RUNA
Last week’s snowstorm temporarily put a crimp in their plans to travel to Cape May to record their fourth CD, but when the members of RUNA, the Philadelphia-based Celtic band, finally got there, they had to kick themselves into gear again.
They got some help. On Saturday, they learned that they had won two awards from the Irish Music Association—top group and top traditional group in a pub, festival, concert, beating out the likes of Solas, Lunasa, Altan, and popular local band, Burning Bridget Cleary.
“We were thrilled just to be among the other groups that were nominated,” said lead singer, Shannon Lambert-Ryan. “This was just wildly exciting. We were kick-started for the week.”
It was validation for a band that’s never been easy to slide into a specific niche that it’s a player on the Irish music scene. As one critic put it, “RUNA sounds like no one else,” which is both a blessing and a curse.
“We describe ourselves as Celtic roots music,” explains Lambert-Ryan. “We took a little while to get there in terms of figuring out our brand. We used to describe it as contemporary Celtic music but we were concerned that that connoted Celtic rock or new age sound which we’re not. But we’re not strictly traditional either. We’re somewhere in between niches,” she says laughing.
Blame it on–or credit it to– the widely differing musical styles and background of the band members. “Each of us bring something different and that keeps it balanced,” says Lambert-Ryan, who grew up as a step-dancer in the Philadelphia area, and majored in classical singing and acting. (She’s worked on several M. Night Shyamalan films.)
At the Philly Folk Festival in 2006, she met Dublin-born guitarist Fionan de Barra and, around the same time, percussionist Cheryl Prashker, a Canadian-born classically trained drummer who played the same folk scene as Lambert-Ryan and de Barra, who still lived in Ireland at the time. “I kept in touch with Fionan for a year and a half, then went to Dublin to work on an album with him and the rest is history between the two of us,” says Lambert-Ryan. They were married in 2009 and now live in the Philadelphia area. In addition to his work with RUNA, de Barra also performs with Clannad’s Moya Brennan.
When they decided to perform, they asked Prashker to join them. “After the first time we played together, we all looked at each other said, ‘Well, we need to do a whole lot more of that,’” recalls Lambert-Ryan. And RUNA was born.
And reborn. Eventually, fiddler Tomoko Amura joined them, bringing her bent for the classical and jazz to the mix.
And now, with Amura off pursuing a jazz career, born again. Recently, singer-dancer-multi-instrumentalist Dave Curley from Slide—incidentally, the group to which Fionan’s brother, Eamonn belongs—became part of RUNA, as has Maggie Estes who, despite a freshly minted college degree, is an in-demand bluegrass fiddler from Kentucky and Nashville.
“We met Maggie in Nashville where Fionan and I work frequently with Keith and Krystin Getty, Christian singers from Belfast originally. Fionan tours with and writes for them regularly. She’s one of those sunshiney bubbly people you’d love to work with and she is just spectacular,” says Lambert-Ryan. She blew them away regularly during this past week’s recording. “She’s a lot younger than we are, but she has that kind of chutzpah that just says, ‘Let’s go!’”
So, layered on the strong percussive jazzy sound that both Prashker and Fionan bring to RUNA, Lambert-Ryan’s actor’s penchant for song-stories , and Curley’s eclectic talents (including step-dancing, which Lambert-Ryan says has “kicked my butt into gear” to resume dancing), will be a touch of bluegrass on their next offering, which should be finished in time for the summer festival season.
“Bluegrass is similar in some ways to traditional Irish and Scottish music, but different in other ways. Being able to delve in and out of different genres makes the music exciting for us—it means we don’t have to stay in one ‘pocket’ or genre,” she says.
Touring takes RUNA all over the country, but they have two shows coming up in the Philadelphia area. They’ll be playing at the Mid-Winter Scottish and Irish Festival in King of Prussia on Sunday, February 16, from 3 to 4 PM. And they’ll also be featured at a special St. Patrick’s Season Show at the Irish Center, 6815 Emlen Street, Philadelphia, on Sunday, March 9 at 7 PM.
It’s your chance to find out what makes them the top in Irish music.
