Balancing traditional music and their own songwriting, Ye Vagabonds are rising stars in the Dublin Folk scene. Diarmuid and Brían MacGloinn, the brothers behind the band, were on the road supporting their fourth album All Tied Together when they came up to Minneapolis in early February. I sat down with them before their show at the Cedar Cultural Center to talk writing, politics, and boats. 

Congrats on the new album, which is a little over a week old now. This is your 1st album of all original material, right? 

(Brían) Yeah, our first album was all original, but one. We have one traditional song on [that record]. And then we made a fully traditional album, and then [the third album] is a mixture. 

Do you still play many of the traditional songs live? 

(Diarmuid) Yeah, but it’s getting less and less now. It's down to maybe three or four. 

(Brían) It's hard to get away from the feeling of it. I mean, we don't want to get away from the feeling of it. It's very grand. The traditional music that we play and the kind of community who sing it where we come from, the way that feels [is] something that I try and take out on the road with us. It just feels very grounding. 

(Diarmuid) Yeah, it's a good touchstone. It's a good reminder of how it should feel. 

Is traditional music how you started playing together? 

(Diarmuid) Not exclusively. We had both been playing music separately before that. Brían had been primarily playing traditional music, but I was playing rock... it was me and a bunch of Polish guys in a band and we made up our own funny stuff. But when Brían and I started playing music together, it was 60s pop music... some Appalachian songs. 

(Brían) It was old time American. 

(Diarmuid) Basically anything with harmonies... anything easy to play with a guitar, a mandolin, and 2 voices. 

How old were you when you first started writing your own originals? 

(Diarmuid) Oh, we were teenagers. I was probably 14 or something, when I started writing songs and you were probably the same. 

(Brían) Yeah, I've been writing songs.... forever, kind of. 

(Diarmuid) Me and my sister used to sit down and she'd play the guitar and I'd tell her what I wanted it to sound like and I'd sing my songs that I was making up, which at the time sounded very much like Pearl Jam. 

(Brían) In our house where we grew up Diarmuid's room was kind of at the opposite end of the house from our mom and dad's room, and there was a big heavy fire door on his bedroom, like it was filled with concrete or something. It was really heavy. So Diarmuid's room was its own little soundproof kind of turret on the house. When we were teenagers a lot of nights we would just hang out in Diarmuid’s room, listening to records. We had all of dad's old records and then whatever music we'd found. We'd just sit around and listen and talk about music and then make up songs. 

(Diarmuid) Yeah, it was a good time. It was a good hang. We were listening to a lot of music from the 60s, but also a lot of weird music from all over the world, from the 60s and 70s, right up to, that would have been in the early 2000s. Lots of cool, weird folk music that could be from anywhere really, could be like, Balkan, or could be Chilean, or it could be anything that tickled us. 

I love the Pearl Jam mention, they’re one of my very favorite bands. I don't really hear any Pearl Jam in your music, but I can imagine. I’ll be searching for it now. 

(Diarmuid) haha, Yeah, good. It was definitely when I was, like, 12. I was probably trying in my, like, little unbroken voice trying to emulate Eddie Vedder’s deep baritone. 

That makes two of us. It's cool hearing about all the international and eclectic influences in your music. One of my favorite questions to ask people is how much a sense of place influences their art. You both grew up in a smaller town and then moved to Dublin. How did that move affect the way you wrote? 

(Brían) Oh, God, it was, like, transformational for life. Like, we grew up in the countryside, outside a small town, so where we grew up was all rolling hills and woods, cows and farms... If you look at our four albums now, The 1st one, a lot of it was written in Carlo, it was written with Carlo stuff in there. 

(Diarmuid) It's quite forest-y. 

(Brían) It is very forest-y and we spent a lot of time in a forest that was near our house.. But then our 2nd album, Once we moved to Dublin, We came to accept traditional music into ourselves a lot more. In Carlow, where we grew up, [Traditional music] was more associated with the Irish brand of nationalism, which back then especially, it isn't necessarily right wing in any way. It’s actually very left-wing. But it still excludes certain kinds of people. It was associated with a kind of a cultural nationalism in a way. 

