The Irish Rovers’ Gems (Digital Download)

One evening last spring we sat down together to listen to our old albums with the purpose of releasing 12 tracks for a “best of” disk of our hard to find songs. After a laugh or two over the “Donald Duck” tone of our young voices, we realized there were some great songs that we had forgotten all about. As someone said that night, “there’s a bunch of gems there.” The more we listened to the old versions, the more new ideas for arrangements and instrumentation emerged. The real problem was about to start — how to get a group of Irishmen to agree to any thing, never mind selecting 12 songs out of approximately 300. After a few “civil” discussions and not so few Guinnesses, we managed to pick 32 of our favourites, at which point everyone refused to participate in the elimination of any more songs, out of love and respect for the material and the fact that the Guinness was now gone. Well, to end this artistic and cultural evening we not only decided on 32 tracks, we also decided to re-record them. We hope you get as much pleasure out of listening to these songs as we did redoing them. They’ve brought back many happy memories for us and hopefully they’ll do the same for you. Enjoy.