First of all, you have to learn it.

The conventional assumption is that once upon a time, if you learned it at all, you learned it in a sod farmhouse, behind the parish priest’s back, in between reaping and milking duties, on an instrument that smelled like Woodbines and your great uncle’s Republican angst. But these days, there are a whole helluva lot of us out there who learn this traditional Irish stuff down the side hall of a suburban four-bedroom, in between trips to Target and the taqueria, off a playlist where Frankie Gavin comes right after Fort Minor and right before Frankie J. We play a pretty mean pipes or fiddle or box or flute – hell, we’ve even won a championship or two – but chances are we’ve never cut turf or dug praties next to the bog. If we did, we probably paid 15 bucks to do it at a stop on the bus tour. Céad Míle Fáilte, Americans who play traditional Irish music.

Now, I’m not talking about a familiar crowd of O’s and Mc’s and -ley’s from Chicago, Boston, and New York. They’re a talented bunch, for damn certain, and I highly recommend their albums – but calling them out as Americans who play Irish music (AWPIM? Too soon for an acronym?) is like giving a mensch from Brooklyn credit for making mean brisket. I’m talking about us guys and girls from LA and Dallas and Baltimore and Seattle and Jackson Hole; we who caught the bug after skeptical parents bought us secondhand Chieftains albums or the Titanic soundtrack, crashed our first session with a Generation tin whistle or a pizza-box bodhran, and somehow wound up playing mean tunes in the end. You know who you are, and so do I, and only because I'm one of you – i.e., don’t even try to act like the theme to Braveheart wasn’t one of the first “slow airs” you ever taught yourself

That brings me around to a bit of ground I'd like to cover: let’s have a look at what it’s all about to be an AWPIM (there, I took the plunge), from our first discovery of how parallel fifths somehow felt like tiny orgasms, to outgrowing our first attempts to put on an Irish accent, to learning to love soapy warm overpriced beer for what we’ve convinced ourselves it means to drink it. Let the voyage of self-explanatory navel-gazing begin: start thinking about what color you want the sweater made out of all the lint you collect to be.

Mine will be blue.

There's an awful lot to be said...

So let’s start here: at the point where I frankly admit I'm taking up a dubious rhetorical task, writing about music. And that happens to be the same point where I claim that a lot of familiar, convenient, inevitable "dancing about architecture" metaphors folks use to explain this misguided chore are a good bit more quaint that they immediately appear. I'm writing about traditional Irish music specifically - but pick any genre, talk to someone who plays it, and they'll give you a pretty good sense of why writing about any kind of music is actually more like miming a performance of an unauthorized Portuguese translation of the Bhagavad Gita. 

After all, there's no isolated, "pure" form of music you can compare things too; music only exists in artistic and cultural ore. So whether it's traditional Irish music, classical, Jazz, electronica, or Indonesian nose flute you're writing about, making a narrative out of music can never be "simple" process of fumbling together a one-to-one relationship between two distinct art forms. Any writer crazed/misguided/drunk enough to try this inevitably runs up against the fact that any form of music, just below its Wikipedia-entry surface, is a natural alloy: music is an art form wrapped up in social institution that hooked up with a personal addiction after going on a date with a cultural institution while cheating on a subculture. Good luck making rhetorical matchups. Hell, I'm a paragraph deep and I'm already running out of fancy nouns. What am I going to do if I start trying to describe the politics of dating on the Irish session scene?

Strangely, I'm undeterred. I just keep repeating to myself a well-establish dictum that's guided many musicians and writers alike through similar creative straits: 

"Why the fuck not?" 

In the spirit of that statement, I ask for forgiveness in advance.