(Diarmuid) Yeah, which in and of itself, cultural nationalism, especially in a country that has been colonized, can be a cool thing. 

(Brían) Totally. But I think in terms of how we felt in those places, it didn't, didn't open up too many possibilities for us. But then when we moved to Dublin, we met this scene of anarchists and punks, people who had tattoos and piercings and wore black, but they still wanted to sit there and sing ballads. It opened up a lot more imagination. 

(Diarmuid) I think the focus was also on the songs, and often on unaccompanied singing, in a way that we hadn't encountered as much growing up in Carlow, where it was more about playing fast tunes. 

(Brían) So it was kind of transformational. That experience of meeting those people was super powerful and transformational. This 4th Album is very much set in Dublin. We tried to make it as realistic and as real and as urban as possible. We wanted to feel like our lives did, we didn't want it to be pastoral. 

(Diarmuid) And it's not about trying to write ‘urban’ themed songs. It's just writing honest songs about our life, our lives. (Brían) So, yeah, that's a great question. and it's something that I love to think about, a sense of place and a sense of identity are two of the most powerful things for making stuff, because it's the context that you make it in and how it makes you feel. 

That part you just mentioned about cultural nationalism living in a colonized country like Ireland, and how that doesn’t quite map left-wing-right-wing the way we might expect in the states, I think that’s something some Americans my age are becoming aware of with Kneecap being so big right now, but I’m sure it’s still hard for us to grasp that particular history. 

(Brían) It’s complicated. Like, It's unimaginable for a lot of Americans to think of supporting Palestine. I see a Palestinian flag next to an Irish flag up there. [hanging in the Green room of the Cedar] It's unimaginable for a lot of Americans to imagine solidarity with Palestine without that somehow immediately having to mean anti-Semitism. In Ireland it just doesn't. 

(Diarmuid) Yeah, It's absolutely not about being against Jewish people. It's just about standing with another nation that is colonized, and in this case, it happens to be colonized by the state of Israel. 

(Brían)And we happen to share some history with Palestine as well. It goes back 100 years 

(Diarmuid) The British initially when they colonized Palestine, they sent over the same army that they had used to arrest the Irish. 

(Brían) The same guys who sewed the chaos that led to the Civil War in Ireland in the 20s went directly to Palestine to do the same. So that's one thing in particular that maybe people are becoming more aware of, especially because of Kneecap. But that's not to say that right wing nationalism, in the kind of fascist sense, isn't growing in Ireland. It is. There's a lot of chaos being seeded by foreign bad actors. 

(Diarmuid) Like, people from here [the US] and from the UK. It's actually MAGA agitators online who are trying to spread those ideologies in Ireland. Like, my wife is Muslim and [recently] we were at an Eid celebration. We were walking into this celebration, we'd gone every year, it's like a big gathering, you know? It's lovely, everyone gets dressed up in their nicest clothes and all the kids are there, and it's this lovely sweet holiday event. And this was the first time that we've ever seen a protest out the front of the building, 

(Brían) They had Make Ireland Great Again hats 

(Diarmuid) Yeah, these green, Make Ireland Great Again hats. So it's just this complete facsimile, it's a carbon copy of this thing that is happening here [US] and in the UK. It's all just about divide and conquer. 

(Brían) ...They're starting to believe in ideas of the great replacement theory when in reality, their culture is being replaced by consumerism, rampant consumerism. It has nothing to do with a small number of immigrants. 

(Diarmuid) It really doesn't. 

You both speak so eloquently about that, Thank you. I’m going to change topics completely now. When I was delving through your Instagram, I was amazed at all the boat content. 

(Diarmuid) Yeaaaah ! 

Can I hear about how your boat tour started? 

