Dear listeners,
This year St. Patrick’s Day was on a Monday, a particularly cursed fate for a holiday associated with merriment. I propose extending the celebration all throughout the week — a feat of endurance that will require the proper soundtrack. Today, I offer you just that.
This playlist contains tracks from 11 very different artists from Ireland.* It features some interpretations of traditional Irish tunes from legends like the Pogues (I’ll get to their origins in a moment) and the Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem; a few superstars who put Irish rock on the global map in the 1980s and ’90s (U2 and the Cranberries); and some younger upstarts refreshing Irish sounds for a new generation (the imaginative post-punk group Fontaines D.C. and the raucous rap trio Kneecap, whose 2024 biopic I highly recommend).
Whether you’re playing this while sipping a pint of Guinness or trying to conjure that pub atmosphere within the secrecy of your headphones, I hope this playlist keeps you in the St. Patrick’s Day spirit all week (and maybe even all year) long.
Lots of fun at Finnegan’s wake,
Lindsay
*Before you email me about their exclusion, a friendly reminder that the Dropkick Murphys are from Massachusetts. As for Hozier, well … something tells me that there are at least a few other playlists out there where you can hear his music.
Listen along while you read.
1. U2: “I Will Follow”
We begin with a chiming missive from some of Ireland’s most famous musicians — back when they were just four unknown lads from Dublin. Written for Bono’s late mother, “I Will Follow” is the first track off U2’s 1980 debut album, “Boy,” and it features some novel ideas from the producer Steve Lillywhite, including heavy use of a glockenspiel and some unorthodox percussion instruments on the bridge. “Bono was breaking bottles in the back,” Lillywhite later recalled of the recording session, “and I had a push-bike upside down on its saddle, turning the wheels and running a knife along the spokes.”
2. Sinead O’Connor: “Mandinka”
Sinead O’Connor, also from Dublin, introduced her mighty voice and undaunted conviction to the world with her 1987 debut album, “The Lion and the Cobra.” Inspired by Alex Haley’s “Roots,” this ecstatic second single — which she sang in a star-making performance at the 1989 Grammys, with the Public Enemy logo drawn on her shaved head — was O’Connor’s gesture of solidarity with the formerly enslaved Mandinka people of West Africa.
3. Thin Lizzy: “Jailbreak”
“Tonight there’s gonna be a jailbreak,” warns Phil Lynott — the unofficial poet laureate of Irish hard rock — on this anthemic title track from Thin Lizzy’s classic, riff-packed 1976 album. Is that why the boys were back in town?!
4. The Pogues: “Dirty Old Town”
Though the Pogues were technically from London, they carried the torch of Celtic punk so proudly that I’m not going to gatekeep and say they’re not an Irish band. (Shane MacGowan lived in Ireland as a child, anyway, and wrote many of his best songs about Irish emigrants.) The Pogues recorded this Irish classic — written in 1949 by Ewan MacColl and made famous in the early 1960s by the folk revival group the Dubliners — for the 1985 album “Rum Sodomy & the Lash,” and it became one of the band’s signature songs. MacGowan’s vocal is at once sour and sweet, a perfect balance for a song about a love-hate relationship with your hometown.
5. Fontaines D.C.: “Jackie Down the Line”
The Irish rock band Fontaines D.C. had a breakout year in 2024, thanks to its acclaimed album “Romance.” This moody tune from the 2022 release “Skinty Fia” can be interpreted as a poetic meditation on the relationship between Ireland and England. “The more I listen to it, the more it’s about Irishness surviving in England,” the frontman Grian Chatten once told Steve Lamacq of the BBC. “Or not even just Irishness in England but it’s about a cultural identity, or some kind of identity, surviving in another place.”
