The Glen Road Performers

 A state-ranked runner in high school, his athletic career was truncated by service in Southeast Asia.  Returning to America, he became a clothes salesman before attending art school.  Then, after music struck, Mike honed his skills performing for the mainframes as a late-night computer operator, while touring extensively with Scartaglen.  When that band split up in the mid-nineties, Mike went on to form Sunrush and taught fiddle at two prestigious summer schools.

 Living life to the full, Mike’s tireless enthusiasms have lead him to both successes and trouble.  Listen carefully and hear those themes in his songs, dark events underscored with optimistic faith in human nature.  In performance, Mike’s sunny personality and honest nature combine in a compelling presence, the focus of hushed attention during his unaccompanied songs, the musical backbone of Glen Road’s instrumental sets.  And you wonder if his “haven’t been right since” speech is not, in fact, dead wrong.

Turlach Boylan
One friend has described Turlach Boylan as ‘fierce’, while others think him enigmatic, and elsewhere he is seen as a curmudgeon.  It boils down to a couple of things:  this intense Irishman insists on good music and seldom wastes a lot of time with words.  Words wouldn’t have carried much weight back in the early eighties when his father decided Turlach and six siblings would play Irish music.  In the ensuing battle of stubborn minds, seniority won the day, and a stream of success in competition left five of the seven Boylan children with All-Ireland championships.  A veteran of piano and trumpet lessons, Turlach learned to play with the help of County Antrim flute teacher John Kennedy.

Since then he’s been an engineer, a computer programmer, an entrepreneur, and founder of big plain records, a record label promoting Irish traditional music in America and of Bandstore, a website where independent musicians can sell their wares.  Turlach’s debut solo album, The Tidy Cottage, was finalist in the Crossroads Magazine 2000 music awards.  The follow-up album Shame The Devil features his talents on banjo, mandola and tin-whistle as well as flute.

Greg Brown
The second engineer in Glen Road, Greg Brown once made his living programming telephone systems but gave up the glory to teach music to kids at the Ottawa Folklore Center.  Born near St. John’s Newfoundland, Greg began learning fiddle music at age seven from Christina Smith, while also perusing classical music on piano and violin.  He spent his teenage years in the prairies of Alberta, worked in the oilfield during college, and now lives in Ottawa, Ontario.  Somewhere along the line, he also learned to play viola, concertina, guitar and accordion.

 Greg isn’t quite the Rock’n’Roll fanatic that he once was, but he still enjoys many kinds of music.  The music of Newfoundland is his favorite and he is dedicated to presenting his heritage to new audiences, and, of course, sneaking the tunes into Glen Road shows.