Knobby Tires and Irish Fury...Tasty!

While in the Navy, a friend introduced me to his mother as, "The guy who drives it like he stole it." Not much has changed in the eight years since then, at least regarding my driving. Trying to squeeze in a mountain bike ride during lunch only further encourages me to use what this same friend referred to as, "time management," behind the wheel. Yesterday I pulled into the mountain bike trailhead about 15 minutes from work with little time to spare. I had a meeting scheduled for right after the ride.

A couple of weeks ago I picked up an iPod Shuffle for the mountain bike and the downriver boat. After pulling my bike out of the back of the truck and clipping it was time to try out the new toy. After queuing up the iPod and clipping in, I was off. The tunes for today were organized into a new playlist called Angry Irishmen.

My tastes in music, they have not changed dramatically over the years. As a general rule I like country, rock and country that rocks. As of late though, this has taken somewhat of a different direction. As previously mentioned in a post a few weeks ago, I have started indulging in slightly different varieties of music. The Nashville sound has grown old. Every, "new," artist sounds the same as the last 20 or so to come out of Nashville since I was in high school. As a result, I have started digging around and really enjoying a lot of the sounds coming out of Austin. This is only half of the story though. On this day, I was not listening to country.

Owen Donahue and Mike Larson, two college teammates, they enlightened me on the world of what was described years later by a friend as, "angry white boy music." Mostly this meant playing Mettalica as loud as possible... all the time. Mettalica has yet to become a resident in my iTunes library. In fact, most angry white boy music has not made it into my library. As of late however, I have started to feel a need for a soundtrack with some more intensity to it... intensity reminiscent of Mike, Owen and Mettalica. Still, I was not looking for exactly Mettalica, but something along those lines of intensity. I needed something that rocks.

Sniffing around in the depths of the internet, which mostly means entering in anything I can think of into Pandora and seeing what else cycles through, I stumbled over a band I was first introduced to at the Teton Science School during junior high over 20 years ago now. An Irish foreign exchange student introduced me to the Pogues on his walkman. The Pogues, 20 years later, were just what I needed. The Pogues led me to The Young Dubliners, Dropkick Murphys and Dubliners. They are all grouped together into a decidedly Irish version of angry white boy music, a playlist I call Irish Fury.

For quick mountain bike lunches, plugging into Irish Fury is perfect. Plug in, clip in and let it rip through the singletrack. Thus far, this combination has contributed to landing on my head just once.