(Diarmuid) Well, it was mid-pandemic, and our friend Miles O'Reilly, the filmmaker, had this pipe dream that he wanted to do with some band, that he wanted to go on a tour on a barge and film the whole thing. 

(Brain) We did the tour of the islands as well. 

(Diarmuid) We had done this island tour with him [previously] which was also an alternative style of touring. We visited islands off the coast of Ireland, played gigs in places where they wouldn't normally be on regular touring routes because they're quite small communities. We had done that already. So the barge idea came up again during the pandemic as something that we could do and remain socially distanced from people., and do outdoor events. And so we made a funding application. The whole thing was funded, so we weren't relying on ticket sales. We rented 2 barges and we had the best time ever. 

(Brían) We [spent] 6 weeks living on a boat and by the end of it, we became actually pretty skilled at handling [the barge]because we did more miles than most. There are about a 1000 people that live on barges in Ireland on the canal system, but most of them don't move that often. Because we spent 6 weeks constantly moving and maneuvering we got pretty good at it, and the people who look after the waterways, the lockkeepers, got to know us. We actually ended up having to rescue a couple on some boat, and we had a few situations (laughs) where we got called upon. It was like being a superhero in slow motion. The guy rang up being like can you get up to Carlo as quick as possible? I need you up at the bridge. There's this boat, it's just gotten stuck under the bridge. 

(Diarmuid) Then we're like, We're on our way. As fast as we can. It was, like, four miles an hour. Yeah. So, yeah, it was funny. It was, it was a dream. It was amazing. 

Have you guys ever heard the story of Pete Seeger in the early '70s, when he built a wooden yacht on the Hudson River here? He would sail it up and down the river and around New England, kinda kidnapping his musician friends and just doing shows around there. 

(Diarmuid) Cool, What a legend.

You're part of a long history of folk singers on boats. 

(Brían) Good footsteps to follow, love Pete Seeger. And Peggy. And Mike, all of the Seegers. Yeah, yeah. We dug, like, deep into that when we were teenagers. 

That's so lovely. Does it feel different doing your songs here in America for American crowds, as opposed to back home in Ireland? 

(Diarmuid) Everywhere that you do them is different, We play all over Europe, as well.. And it kind of varies from town to town. You can tell when an audience is really listening to the text of your song, and sometimes people will respond to individual lines in a lovely way. That’s a thing that happens over here, and I love that. I guess people are primed for it because there's a lot of songwriting here. There's a lot of, like narrative country music, 

(Brían) It’s such an American tradition. The folk song, sung by somebody with a guitar, It's such an American thing and people listen to it and read it almost, so they really engage with the lyrics. It helps a lot. The crowds are really casual and fun in America in general. 

(Diarmuid) In Ireland, people will get our direct references without any need for any further explanation. That's one thing, they already have a lot of the context. We need to do much less explaining. That doesn't necessarily mean that they are better at understanding the songs, because I think the songs just mean different things in different places. And then European crowds, you have to recognize sometimes you're playing to crowds [where] maybe English isn't their 1st language, and so they're having an experience that we've had all our lives as well, listening to music from other places. Which I've always loved, listening to music in languages I don't understand. I always loved it, but it's a very different kind of experience. 

(Brían) It’s a texture.

(Diarmuid) They're just experiencing the atmosphere. And that's also lovely, you know? 

That’s cool to hear. For my last question, since I’m here with college radio I wanted to ask, is college radio a thing in Ireland? 

(Diarmuid) No, It’s not, but I really like that it is a thing here. We’ve had a couple of requests for college radio interviews in the times that we’ve been [In the U.S.] we always accept them when we can, It’s obviously something that’s important to people here.

(Brían) I studied radio in college, that was my major. There was a little station we would run for a week a year, and I’d do whatever I could to put together these programs with as much live music involved, and interviews, but then it was a tiny listenership, and nowhere near as well supported as I think [college radio] is over here. I think it’s an amazing thing. I love radio as a medium.

Interview: Elvy Ruchie