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Gerry Diver’s Speech Project is an abstract folk album, building off the interviews of Irish musicians and coaxing out the inherent musicality of their words, unraveling the tones and weaving them into mournful piano chords and energetic fiddling, interspersed with worn and anonymous archived sounds. The voices come from minds as varied as punk singer Shane McGowan of the Pogues to Christy Moore of the Dubliners, but many express a similar sentiment about their music: they are experimenting with authenticity, playing with homages to the musicians of old, but also the place of Irish people and their claims both inside and outside of Ireland. It was out of this variety of Irish memory, and its assertion that the musicality of the Irish people is innate, that this project was born. With this website, I mean to explore the motivations of 3 Irish bands both of center and periphery, peaceable and rebellious, motivated by their bottom lines and the values they espouse: The Dubliners, Dropkick Murphys, and Wolfe Tones. Their shared heritage collides in certain songs, as popular groups with multi-decade careers and a shared identity would be expected to, but the themes that they deal in intermingle as well; they are as defined just as much by what they sing about as what they don’t.