Herlihy, Craig; Brian Herlihy; Brad Dillon (Yokeshire) (December 2000)

Yoke Shire: Behind The Masque Of Shadows

In October 2000, Boston, Massachusetts-based Yoke Shire were one of several artists performing at the ProgDay 2000 festival. If you've been following this site for any length of time, you know that Yoke Shire are often featured in our newspage. And, you also know that their Masque Of Shadows album has been nominated for and been the recipient of numerous awards. For instance, in the Jam Music Magazine awards (a New Hampshire, USA based magazine) the album received three "Reader's Pix 2000 Awards": Album of the Year, Song of the Year ("The Brook, The Mirror And The Maiden") and Best Engineered Album. Previous to that, they were nominated for three Delire Musical Awards, receiving awards for two: "Best New Artist" and "Best Album Production." This on top of having been rated as one of the Top 5 albums by "La Villa Strangiato," an Ontario, Canada-based progressive radio program (not to mention making the top 5 reviews of the month in both Soundcheck and Metronome Magazine)

Masque Of Shadows is the band's first full-length release, there also being the two- track preview single "A Foreshadowing," which includes "Maiden Voyage" and "Shape Of A Dancer," and an EP under the name Yoke. The band consists of Craig Herlihy (vocals, flute, guitars, keyboards, bass, and many others), his brother Brian Herlihy (guitars), and drummer Brad Dillon who agreed to let me pepper them with a few questions about Masque..., ProgDay, and more for this e-interview.

Congratulations on your recent awards for the Masque Of Shadows. It must be gratifying to see that your full-length debut has been so highly regarded.

Yeah it is very gratifying, we've been working for a long time to get to this point, and it's nice to get the acknowledgement for all our hard work. The most gratifying thing is knowing that we're touching people with our music. It's also nice to see that there's a worldwide audience that is appreciative of Yoke Shire's sound.

The live on-air appearances seem to be doing well for you, too - you recently won the ASCAP Plus Award. How did the on-air performances come about?

The on-air performances came about as an offshoot of acoustic performances that we've been doing. The acoustic on-air performances are a really nice contrast, too, from the big production show of our electric performances. They put us in a situation where we're stripped down to just a few acoustic instruments in a very small space, live, on-air often times to the world. It's an exciting position to be in, and we enjoy doing it. It's nice to get back to the roots of the acoustic elements. It gives us an opportunity to present some brand new material that we've just been working on as well as doing some different versions of our electric stuff. And often times you'll find a particularly interesting array of instruments that we use for these performances, including subtle unique percussion, marimba, tin whistle, and different combinations of instruments as well.

Speaking of instruments ... in reading the liner notes, I have to ask Craig - what is a melodihorn?

It's a breath-controlled reed instrument that I've found useful to create medieval drones and other unique tones.

It's stated here on the album and in the press kit that no samplers, drum machines, etc. were used...?

We want to let people know that what they're hearing is totally authentic. We made note of it since some people can't believe what they're hearing. Some are led to believe that it would just be a sequencer, a sampler, or a drum machine making a certain sound. It's easy to dismiss it as "Oh, they just did that with this modern technology." Some of these weak substitutes have become so commonplace, that we wanted to point out that we're actually playing the real instruments.

It is refreshing. I think more and more artists are going that route, or at least to use the synthesized sounds more sparingly.

This certainly has been the year of the festival, or perhaps it just seems that way since they're getting such stellar line ups. How did the ProgDay gig come about?

Peter Renfro has been doing a great job putting on the ProgDay Festival for the past 6 years. He got a hold of a copy of our CD Masque of Shadows and a very exciting live review from one of our concerts, and was impressed enough that he invited us down to kick off the festivities for this year's event with an hour long performance.

ProgDay was a great time. We received a lot of positive feedback from those in attendance about how much they enjoyed our set. We played three songs from Masque of Shadows, and the rest of the songs were basically new to the audience.

Everybody was really friendly, appreciative and respectful towards each other and also the farm. There was a very peaceful vibe in the air the whole weekend. The day we played, the weather was absolutely gorgeous. Some people were playing frisbee with their dogs, while others relaxed, setting up camp with their sun umbrellas, lawn chairs, and coolers full of beer, among other things to enjoy the show.

We made the trip in a deluxe mobile home, which was quite a nice home base, attracting many friendly gatherings. Fans would come up to say hello and get their CD autographed, or to get a picture. We were in a sward about 50 paces to the east of the stage.

It was also great meeting and hanging out with all the other bands. We made a bunch of new friends down there. Another cool thing was meeting some of the enthusiastic fans that have been emailing or writing to the band.

Are there plans to tour further?

Performing live is one of the aspects of being a musician that we really dig, so we're basically playing out live continuously, and we're always trying to expand out the regions we perform in. Hopefully before long it will be completely global touring.

With the response Masque is getting, I doubt you'll have very long to wait. "A Foreshadowing" wasn't your first preview ... was any material on the previous EP later released on Masque or should fans start seeking that out? (though they should anyway) It is mentioned elsewhere that some of the early material might be released at some point...??

In 1995, we released a 4 song EP, consisting of material that's not found on Masque of Shadows. Currently it's unavailable but we have plans to release a remastered edition. Fans can keep an eye out at www.yokeshire.com for more information about when this release will become available. [Released as A Seer In The Midstin 2002 -ed.]

There's some really great material on there, we're excited to get it out to the fans. Especially the prog-rock people, who can look forward to an epic number that comes in at over 9 minutes with a lot of folk-prog elements in it. We actually still play all 4 songs as part of our live repertoire, two of them we played at ProgDay.

Do you think of yourselves as being a progressive rock band or is it just that the prog community has accepted you the most? I noticed 20 of the 33 reviews of your album that your site links to are in progressive magazines.

Well, the progressive rock genre has been very receptive to our music, but we came out of a time period when progressive rock wasn't so defined with such borders. It was more of a blend into what people just considered Rock & Roll, and sometimes now is considered Classic Rock. So we feel like we stretch out not only to the borders of the Rock & Roll spectrum, but transcend beyond borders in general.

Amidst that, we do consider ourselves progressive rock, and it's good to be part of such a cool musical community.

The music indicates varied influences, what are some of those influences? I mean, I detect a little Jethro Tull, maybe Iron Butterfly...

In terms of prog-rock, Iron Butterfly has made some important contributions that sometimes may go unnoticed, particularly their epic "In a Gadda Da Vida" which inspired a lot of people to stretch out and play a song for a little longer than just the typical Top 40 chart thing. There were some really cool organ breaks, and drum breaks, and just working together as more of an experimentally successful unit. And of course Jethro Tull has made their mark on the progressive map as well as other genres, and is a source of inspiration for us. Thick As A Brick and Songs From The Wood in particular are special albums in the prog realms. Hopefully we incorporate and bring a dash of each of our musical influences into what we present as the Yoke Shire sound, and we're quite sure we're coming up with a unique blend while doing so.

What's the genesis of the name? I know it was originally just Yoke.

"Yoke" is a word that means "union." For us, it represents our union stylistically and our union as a group of three musicians coming together. It also has spiritual roots in the union of the body, mind and spirit. "Shire" was added to expound upon the image and add hues and paint a closer picture of what we represent musically.

[A shire is a term used in Great Britain (mainly) for county, such as Yorkshire (having mentioned Yoke Shire to my mother - who's English - she asked, "Are you sure you don't mean Yorkshire?"). -ed.]

Now one of those pesky history questions: when did you first realize that you wanted to be a musician?

We've all had an affinity towards music since the very early years of our lives.

Brian: I was drawn towards The Beatles records and had come to really appreciate their music; John Lennon in particular was a major inspiration. And that's what made me want to take up guitar. So I took the paper route money I had saved, and headed down to the local music store and bought an acoustic guitar.

Craig: ...which I later bought off him with my paper route money, and began taking it up myself when Brian moved on to the next level of guitar. Around the same time, I started using a cassette machine that Bri had purchased, which was a "sound to sound" system. We had two cassettes and we'd keep flopping them back and forth to overdub our tracks. I worked quite a bit with that in the early days and developed up some different techniques that became the foundation of what I do in terms of a producer. I remember the feeling of wanting to be a musician started with the first couple of chords I strummed on a guitar, I felt at home there.

Brad: I started playing drums when I was 3 or 4 years old, learning different drumbeats. A couple years later, I began drumming along with records and 8 track tapes, cranking up the stereo as loud as it could go, playing for hours on end. When I was in the 3rd grade, we had "Show & Tell," so I brought all my drums into school and started wailing out a drum solo right in the classroom. Needless to say, my Teacher and the Principal were horrified; my classmates loved it. A few years after that, I started listening to Rush, spending the days memorizing Neal Peart's drum parts. I particularly liked playing along with the live albums like Exit...Stage Left, because the sound of the crowd cheering made me feel like I was on stage. When I joined Craig and Brian's band, they reintroduced me to Led Zeppelin, which advanced my drumming life in a new direction.

Brian: As we've continued to persue our careers, we've been reassured more and more in a deeply spiritual way that we're exactly on the right path, not only individually, but that we've found each other as a collective unit and that together we're heading down the right path.

Brad, how did you hook up with the Brothers Herlihy?

I have known Craig and Brian for quite a few years now. Before I joined up with them musically, I used to attend their concerts, which were always amazing. Occasionally, we'd shared the same bill together at a few shows earlier on, and we always got along really well.

I remember thinking to myself as I was watching them perform, "This is it. This is the band. I've got to get into this band! These dudes kick serious ass!" From the first time I saw them, I wanted to be the drummer in their band. I really loved how even back then they were pushing the boundaries; they were way ahead of their time. I felt that if someday we could combine our talents, there would be no limits as to what we could achieve together. I lived with that longing for a handful of years, and then on Christmas Eve one year, the phone rang and it was Craig on the other end. A few days later I showed up at their studio and we jammed some tunes, and there was instant chemistry. About a month later, we played our first show together and the place was packed. We rocked the house all night long!

And here you are now, with a highly regarded album, and greater success just ahead. Is it tough to balance this career with "day jobs" or have you been able to move into this full time?

Sometimes life responsibilities can be tough to balance with all of the aspects that it takes to run a project like this. Because we actually love what we do, we put in longer than a full time day, at what people would call a normal job, but we love every minute of it, and we've been in the unique position to be able to segue into doing that.

So have you begun work on a follow up, or are you going to wait a while yet?

Yes, we have many songs on the drawing board for this next album. It hasn't been easy picking songs because there's so many that we want to have on there. Most of the songs have been selected, and are in the process of pre-studio preparation.

We look forward to hearing that. Thank you for taking time out of your schedule to talk to us.

Yoke Shire live at Progday 2000 (© Debbie Bradshaw

[Brad amicably left the land in May 2001 to pursue non-music interests {Along with another single, the three-tracker "Solar Solstice", Yoke Shire have released a further two albums, 2007's The Witching Hour a double CD, which may answer the question about all that material to choose from (as this is their second full-length album, barring the comp A Seer...) and 2011's Awakening Celtic Spirits, featuring acoustic traditional Irish songs} - ed.]

Photos: portrait, live (pics 4, 5) © Joseph P Herlihy, Jr.; live (1-3) © ProgDay 2000 © 'Captain MDA'; live (6), ProgDay 2000, © Debbie Bradshaw


Discography:
Yoke - Yoke (1995)
'A Foreshadowing' (1998)
Masque Of Shadows (1999)
A Seer In The Midst (2002)
'Solar Solstice' (2004)
Awakening Celtic Spirits (2011)