From Mark Gowman: It’s hard to believe it’s been almost a decade since I first started playing Irish music. I’ll always remember walking into that seisiun for the first time and hearing, “Who are you? What do you think you’re doing here? Well, try not to mess us up too bad! And have you ever heard of playing in tune???” All of that was before I took my instrument out. So when I moved to Rochester a year or two later, I was a bit nervous about joining another Irish music community… since I never really belonged to the first one.

As I entered a hotel room in Henrietta where thirty people were crowdedly playing, an accordion player approached me. Rather than chastise me for my intrusion, he invited me to join him and his two fiddler friends. They spent that entire seisiun with me, introducing me to people, offering to buy me drinks, and inviting me to start tunes from my repertoire since it differed from the sets they commonly played. Those men were Ted McGraw, Lynn Pilaroscia, and the late Sean Walker. I have often wondered whether I would still play Irish music—and whether Celtic Music Society would even exist—if not for the kindness of these three men.

It is in this spirit of community that we have invited some great friends and great musicians—ages 9 to 95—to join us on The Devils of Dublin, and we are honored to have them. Celtic Music Society continues to be a labor of love, and we hope you will enjoy listening to this album as much as we enjoy playing.

So far, we've got the album cover set up, our playlist and arrangements done, our guests contacted, our CD production contracted, and the recording studio set up in what was the band office 3 days ago. Now all we have to do is record, and record, and record, mix it, master it, put the packaging together, etc. Oh, and raise the $700 we're short to produce the CD's.

We begin recording Sunday at noon.