It was a real honor and a treat to get to play music with Paddy during my years in Minnesota. I moved to the Twin Cities in 2005, and a couple of years later Paddy invited me over to his house to join a group of musicians who were working through a series of tunes he had picked out. He would have us record a few each week and we would try to have them learned by the next; that project eventually became O’Rourke’s Feast. Before long he invited me into the Doon Céilí Band too, and on other nights of the week I would come over just to work on tunes for the two of us to play.

Those evenings shaped my playing more than almost anything else. I would try to match him note for note, and he was a generous teacher. I had a habit of adding embellishments everywhere, and Paddy would stop me: “Just leave it a long note.” I think I learned from him how much it matters to prioritize the melody, and to pay attention to the specific notes you choose to include in a tune. I’ve always found his melodies especially thoughtful, with real care in their phrasing.

We were lucky enough to take it on the road as well, driving around Michigan, the Midwest, and the Northeast. What I remember most from those trips is how much Paddy loved meeting local musicians wherever we went, and hearing their versions of tunes at a session. Any tune you brought to him seemed to come with a backstory; he could tell you exactly who he learned a setting from and something unique about them. His memory for the specific people and places behind the music is incredible. In his memoir he tells the story of the traveling peddler who sold his first mouth organ to his mother for a shilling, right down to the name of the peddler’s donkey, Bosco.

Those tunes Paddy and I worked up eventually became the album Bright and Early with Dáithí Sproule, and nearly half of the tunes on this playlist are ones we recorded together there. Recording with Paddy meant learning his versions exactly; he had specific settings in mind, and I had to work hard to get all the small corners right. Many of these are settings you won’t find anywhere else. It opens with Tom Ginley’s, which I’ve never heard from anyone but Paddy. Aggie White’s came to Paddy off a taped radio broadcast of the Ballinamere Céilí Band, back home in Offaly. The two marches, The Siege of Guingamp and The March of the King of Laois, stayed with me long after Minnesota; I carried them back to Boston and recorded them both with Copley Street. Most of these twenty come straight out of my old notebooks from those years, and going through the collection to find them brought back a lot of evenings in Highland Park, tea, tunes, and Minnesota Twins games included.