The Secret to Learning Irish Tunes by Ear

Disclaimer: I’m not really someone who learns tunes 100% by ear. What I do is more like memorize and visualize the tune. I like to have both an audio play along track and matching sheet music or tab handy. It helps me to “see” the tune written out measure by measure. I can’t resist the urge to cheat and look at the music. That said, I do have advice about learning a tune by ear that has worked for me before. And that advice is…

Write it yourself!

If you’ve ever written a melody of your own before this should be fairly easy for you. If you’ve never tried to write your own tune before, then this can be a start. When writing an Irish tune that already exists a lot of the work is already done for you. You don’t have to write Silver Spear, Out on the Ocean, or Boys of Bluehill completely from scratch. You just have to write a tune that sounds exactly like the one you are trying to write! Or as close to it as you can get at this moment in time*.

The first step is to listen to the tune you want to learn until you can hear it in your head. Find a YouTube video or some other simple source that sounds like the way they play it at your local session. For the purposes of this exercise, once you can hear it in your head the distinction between a tune you are composing vs. a tune that already exists is insignificant. 

Take what you are hearing in your head and find those notes on your instrument. I recommend knowing the names of the notes you are playing and writing them down. At least know where then notes D, E, F#, G, A, B, C and C# are. You don’t have to write this in sheet music format. You can do it in whatever shorthand method works for you. You can also skip writing it out altogether and keep it entirely aural. I happen to like writing it out so that I can put the notes into some sort of context. 

Have the recording on loop and play along with it. Play the rhythm even if you can’t play the notes. Imagine that the tune is a wheel that’s spinning and if you get off the tune doesn’t stop. It just keeps on spinning until you jump on again. Or imagine that it’s a block of wood and you are chipping away until you have carved something that looks like an approximation of the original. At first you might only get 10% of the notes correct and you have to fudge the other 90%. If you stay on the wheel and slowly chip away, you’ll start to connect more dots and the notes or phrases that you land on become like little stepping stones to get across the pond without falling in.

Things to listen for and make note of

How many parts does the tune have? Plenty of Irish tunes have just two parts: an A part and a B part each played twice through AA/BB. However, sometimes there are three or even four parts. Or other times it is just a two part AA/BB tune but the second time through the B-part maybe you play a different ending than the first time through the B-part. Like AA/B1B2.

Where is the tonal center? AKA where does it want to resolve to? Irish session tunes tend to have tonal centers resolving to the notes D, G, A or E and there are certain sounds these keys or modes make that distinguishes one from the other. 

Does it have a C natural or a C sharp note? Assuming that your melody has one of these notes, are you hearing a C natural or a C sharp? If this distinction becomes significant to you, then it can act as a shortcut that helps other connections fall into place. 

Does the B-part go higher? Quite often the B-part of a tune will be in a higher octave, or at least use some higher notes than the A-part did. After a while you can almost guess where a tune is going to go.

Are there any patterns or scalar things that you notice? Being able to recognize things like this can really help with your ear learning. I don’t really know the musical term for it, but for example a tune might be doing something over an A-minor arpeggio for a measure and then do the same type of pattern but over a G-major arpeggio for the next measure. Or there might be a scalar phrase that starts on a G. Then that phrase gets repeated starting on an F# note. Then it repeats again starting on E note. Stuff like that.

Are there any repeated sections? It’s not unusual for the B-part of an Irish tune to re-use portions of or even half of the A-part. So if you’ve learned the A-part, you sometimes have a head start on learning the B-part because something you already went over is going to be re-used in the B-part.

Grade Yourself

Give yourself 30 minutes to write the tune. After you’ve “written” the tune, compare what you have to an actual transcription of the tune you were trying to play. What did you get right? What did you get wrong? For the parts that you got completely wrong, could you already tell that you were unclear about that part or did you think you had it right? Comparing your version to the original and making note of where you were off vs. where you were on track can help so that next time you get even closer to the actual notes.

