I think what keeps Irish music kind of a living tradition, if you like, is that there is a little bit of freedom to put your own shape to it, whereas some other folk music frowns upon you tampering with it. They feel that you should just pay homage to what’s gone before and do an exact kind of replica. We try to be respectful. Therefore, we don’t screw around with the melody so much, but we color it by the arrangements and the accompaniment. Traditional Irish music, a couple of generations ago, would never have encountered harmony or double bass or rhythm guitar. Adding those little condiments to it would certainly spice it up.

GALO: Your most recent album is Lá Nua. What does the title mean?

KC: Lá nua in Irish means “new day.” There would be a good mix of self-composed and older tunes on there. So that’s two strands, and then the third strand is the kind of tunes from anywhere that we like, that we’ve kind of blended in. Or we’ve created new sets of tunes out of material from Brittany, in France –we really like the Breton dance tunes.  And we love the music from northern Spain, Galicia, and Asturias. We play some French Canadian pieces; we play some Eastern European tunes. On our first album in 1997 we even incorporated a klezmer piece into our stuff then. We’ve always mixed it up. You know, we don’t have a singer.

GALO: I was going to ask about that. The album with Natalie merchant was your first album playing together as a group where you had vocals, right?

KC: Yeah, it was, actually. We’ve guested on a couple of albums before with singers but they’ve been just one song, and then we’ve toured with a couple of singers in a collaborative sense, but we’ve never recorded any serious body of work — whereas with Natalie merchant, we got to do five songs. We got to really develop it. We got a sense of what it’s like to open up songs from the lyrics out, and not just the melody, which is what we’re used to. And to be in the studio with her for a number of days was a lovely experience. It came across purely by chance. She was living in Hawaii at the time, and we were performing there, and a mutual friend of ours suggested that she come to the concert, and she did. She enjoyed it, and she came up to us after and said, “I’d love to work with you guys.” We thought, ‘yeah, yeah, we’ve heard that before.’ But true to her word, a couple of years later she got in touch and said I’m doing this project, and I think you guys would fit some of the songs. It gave us a kind of confidence or enthusiasm for wanting to do more with singers. Not that we’d want to bring a singer into the band, but we’d love to record an album with a bunch of singers. That’s kind of the way we’re leaning with the next album. We think it should be an album of songs with various singers that we love and various singers we’ve worked with.

GALO: When you work with a voice, do you treat it as another instrument or from the vocals out?

KC: I would relate it to looking at the words and trying to picture a scenario, like if you were putting music to a film: you’ve got images and you’re creating music to bring those images to life. Something we’d never done before was look at a passage of words and see what image is conveyed through those words, and try to find some form of accompaniment that would bring it to life — rather than take the core melody of the sound and just either add harmony, or maybe having a fingerpicking guitar, and then going into rhythmic guitar. Natalie was brilliant at conveying what she’d like. She would spend hours with us – she sang all the time, whenever we were trying to work on stuff, and she’d say, “No, we’ll go over that again.” She’d sing for ten hours a day. She was brilliant. I suppose with the Irish singers, we’ve never looked at it like that, because a lot of the Irish songs have a strong melody. We probably did just look on it as the voice being another instrument.

GALO: Lúnasa has been together since ’97, more or less. That’s a long time to be in one group and I’m wondering if things get old, get stale?

KC: Oh, yeah, they do, they do, they do… You become institutionalized; you become formulaic. There’s a fear that each album will just become a carbon copy of what went before, only with different tunes. One thing that helps is [that] we’ve been very lucky that we haven’t had many changes in terms of personnel, but when we have had a change; it’s given us a little shot in the arm. It makes you think of things in a different way and you come out of that environment that you’ve been almost shielded by. We’re embarking on a new relationship now. We’ve got a new guitar player with us: we’re very lucky to have Ed Boyd, who’s worked with some of our contemporaries in Irish music for years, like Flook and Mikey McGoldrick. Eddy’s going to be our man from this tour on. He will definitely lead us down a different road as well.

GALO: Have you, as a group, ever tried something that really didn’t work? Have you gone into the studio and said, “We’re going to make this kind of an album,” and it didn’t come together?

KC: Probably all eight of the ones we’ve done [laughs]. I’m trying to think. No, not really. We would be proud of everything we’ve done, some more than others, some better than others. What’s coming to mind is an album cover [Redwood, on the Green Linnet label] that we hated to such a point that we actually just went and, out of our own money, did a different cd cover so that we’d be able to sell it on the road.

GALO: What was wrong with it?

KC: Oh, it was diabolical! It was terrible! It was the record company that did it and we couldn’t get out of it. We ended up doing a different cover and bringing it on the road because we couldn’t bear to look at it on the merchandising table. It was dreadful. But that’s the only thing we were a little bit ashamed of, which I suppose isn’t bad. In 15 years to be ashamed of one album cover… It’s been great. We’re very lucky.

GALO: One last question: You guys are on tour a lot. How much longer can you do this? It’s got to be hard.

KC: There are stresses. The hardest part of any band is the travel, I imagine, but we know each other well enough to know when to back off, and we know when we can be full on and when we can push people’s buttons the wrong way. It’s a cliché, but it is like a family. You can fight like cat and dog, but at the end of the day, we’d live and die for each other. We all have different projects but there’s nothing we like doing more than this — which is, I think, the testimony. We still believe in this sound that we’ve created. So, until we run out of steam, until the audiences start to wane, we’ll continue. And we do enjoy touring. I mean, to be in New York City in January, how bad [is that], you know?

Lúnasa will be back at the Highline Ballroom in New York City on March 12, 2012, at 7:00 pm. For more information visit http://highlineballroom.com.

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