The Herald-Palladium
April 28, 2022
People of The Guide
Playing past closing time with Brian McClure
By RON DeKETT
HP Correspondent
Brian McClure knows it’s going to be a good night of music when everyone in the bar is belting out the words to “Country Roads.”
“It’s just a great feeling when you have that many people singing all together,” McClure said during a recent interview at his Paw Paw home. “When the audience is into it, there’s nothing like it.”
That’s when time seems to stop, and he gets lost in the moment as the gig swings past closing time.
“The audience keeps yelling ‘more and more,’” he said with a laugh. “I might have made a few bartenders angry for keeping the bar open. They want to go home and everyone else wants to just keep having fun.”
McClure’s name, and music, may be familiar to many. He’s listed frequently in The Guide – sometimes as Celtics and Classics – as he performs regularly at venues throughout Southwest Michigan.
He performs a mix of Celtic, folk, country and classic rock music by using technology to loop his fiddle, playing with vocals, guitar and the bodhran (an Irish frame drum).
The latent Irish music inside McClure didn’t make its presence known until his senior year at Purdue University in 2006, when he was asked to perform for a band at the nascent Nine Irish Brothers in West Lafayette, Ind. He was asked because he had listed violin as one of his talents on his Facebook profile.
Prior to joining the bar’s Irish band, he had never really listened to Irish music, although his mom is Irish, but he soon discovered it paid off.
“I got gigs playing Irish music,” he said. “There’s not a lot of gigs playing fiddle for rock bands.”
He had learned to play the violin as first chair for the Paul F. Boston Middle School orchestra in La Porte, Ind. He chose the violin thinking he was young and would have time to master a difficult instrument.
“I was looking at longevity,” he said. “For some reason I had that wisdom when I was 12.”
He later dabbled with the guitar while at Purdue studying aeronautical technology, but didn’t take it seriously until about three years ago to build his solo act.
While at Purdue, he joined the Glee Club, and acquired valuable practical experience.
“I got a lot of experience traveling with shows, very professional shows,” he said. “It was a great experience for me.”
Perhaps the most indelible event in his evolution as an Irish musician occurred with the death of his maternal grandfather at the end of his senior year at college. The maternal side was a tight-knit family, and his grandfather was its keystone, McClure said.
The family asked him to play Irish fiddle at the funeral.
“It had a really deep emotional impact,” he said.
In appreciation, the family bought him a round-trip plane ticket to Ireland with a three-month layover between going and returning.
“So I went to Ireland for three months, and I didn’t really have a plan,” he said. “I was all by myself. I was 21. I had my fiddle. I had a backpack. My cousin, who was in the Navy, gave me a bunch of MREs (meals ready to eat), which really saved me.”
He arrived with $300 in his pocket and looking no further than staying a single night at a Galway hostel.
The next morning, he was sitting alone in the hostel bunkroom amid about 30 bunk beds. Everyone had gone. That’s when his fortunes changed for the better.
“The owner, this French guy, walked in and said, ‘Are you the American that asked me for a job?’ And I said, ‘No, but I can do it.”
So he got a job changing bed sheets in the morning, which earned him a place to sleep and call home base.
But he still needed to earn money to eat and purchase essentials, so he began busking in the street.
“It was actually successful,” McClure said. “What I learned from busking on the street is you have to perform. You have to put energy out in order to grab someone’s attention. And then you got about 10 seconds before they walk by (and decide whether) to pull out a coin from their pocket and throw it into the case.”
After three months, buoyed with real-life experience and international friends, he returned home to continue honing his craft. He believes one of the factors that sets him apart from other performers stems from lessons he learned as a busker.
“I am focused on how I can put my energy into you, the listener,” he said.
He wants to start branching out into other musical genre, begin writing his own music and develop his own unique style.
“I am making a pretty good living at it, so I want to put more energy into it to give it the proper respect it needs,” he said.
Meanwhile, he will continue to perform, respond to calls for “more, more” and perhaps keep bartenders working past closing time.
“It’s what I love to do,” he said. “I love bringing joy to others.”