*On the bright side, if you are really, really bad at transcribing what you hear then the worst thing that happens is you accidentally write an original tune! 

Interview with Myself

 When did you start playing music?

I started playing music in 2006 at the age of 32 after someone suggested that I should play banjo. After a day of researching what type of banjo to get I chose the tenor banjo.

Why did you wait until you were in your 30’s before taking up an instrument?

I never wanted to play a musical instrument as a kid or as a teenager or even in my 20’s. I don’t think it ever crossed my mind. I played golf and baseball. Later on, when I was old enough to be really into music, the idea of playing an instrument seemed out of reach because it was something your idols such as Jerry Garcia did. Not something that I myself could do. In 2004 and 2005 I went to Ireland and that sort of primed the pump. Witnessing regular people sitting around a table playing music in pubs - not up on a stage as a performance - probably broke the ice a little bit. By the spring of 2006 I guess I was ready and just needed a little nudge from a stranger. My mom taught herself how to play piano when she was in her late 40’s or early 50’s so that may have been a subliminal inspiration.

Why did you choose tenor banjo?

I’m left-handed. During that day of research in May 2006 I learned that you could buy a vintage tenor banjo and have it set up left-handed. As opposed to a 5-string banjo which would have to be purpose-built to be lefty. So that was a big factor. That, and thinking that the tenor banjo would be easier. I also found out that the tenor banjo is used in Ireland and that it can be tuned like a mandolin and that people used picks/plectrums rather than their fingers. I had no interest in playing the obvious instruments - guitar or mandolin - because the bar was too high. Tenor banjo felt obscure which appealed to me, and I realized that learning tenor banjo was kind of like learning two instruments in one, because I could later switch to mandolin if I wanted to.

Did you take any lessons starting out?

Yes I found two local teachers right away - Josh Bearman of the band Special Ed and the Shortbus in Richmond, VA and Cleek Schrey who was living in Charlottesville at the time. Josh specialized in old-timey stringband music and primarily taught clawhammer banjo, guitar, and mandolin. I was probably his only tenor banjo student. I was starting from scratch so he showed me the basics of music - scales, how to read mandolin tab, chords. I didn’t really have anything in mind but I was really interested in theory. He would write out Arkansas Traveler for me and then the next week I would come back wanting to learn a Meat Puppets or Neil Young song. It was all over the place. 

Cleek, on the other hand, was an expert in Irish traditional music and assumed that I wanted to learn Irish tenor banjo, so that’s what he showed me. Cleek is known as a fiddler so most people didn’t know he even had a tenor banjo but he did. Cleek’s lessons were focused exclusively on Irish music. He would load me up with Irish trad CDs to take home and make copies of. It was as fundamental as how to hold the pick and the difference between a jig and a reel. I wasn't a very good student.

When did you first hear Irish music?

In the fall of 2004 my wife and I spent a week in Ireland on vacation. We traveled around County Clare and County Galway, but spent the first and last nights of our trip in Doolin. We happened to land in Doolin on the night that fiddler Yvonne Casey was doing the release party for her self-titled debut CD at McGann’s pub. That was my first real exposure to Irish music and it was one of the peak experiences of my life. Eoin O’Neill and Quentin Cooper were there along with James Cullinan. I can’t remember who else. Maybe Kevin Griffin on banjo. I didn't know who any of these people were at the time but I later bought every CD I could find featuring either Yvonne, Quentin, Eoin or Kevin Griffin! These local County Clare musicians were the stars of Irish music as far as I was concerned.

Do you play any other instruments?

I don’t really play any instruments, per se, so yes and no. I think of what I do as playing melodies on an instrument. I don’t have an ear for chords and I don’t enjoy singing songs or playing accompaniment or soloing. I kind of just enjoy playing the tune so any instrument I’ve ever had that’s all I did was play melodies. I have a guitar - a six-string Vagabond travel guitar - that I haven’t played in a while but during the pandemic I taught myself how to play melodies on it by tuning it in all 4ths. I also went through a glockenspiel > xylophone > marimba phase. I didn’t really learn how to play mallet instruments properly, I just learned how to find melodies on the layout of the bars/tone plates. I might be getting a hammered mbira in 2025.