6. The Cranberries: “Zombie”
Rumbling and primal, the hardest rocking hit by the Cranberries (a group formed in Limerick) was inspired by two I.R.A. bombings in Warrington, England, that killed two children in 1993. The Cranberries had previously been known for the softer sound heard on singles like “Linger” and “Dreams,” but the vocalist and songwriter Dolores O’Riordan insisted that this one required something else. “She was adamant how she wanted more distortion pedals on the guitars and for me to hit the drums harder than usual,” the group’s drummer Fergal Lawler once recalled. “But she was absolutely right, because ‘Zombie’ was such an angry song.” In 2019, a year after O’Riordan’s death, the “Zombie” music video became the first by an Irish band to hit one billion views on YouTube.
7. Kneecap: “Sick in the Head”
Kneecap is a hip-hop trio that makes incendiary and sometimes humorous music that reflects the experiences of the post-Troubles generation in Northern Ireland. Last year, its three members starred alongside Michael Fassbender in a wildly entertaining (and only semi-fictionalized) biopic that dramatized Kneecap’s rise to fame (or perhaps more accurately, infamy). This track from the 2024 album “Fine Art” is indicative of the group’s sound, which blends English- and Irish-language lyrics — a provocation in a time when the Irish language has been declared “endangered.”
8. The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem: “Finnegan’s Wake”
The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem emigrated from Ireland to the United States after World War II and eventually became key figures in the Greenwich Village folk scene, usually appearing clad in their Aran jumpers. (Bob Dylan was a huge fan.) The Clancy Brothers and Makem were known for their spirited arrangements of traditional Irish tunes, like this classic, darkly comic ballad about the resurrection of Tim Finnegan — a story that also inspired James Joyce.
9. Enya: “The Celts”
This ethereal early composition by Enya — Ireland’s best-selling solo artist of all time — served as the theme song to the popular 1987 BBC documentary series “The Celts: Rich Traditions and Ancient Myths.” That same year, it also appeared on Enya’s self-titled debut solo album, which was reissued in 1992 and retitled “The Celts” following the commercial success of her next two releases.
10. My Bloody Valentine: “Sometimes”
When they were adolescents, Kevin Shields and Colm O’Ciosoig, the two Irish members of the famed shoegaze band My Bloody Valentine, met — amazingly — at a South Dublin karate tournament. (They were spectators, Shields has clarified, not participants.) The band formed in Dublin in 1983 before relocating to London two years later, where it would eventually record its 1991 masterpiece “Loveless,” on which this hazy, dreamlike song appears.
11. Van Morrison: “Fair Play”
Finally, let’s go out with a track from what is arguably Van Morrison’s most underrated album, and almost certainly his most Irish: the 1974 diamond-in-the-rough “Veedon Fleece.” The title and first lyric of this laid-back opening track come from an Irish saying, “fair play to you,” which serves as a kind of humble nod to a friend. Morrison wrote most of the album, including this song, on a 1973 visit to Ireland — the first time he’d been back to his home country after becoming a star abroad. Its soft, jazzy sound is especially connected to Celtic folk. Sinead O’Connor was a great admirer of the album. She once called it “the most obvious album he’s ever done about Ireland,” adding, reverentially, “‘Veedon Fleece’ is the only thing I listen to just before I go onstage.”
The Amplifier Playlist
“11 Songs to Keep St. Patrick’s Day Going” track list
Track 1: U2, “I Will Follow”
Track 2: Sinead O’Connor, “Mandinka”
Track 3: Thin Lizzy, “Jailbreak”
Track 4: The Pogues, “Dirty Old Town”
Track 5: Fontaines D.C., “Jackie Down the Line”
Track 6: The Cranberries, “Zombie”
Track 7: Kneecap, “Sick in the Head”
Track 8: The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem, “Finnegan’s Wake”
Track 9: Enya, “The Celts”
Track 10: My Bloody Valentine, “Sometimes”
Track 11: Van Morrison, “Fair Play”
The post 11 Songs to Keep St. Patrick’s Day Going appeared first on New York Times.
