Love and Laughter from Solas

UNLESS you are U2 and successful beyond anyone's imagination, it is very hard to keep a professional band on the road and performing for more than a decade, no matter what the genre.

Add to it the challenge of keeping the essence of the band intact and evolving at the same time amidst critical personnel shifts, as personal and professional situations present themselves over the years.

For the cutting edge band Solas - formulated in the mid-nineties as one of the top bands to come out of Irish America - the pressure has been on remaining founding members Seamus Egan and Winifred Horan to stay fresh and topical and flexible to remain in the vanguard of the professional touring bands creating music that makes people stop and listen.

With the release of their ninth CD For Love and Laughter, Solas has once again solidified their place as one of the most exciting and creative bands to be seen in the Celtic acoustic music arena.

The release in 2006 of their last recording celebrating their first decade, Reunion, on both CD and DVD encompassing all the band members from the early years like Karan Casey, John Doyle and John Williams successfully demonstrated where they had been and where they were going as a band.

The live recording -- the first the band had done with any of its ensembles -- was packed full of energy and drive and the collective talents that Solas has always seemed to exhibit in full force.

Perhaps it invited comparisons about whether the old band that started out so explosively with Casey, Williams and Doyle alongside Egan and Horan would outshine newer members Mick McAuley, Deirdre Scanlon and Eamon McElholm.

Rather, it showed the strength of the band's open collaborative tendencies to work with the talents on hand and get the best of out of them in ensemble mode.

When Scanlon left the band shortly thereafter for a less hectic life in Ireland, Solas (which was truly blessed with both Casey and Scanlon as dynamic vocalists with their own strong styles) needed to recruit another lead singer who could dominate center stage and help shape their performances and allow more suitable vocal settings for Mick McAuley and Eamon McElholm.

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Nster.com