Do you ever write your own music?

I went through a phase of writing my own melodies as a creative outlet. Starting in June of 2017 I gave myself the task of writing a tune a week for a year. I never missed a deadline and actually kept this up for three years straight. These weren’t tunes in any style. And they weren’t entirely original. For example, I might hear a snippet of melody in an old field recording from South America and write an A part based on that. Then I might hear a snippet of melody 20 minutes into a Phish Chalkdust Torture jam and write a B part to the tune based on that. I wasn’t transcribing these note-for-note because I’m not capable of doing that. But I was using my ear to transcribe what I thought I was hearing and make sense of it as conforming to a scale or mode, and then transposing it into a tune of my own. The more wrong I got it the more original it was. This definitely was good ear training if nothing else because I had no music to look at when “writing” these tunes.

What kind of music did you listen to growing up?

When I first got my driver’s license and had a paycheck to burn I would spend it on cassette tapes. This was 1990 or ‘91 just before CDs became a thing but after vinyl had gone out of fashion. I was really into 60’s folk and folk-rock and early 70’s singer-songwriter stuff. Some of my first cassettes would have been Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, The Byrds, Crosby Stills and Nash, Woody Guthrie, Janis Joplin, James Taylor, Eric Clapton and John Prine. Black Sabbath and Lynyrd Skynyrd too! The only tapes I had by current bands of the time were Against the Grain by Bad Religion and Bloodletting by Concrete Blonde.

The Grateful Dead would have also been in my purview but didn’t stand out from the pack just yet. However, when Eric Clapton’s Unplugged came out, a record store clerk turned me on to Reckoning by the Grateful Dead, their all-acoustic live album from 1980. That is the one that did it and then I was off to the races buying every Grateful Dead and Grateful-Dead related CD there was like Jerry Garcia Band, Garcia/Grisman, Kingfish, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, Hot Tuna and Old and In the Way. This deep-dive led me backwards and sideways to all kinds of acoustic, roots-based, folk, blues, stringband, and bluegrass music such as New Grass Revival, the Red Clay Ramblers, Norman Blake, Hot Rize, Cephas and Wiggins, and John Hartford. Lots of stuff on Rounder and Flying Fish records. I soon found Phish and now I had a contemporary band to obsess over as well as other mid-90’s jambands like Leftover Salmon, and .moe. 

Do you have any favorite music books?

Improvise for Real by David Reed. Helped me better understand modes and their relationship to the major scale, such as Dorian and Mixolydian. Also where I learned how to write out melodies by scale numbers 1 through 7, similar to Chinese jianpu.

The Pattern System for the Bass Player by Ariane Cap. Taught me the importance of proper finger technique, and where notes on the fretboard fall in relation to the major scale.

Best Practice by Judy Minot. Designed with the adult learner in mind.

Musical Scales of the World by Michael Hewitt. Reinforced how almost everything can be seen in comparison to the major scale.

Do you have any musical influences?

Thank you for asking. I wish I could say that I do, but as an adult learner who memorizes Irish tunes from a combination of sheet music and play-along tracks, the closest thing I have to an influence is the ice cream truck version of Turkey in the Straw!

My favorite musician of all time is Jerry Garcia. He's a very expressive, very musical player with a gift for melody. Listen to how to how he can go several times through and around on a traditional song like Peggy-O. That's likely where I got my initial interest in plucking melodies from.

The band I've seen the most and listened to the most in my life is Phish. If I take anything away from that which could pertain to Irish music, it is the way the four band members of Phish listen so attentively to one another in a live setting. At any moment, all four members are responding and I think that's a good characteristic to have.

