For Shane Hayes, playing traditional Irish music feels as natural as breathing. “You don’t think about it,” he says. “You just play.”
Hayes was born and raised in Ennis, in Ireland’s County Clare, as were the other two founding members of the award-winning trio Socks in the Frying Pan. The band’s performance at Hog Island in Orleans on Saturday, March 15 was sold out at press time.
Hayes calls County Clare, on Ireland’s west coast, “the Nashville of Irish music.” Niall Keegan, a lecturer at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance in Limerick, wrote: “It would not be an exaggeration to state that County Clare has more musicians and performance events than any other county in Ireland and that the music plays a larger role in the economic, social, and aesthetic life of the county than any music anywhere else on the island.”
In a 2023 interview on Lehigh Valley Public Radio in Pennsylvania, Hayes elaborated: “Every man, woman, and child, horse and donkey and dog and cat plays something in County Clare.” Schoolchildren learn the tin whistle; at night, sessions dominate the pubs. “Between all the pubs,” says Hayes, “there might be more musicians than punters.” (“Punter” in this case means those dupes who are paying customers.)
Hayes started lessons on the tin whistle at six. By eight, he was learning the two row button accordion, which he plays in the band. In the Irish traditional world, the instrument is known as “the box,” for its shape. “It’s like holding a giant keyboard or a giant version of a harmonica,” he says. With his fingers on the same buttons, a push or a pull will produce different notes.
Socks in the Frying Pan formed in the summer before Hayes’s last year of college, when he was working in an Ennis pub. The regular musicians canceled, says Hayes. “The guy behind the bar said, ‘Hey, you! You play music?’ ”
Hayes said, “Sure!” He called his younger brother, Fiachra, who plays the fiddle, and a friend, Aodán Coyne, who plays acoustic guitar. They did the gig, and the barman was pleased, says Shane. Soon they were playing seven nights a week. In 2012, just for fun, the trio released an album called “Socks in the Frying Pan,” which became the band’s name. Why? “It’s a terrible secret that we’ll never tell anyone.”
The band has toured internationally and performed in 46 U.S. states. They’ve released five albums. The latest, Waiting for Inspiration, came out last fall.
Shane Hayes splits his time between Ennis and Florence, Italy. Coyne is married to a woman from Wisconsin — he’s back and forth, too. Fiachra Hayes travels a lot — he’ll be replaced in this weekend’s Orleans performance by Chicago-based fiddler Ian King. “It’s rare that the three of us are in the same country,” says Shane. But when they’re together, he says, the band performs with a closeness that reflects their 17 years of playing together.
“There was a time when we’d have to sit down and work out harmonies,” says Hayes. Not anymore. “We know who’s doing what,” he says. Their music is seamless and energetic. Hayes calls it their “Socks sound.” They play together “like three individuals that happen to be rowing in the same direction,” he says. The three appear to be in a conversation: the bow arm of the fiddle player in urgent, fluent dialogue with the contractions of the accordion, and the quickly strummed guitar buoying the group along. They sing, too, and their voices blend in effortless harmony.
Their albums mainly include traditional tunes — reels, jigs, polkas, airs, and songs. Hayes describes playing those tunes as “a journey into the past” — sometimes a frustrating one. He remembers working on the band’s second album, released in 2015, called Return of the Giant Sock Monsters From Outer Space. He was looking for polkas to record. “I listened to 252 polkas, one after the other,” he says. “Every one of them was a ‘no.’ ” He snatched his accordion from the floor and composed two of his own — both of which are on that album.
Waiting for Inspiration, with 11 tracks, was an experiment, says Hayes. “Absolutely everything is original.” Writing their own songs and tunes was liberating, he says.
Irish traditional music is necessarily repetitive: before they were written down, tunes were passed down through generations by ear. Despite this, “There are certain tunes I’m never, ever tired of playing,” says Hayes. For those tunes, he says, “we make a point of not stopping until we’ve let go of the crowd, let go of ourselves, let go of the worry — until we’ve settled.”
On Waiting for Inspiration, says Hayes, a slower tune called “Jam Making” evokes that feeling with its gently rocking beat. Another is a three-tune set called “Bbd” from the band’s 2019 live album, Raw & Ríl. In performance, they’ll play the first and second tunes of “Bbd” a couple of times each. The third tune, a quick reel that spins out dizzily, is “face-melting,” Hayes says. The band might repeat that one for 10 minutes until everyone disappears into the churning melody.
It’s a kind of travel, Hayes says. Once the band is there, he says, the goal is to get the audience there, too.
“You get to a place where you’re not anything,” he says. “You’re in the music.”
Timeless Tunes
The event: Socks in the Frying Pan performs traditional Irish music
The time: Saturday, March 15, 7 p.m.
The place: Hog Island Brewery, 28 West Rd., Orleans
The cost: As of press time, this show was sold out
