Paul Brady has been a major figure in the Irish music scene since the 1970s, writing and performing songs with enormous heart and soul. His latest release, The Vicar St. Sessions Vol. 1, presents highlights from a month-long run of shows in Dublin featuring guest appearances from such fans of his work as Van Morrison, Bonnie Raitt, Sinead O’Connor, Mark Knopfler, Mary Black, and Maura O’Connell. Paul is not only one of the best interpreters of Irish traditional songs, he’s also a brilliant songwriter whose originals have become classics in their own right.

Born in Belfast in 1947, raised in Northern Ireland on the border with the Irish Republic, he learned to play piano by ear listening to Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino. By the age of 11, he’d picked up a guitar and discovered Chuck Berry. In Dublin in the late 1960s, he joined The Johnstons and went on to record seven albums before joining Planxty, the premier Irish folk band of the day, and playing with such luminaries as Andy Irvine, Liam O‘ Flynn, Donal Lunny, and Christy Moore. His first solo album, Welcome Here Kind Stranger, won the Melody Maker award for Folk Album of the Year in 1978. Since then, he’s released more than a dozen stellar solo albums, pushing the boundaries of Irish contemporary music. He’s a profound and passionate performer, not to be missed. 

Kyle Alden, Grand Prize Winner of the Y-Tunes Song Contest in Sligo, Ireland in 2012, is a Bay Area singer and songwriter steeped in Irish tradition. His third album, Songs From Yeats’ Bee-Loud Glade, is a collection of original folk songs inspired by the poems of William Butler Yeats, and the Marin Independent Journal calls his latest album, Down in the West, Volume I, “intelligent, thoughtful, skillfully performed original acoustic Americana with an Irish lilt.” Kyle has worked with such musicians as Mick Moloney, Athena Tergis, Mike Marshall, Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh, Liz Carroll, Tommy Peoples, and Paddy Keenan, and played in such bands as the Mild Colonial Boys, the Gas Men, and the Shots, not to mention his time with the San Francisco punk band, the Young Republicans.

visit the Paul Brady website

visit the Kyle Alden website