Irish tenor banjo tends to be flashy, and I shy away from that. If I was going to be influenced by actual players of the instrument I play in the style of music that I play, it would be by the sensitive, more subdued players such as Angelina Carberry, Mick O'Connor, Paddy "Paahto" Cummins, and Brian Fitzgerald. Unfortunately, I don't know how much I've taken the time to actually approach it this way though.

Oddly enough, golf is another influence. Sure there are the Tiger Woods and Annika Sörenstams of the world, but the average golfer is struggling to break 90, right? You go out and play bogey-golf on the weekends with your friends. You might have the occasional par or birdie, but mostly it's bogeys, double bogeys or worse. But you still have fun as an amateur hobbyist. Nobody is watching you on TV or asking for your autograph. You're still a golfer though. That may be one of the biggest influences when compared to the community aspect of playing Irish trad music. 

What are you working on now?

Right now, I’m still focusing almost exclusively on familiarizing myself with the tunes played in Irish sessions. Every single day there’s a new tune to learn. I’ve put ornamentation on the back burner, but occasionally I’ll practice triplets and double stops or other variations. 

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Best Albums of 2024

I stayed in my comfort zone during 2024. Without really being in search of new music, I let it come to me. These were my favorites. 

Woodland by Gillian Welch & David Rawlings. Gillian & Dave take turns singing lead vocals in what is easily the best album of 2024!


Evolve by Phish. Somehow at 40 years into their career Phish keeps climbing to higher peaks with a studio release that helps demonstrate just how great their post-pandemic work has been.


Tension by Mulatu Astatke & Hoodna Orchestra. Ethiopian jazz meets exotica in a style I like to refer to as “elevated elevator” music.


Hydra by Nuala Kennedy & Eamon O’Leary. Two of the best vocalists and instrumentalists in Irish music come together for a release that will stand the test of time.


Wild Rose of Morning by Andrew Marlin, Christian Sedelmyer, and Jordan Tice. This Andrew Marlin led project gets a big kudos for being able to effortlessly pull off both the O’Carolan piece Si Bheag Si Mhor and a cover of Norman Blake’s Billy Gray.


Atriums by Trey Anastasio. Time goes out the window as you listen to this long form piece of ambient music. Simply amazing.


Trail of Flowers by Sierra Ferrell. With lyrics such as “I could break a hundred down at the Dollar Bill Bar”, what’s not to like?


When I’m Called by Jake Xerxes Fussell. Album number five from this song catcher continues the trend of excellence. If you haven’t heard Jake Xerxes Fussell, I urge you to check him out. All of his stuff is great!


Epiphany: Irish Traditional Music on the Tenor Banjo by Elaine Reilly. As an amateur Irish tenor banjo player, I’m required to include this marvelous debut album by Elaine Reilly. But it's not without merit. Forgoing the technical pyrotechnics that some whizz kids might lean toward, Reilly focuses on taste, tone and joy in a mature style reminiscent of Angelina Carberry and John Carty. 


Highway Prayers by Billy Strings. Billy Strings’ creativity and musical drive are unparalleled. His once-in-a-generation talent is on full display with Highway Prayers.


Cuimhne Ghlinn: Explorations in Irish Music for Pedal Steel Guitar by David Murphy. Irish pedal steel guitarist David Murphy makes beautiful use of a non-traditional instrument that is actually perfectly suited for the playing of slow airs and harp tunes. For fans of Susan Alcorn.

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First 30 Days in Oregon - Top Things Done

Take a Trip to the Coast

Drove out to Tillamook and then went up the coast through Garibaldi, Rockaway Beach, Manzanita, and Cannon Beach on the way to Ecola State Park. Took in the views there and did a 3 mile loop hike. 

Ecola State Park

Go See Live Music

Saw a Jerry Garcia Band style cover band called Rhapsody in Red at the Laurelthirst Public House and the Phish cover band Shafty at The Get Down.

Attend a Professional Sports Game

Went to a Hillsboro Hops baseball game (High-A affiliate of the Arizona Diamondbacks) and also rooted for the Portland Thorns at Providence Park (National Women's Soccer League, NWSL).

Hillsboro Hops game

Sample Nearby Breweries

There are three breweries within walking distance: Three Mugs, Vertigo, and Mazama. It took less than a week to sample each of them!

Take the Train (light rail system)

The nearby Orenco MAX station makes it easy to hop on and go either west toward the actual town of Hillsboro or east to Beaverton downtown. Both of which are worthy destinations. Or take it farther east into the wilds of Portland!

Explore Local Parks

Have walked through Orenco Woods Nature Park, Noble Woods Park, Jenkins Estate Park, and Rood Bridge Park. All are close by. The best by far though has been Hoyt Arboretum in Portland. With 12 miles of beautiful trails this is a place I'll be returning to a lot.

Ride My Bike on the Rock Creek Trail

My bike arrived three weeks after I did, thanks to slow cross-country movers, but within time for me to ride it on the Rock Creek Trail during my first month in Oregon. The ride from my door to my sister-in-law's house is 4.5 miles, mostly along this paved path with a few road crossings along the way. There are a couple hills each direction that present a challenge for my single-speed, coaster brake bicycle, but so far I've been able to handle it.

Make it to Tomorrow's Verse, Portland's Phish-themed Brewery

Made it there once during the first 30 days. It was pretty cool. They had an acoustic duo playing so it was almost like a listening-room atmosphere that night. I'll be going back to watch some Phish summer tour 2024 webcasts for sure.

Check out the Nearby Restaurants

Let's see, within walking distance there's a Thai restaurant, a pizza place, a burger place, an awesome French-style bakery open for breakfast and lunch, a coffee shop that's open long hours, a neighborhood steakhouse, a sit-down Indian restaurant, a Lebanese eatery, a Japanese sushi and sake bar, and a Vietnamese pho house. Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. I've been to five of these so far. And that's not even counting the other restaurants you can quickly get to using public transportation.

Scope Out Portland

We've been to the Laurelhurst, Bucktown, St. Johns and Beaumont-Wiltshire neighborhoods so far. Next on the list is the Mississippi Avenue District and the Hawthorne District. Find a city, find yourself a city to live in!

It's not supposed to be this hot!

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Cross Country Drive - Towns/Cities along the way

We recently did a cross country drive from Virginia to Oregon. We stayed approximately 16 hours in each of the following locations, half of which was spent sleeping. So here are some very superficial first impressions based on notes I took along the way.

Yellow Springs, Ohio

As if transient artisan hippie tailgate vendors from the Grateful Dead Shakedown Street matured and got together to form a town based on agreeable, utopian ideals. Very gay-friendly, Black-friendly, and welcoming overall. Surely an anomaly in Ohio. With many trails converging upon the town center and a bohemian aura, this would make a good place to live. Safe, pleasant residential streets for walking. Great for bicycles and for raising a kid. It might get a little boring in the long run. You could easily think you were in small-town Vermont instead of small-town Ohio.

Yellow Springs, OH

Davenport, Iowa

Blue collar, gritty and proud. Down to earth. No nonsense. Identity bound by being on the Iowa side of the Mississippi river. Slightly in decline? With a nice riverside walkway/bike path. It was VERY windy when we were there which may have influenced my perception. Davenport has an edge to it. Not much else to say.

Davenport, IA

Sioux Falls, South Dakota

Bigger and more cosmopolitan than you might think. Artsier than you might think. Lots of sculpture everywhere. Could be Anywhere, USA except for the river that runs right through the city center. Everything felt new as if the whole place received a face lift over the last 20 years as the population has boomed. Definitely a city on the way up. Started to see indigenous people as part of the demographic makeup. There was a lovely greenway from our Air BnB to downtown. And of course the Falls by which Sioux Falls gets its name were stunning! They've built a tremendous park around the Falls that we visited on a glorious morning. The Porter Sculpture Park about 30 miles west of the city is one of the best places I have ever been! 

Sioux Falls, SD

Deadwood, South Dakota

Situated in the mountains all the way across the state from Sioux Falls, you know that you're in "The West" by the time you reach Deadwood. We were there on a weekend when a rodeo and a sold out country music concert were happening in this little mountain town, so it was quite crowded at first. Later there was a mid-evening lull when most of the crowd went to either the rodeo or the concert. In Deadwood there are lots of saloons to go drinking in and see cowboys, but not that many places for eating anything beyond bar food. They lean into the Wild West, Wild Bill Hickok theme with re-enactments designed for tourists happening at a couple different locations. It's a very music oriented town with most bars playing a mix centered around Bocephus and Merle Haggard (or live musicians playing the same), which I was fine with. There's an awesome cemetery on a hill overlooking the town where Wild Bill and Calamity Jane are resting.

Deadwood, SD

Livingston, Montana

This was a quirky town that reminded me of Nederland, Colorado or Black Mountain, North Carolina. Very vibey with mountain vistas everywhere you look. Apparently it can very often be very windy here, but we caught it on a (somewhat rainy but) non-windy day. The locals (both humans and dogs) are friendly and engaging. I got the feeling that we could just live here and fit right in, although I am definitely not as rugged as the Montana people tend to be. Livingston had a cool town-center springing off of both Main Street and Park Street. A great spot!

Livingston, MT

Sandpoint, Idaho

Pedestrian-oriented, dog-friendly and on beautiful Lake Pend Oreille, Sandpoint has everything you might want from a small municipality. Second only to Yellow Springs for town most likely to see a person with dreadlocks. Or maybe first in that regard. We met some almost too-friendly locals who are more than happy to be your instant friend and/or guide or I don't know what. It seemed like a resort town where people with money from Spokane or Couer d'Alene are slightly at odds with those born and raised here. As a blow-in, I have nothing but positive things to say about Sandpoint. It would be a swell place to return to if the 7-hour drive from Oregon to there wasn't across such a dry, dusty, windy part of the country! 

Sandpoint, ID

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My Ten Favorite Songs

I created a Spotify playlist to listen to while driving across the country from Virginia to Oregon. I don't know how many songs it has on it, but the playlist is over 38 hours long! This large collection of favorite songs by my favorite artists got me to thinking about what my ten favorite songs might be. So I went through the playlist and jotted down the names of songs that I thought might be candidates for the top ten. This initial run-thru came out to over 30 songs. So then I whittled it away to these final ten.

Half Moon Rising by Yonder Mountain String Band, from the album Elevation.

Brown Eyed Women by The Grateful Dead. Pretty much any version, but I guess the Europe '72 version is the standard.

Windfall by Son Volt from the album Trace. It could have also been Tear Stained Eye from the same CD.

Tangled Up in Blue. This is a Bob Dylan song, but I'm specifically thinking of the Jerry Garcia Band version from the 1991 live album entitled Jerry Garcia Band.

Galway Girl by Steve Earle from the album Transcendental Blues. 

What Deaner was Talking About by Ween from the Ween album Chocolate and Cheese.

To Live is to Fly. This is a Townes Van Zandt song, but I'm thinking of the Cowboy Junkies cover of this song found on their Black Eyed Man CD.

Good Guys and Bad Guys by Camper Van Beethoven from the album Camper Van Beethoven.

Ginseng Sullivan. This is a Norman Blake song and I love Norman's version from his album Back Home in Sulphur Springs. Of equal status is the Tony Rice take found on Manzanita. However, I would be omitting a primary booster of this song if didn't give Mike Gordon from Phish credit. I first heard Phish do it on a bootleg CD of their 12/31/93 show from Worcester, MA. I was already familiar with Norman Blake's music at the time and this connection sealed the deal!

Paradise by John Prine from his album John Prine. Honorable mention to every single other song from that same LP!


I must also list these five runner ups: A Horse in the Country by Cowboy Junkies, Golden by My Morning Jacket, Just Before the Evening by Leftover Salmon (Drew Emmitt), Truck Stop Girl by Little Feat (Lowell George), Desolation Row by Bob Dylan (as played by the Grateful Dead with Bobby spewing out the lyrics!), and In Tall Buildings by John Hartford.

Back to the ten favorite...I didn’t want to repeat artists, however the Grateful Dead/Jerry Garcia could have easily had a couple more besides Brown Eyed Women. Ship of Fools or Mission in the Rain, for example. 

Lastly, my favorite band is Phish. Phish is known for jamming more than songwriting, so I didn't want to fluff the list or undermine its credibility by arbitrarily including a Phish song in my list of ten favorite songs. But it wouldn't have been arbitrary. Evening Song, Friday, and All of These Dreams were all strong contenders. Yes, even Friday! Last word.

The Five Oregon Jambands I'm Most Excited About Seeing

Before I list the five Oregon bands that I'm most excited about seeing, I'd like to list ten bands that I would have been excited about seeing almost 25 years ago.

In 1999 I moved from Richmond, VA to Longmont, CO. Longmont is near Boulder and also not far away from Denver or Fort Collins. Music was thriving in Colorado at that time, and I'm sure it still is. At any point during the year 2000, my list of ten favorite bands to see live would have likely been these ten acts:

Phish, moe., String Cheese Incident, Yonder Mountain String Band, Leftover Salmon, Dark Star Orchestra, Sound Tribe Sector 9 (or just Sector 9 back then), The Big Wu, Strangefolk, and Ween.

This is still a few years before I would learn about My Morning Jacket. Anyway, except for Ween this is a pretty jamband-centric list. Before long I ended up moving back to Virginia and have the spent the last 20+ years here.

Of the above mentioned groups, the only local-to-Colorado bands were Leftover Salmon, String Cheese Incident and Yonder Mountain String Band, with YMSB being the most local of the three. When I first began seeing the Jeff Austin-led Yonder in October 1999, the jamgrass quartet was only about a year old and still playing small local venues such as Wolf Tongue in Nederland, Mountain Sun in Boulder, and Oskar Blues in Lyons. Good times. 

Now it's now all over again, and with a move to the PDX metro area just a few weeks away, these are the five young Oregon bands I am most excited about seeing!:

Spunj - To me Spunj sounds like they are at Eggy or Magic Beans level. Maybe even better! Spunj kicks ass and I can't wait to see them live.

Bodhi Mojo - Earthy and hippie with an emphasis on song structure. Their annual campout festival looks great!

Yak Attack - Instrumental organic jam. Might take me back to the days of seeing Sector 9 at Tulagi in Boulder.

Lost Ox - Maybe the most psychedelic of this bunch.

Shafty - Portland's own Phish cover band.

These five are all different breeds of jambands, and most seem to embrace that identity. Spunj is actually from Eugene but I'm willing to make an overnight out of it if necessary. 

Things are different now than they were 25 years ago. For one thing I'm 50 years old and much less likely to stay out late on a weeknight, much less a weekend. A couple beers at a walking distance from home brewery and in bed by 9pm is more my style now. But I'm hoping to find some of that same youthful energy that I had back in Colorado all those years ago so that I can check out these bands in their natural environments. 

Being near Portland will also offer the opportunity to see touring acts in a brand new setting. For example, Jake Xerxes Fussell at Mississippi Studios in Portland. Other music-oriented hangouts include The Goodfoot, The Get Down, Laurelthirst Public House, The Landmark Saloon, various McMenamins branded places, and the Phish-themed Tomorrow's Verse brewery. 

Lots to check out!