Gerry Diver’s Speech Project is an abstract folk album comprised of interviews with Irish musicians. The album coaxes out the inherent musicality of their words, unraveling the tones and weaving them together with 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 musicians of old, but also exploring the place of Irish people within the historical narrative of the British Isles, and their claims both inside and outside of their homeland.
It was out of this examination of Irish memory, and its assertion that the musicality of the Irish people is innate, that this project was born. With this website, we mean to explore the motivations of 3 Irish bands: The Dubliners, the Dropkick Murphys, and the Wolfe Tones. Their shared heritage collides in certain songs, as popular groups with multi-decade careers 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, and each group has struggled to find a balance between the authenticity of their art form, and their own commercial interests.
This project has set its aim around the idea of music reflecting the ideologies of the Irish people. Having examined their discographies, we chose three songs that each of the bands covered, and analyzed their lyrics in order to better understand the cultural and historic significance of each song, and the reasons each band chose to record them. We then decided to examine each of the bands in an attempt to better understand their personal style, their artistic aims, and their intended audience .
Throughout this website, there will also be links to further readings that provide historical and cultural context for our subject matter. These links will provide further insight into the commercial aspects of each band, and enable readers to better understand the lyrics of and performances of the songs below:
