As one can imagine, St. Patrick’s Day is a busy time of year for Irish-themed bands everywhere, and Detroit’s Stone Clover is no exception.
“It’s our Super Bowl, I call it,” says band frontman and guitarist Pauly Brady. And it’s literally in his blood: his grandparents built the Old Shillelagh bar downtown.
This week’s itinerary includes rehearsal on Friday, followed by a trek out to Grand Rapids for the Irish Off Ionia festival on Saturday. On Sunday, Brady and Stone Clover’s violinist have been tapped to perform the national anthem at the Detroit Red Wings-Vegas Golden Knights game. (Brady says Stone Clover’s track “Battalion” is also set to be played on the P.A. during the hockey match, and that it actually features Darren McCarty on backup vocals. As to how the former Red Wing wound up on the track, it’s a long story.)
All of that’s followed by a hometown show of sorts at the Lager House during Corktown’s annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade festivities. The venue’s former owner PJ Ryder, Brady says, gave Stone Clover its first big break as a rock band. “I’d been playing there for him on parade days, just [me] and a buddy playing Irish music during the parade,” he says. “We got everyone we knew to come out on a Thursday night. They sold so much beer. … And 10 years later, he had us headline his 10-year anniversary party. He said we were one of his favorite bands.”
And that’s not all for Stone Clover this year. On Monday, the band is set to perform at a tent party at Kudos Taproom and Fieldhouse, a former Gander Mountain retail store in Taylor that was converted into a facility with games like pool, ax throwing, and pickleball.
“We’re only doing a small run this year,” Brady says, adding, “This is actually light for us!”
This year marks a next chapter for the Stone Clover, which boasts a new lineup with Katie Bruin (violin), David Connors (bass and “purveyor of dad jokes,” Brady says), Chris Kaszuba (drums), and longtime friend of the band Eli Wolcott joining on highland bagpipes and the “Mandocaster,” an electric mandolin. (“We consider Paco Higdon our sixth man,” Brady adds. “He’s our producer and the owner of Tuxedo Avenue Studio.)
It’s not quite that Stone Clover has gone electric; that happened years ago. While the first version of the band featured just acoustic guitar, acoustic violin, and acoustic mandolin, Brady has tweaked the band over the years into what he calls a more rock-oriented “paddy slag” sound, which Brady sees as different than the Celtic punk of acts like the Pogues or the Dropkick Murphys. “Occasionally we slip a little of that in there, just to let people know where we come from,” Brady says. “During the St. Paddy’s day season, we pull out a bunch of [traditional] songs, because we’re playing the pubs, and people want that. But once St. Patrick’s Day is over, we go back to a far more rock-oriented sound.” The band has been known to cover rock tracks like “Aerials” by System of a Down and “Hysteria” by Muse.
Stone Clover also released its latest EP Thieves last month, which Brady sees as an evolution of the band’s sound and ambitions. That came in part due to circumstance: Brady says he has spent much of the past few years fighting long COVID symptoms from the initial 2019-2020 pandemic outbreak that included fatigue, difficulty breathing, and having to learn how to sing all over again. “I couldn’t walk down the hall without gasping for air,” Brady says, adding, “There was a point where we thought we would have to change the keys of our songs if I was ever going to be able to sing them again. I couldn’t get my range, but I got it all back … so it took years to get this album done because of that battle.”
In the band’s downtime, Brady also began to see the songs he had been working on as creating a larger mutli-album rock opera narrative, which he envisions could one day be adapted into a musical. Thieves is not officially part of that album cycle, Brady says, though he describes it as a “taste” of things to come. He’s coy on details about its story, but says he’s been working with a Wayne State University professor to ensure historical accuracy. The instrumental title track on Thieves “is meant to symbolize the buildup to World War I,” Brady says. A planned music video features “gallons” of fake blood, he adds.
Brady aims to play a few more local shows and be able for the band to be ready to tour by the end of the year, and hopes to release an album every year for the next few years.
He says he sees his health issues as a blessing in disguise. “The fact that I got sick, it allowed me to craft this thing,” he says. “It was going to be a rough cut diamond if we did it then, but now I feel like it’s a fully faceted stone.”
