There are times when a band becomes more than just a band. Some bands become a multi-media, multi-marketing project. The progressive rock band Yoke Shire is just such a band. The Chelmsford-based Yoke Shire has reached a world wide audience through the internet and by playing festivals around the United States. Yoke Shire's first full length CD "Masque Of Shadows" brought the band respect from listeners around the globe.

Technical advancements made by Yoke Shire during the recording of "Masque Of Shadows" inspired band members/brothers Craig and Brian Herlihy to construct their new Hallowed Ground recording studio. While the brothers have been working on a new concept album, they managed to cull together some new songs, some old songs, and live material and released them as a compilation CD called "A Seer In The Midst". Yoke Shire was a trio up until the "Masque of Shadows" tour ended when drummer and glockenspiel player Brad Dillon decided to move on to non musical projects. Amazingly, the Herlihy boys have continued as a duo, thanks to their technical and multi-instrumental training. Craig Herlihy simply assumed the drummer's role as if he's held the position all along. "I've picked up the drum end of the picture here," Craig said. "I've actually been playing drums for many years and spent part of my writing time doing the drum parts as well in the early days. Now I'm just kind of adding that on to the repertoire."

The duo setting has worked out well for Yoke Shire, allowing the boys to tighten their arrangements. Fortunately, they have a brother named Joe Herlihy who invented foot pedals for Yoke Shire to create percussion with snare drums, bass drums, and high-hats while they play other instruments with their hands. "It's worked out pretty good," Craig said. "It's given us an opportunity to do some more of the acoustic material and kind of expand things out in a few different directions than what we were doing before, with some different instrumentation and stuff like that."

"As we got out and played our live show," Brian Herlihy added, "a lot of people were always impressed with what we were able to cover as a three piece band. Now, we're doing shows as a two piece act and people are astounded and are saying "Oh my God, I can't believe it's only two guys." Craig will be there playing flute with one hand and keyboards with the other, bass pedals and singing and doing all his stuff, and I've got a double neck guitar that I'm using and I’ve started playing percussion. We even play a few instruments with our feet and we're both singing and filling in the space. So, it's really a challenge. It's been good actually to play as a duo. It clicked up the challenge all the more."

"With the foot percussion that we got going on," Craig said, "usually at any given moment we've got some percussion going on of some kind. We found that just different configurations of stuff that we do has worked out well. At some point we may be involved with some other musicians on stage."

Aside from Brad Dillon's departure, other changes for Yoke Shire have included making their new Hallowed Ground recording studio in their hometown of Chelmsford. "Our big deal over the past two years," Craig said, "was building our own studio and putting together this latest CD "A Seer In The Midst". The studio was quite a thing to put together, between the construction of the place and the outfitting with all the equipment and everything. We found that took up a lot of our energy for about a year."

Brian Herlihy said the band has been working the festival circuit and attending awards shows. "We've still been playing out quite a bit too," he said. "I know (Metronome) came to see us and reviewed us back in 2000 on New Year's Day (at Chantilly's in Manchester, New Hampshire). We've done quite a few things since then. We ended up returning to Chantilly's. We did a live web broadcast of the show. They were showing still pictures every minute or so. That was pretty cool because we were able to reach a lot of the fans overseas that haven't had a chance to see or hear us live. So that was pretty neat."

Networking through the internet gained Yoke Shire some invitations to progressive rock festivals. "We've played a bunch of festivals," Brian said. "We went down to North Carolina and did Prog Day 2000 down there, which was a cool international festival. We ended up meeting bands from Italy and England and also Indonesia. It was a cool camaraderie in the progressive rock scene. We've been able to make a lot of friends that way. We've been up in New Hampshire. We've been out to Albany, New York. We've done a bunch of radio shows."

If performing to wide audiences gave the boys greater exposure, imagine their glee when their peers in the music industry and the music journalist recognized their contributions to progressive rock recordings. "We also won a few awards in that time period," Brian began. "There's a place up in Quebec, Canada called Delire Music and they awarded us "Best New Artist" and "Best Album Production". Jam Magazine up in New Hampshire - we ended up getting a few awards from them for "Masque of Shadows". We got "Album of the Year", "Song of the Year" for "The Brook, The Mirror, and The Maiden," and we got "Best Engineered Album" from them for the sound quality. For the past three years running we've gotten awards from ASCAP, the writing society in New York for our achievements in radio broadcasting and live radio performance. So, it's been pretty busy, we’re really doing well, and we’re getting some good feedback."

Yoke Shire's new Hallowed Ground studio is really a logical evolution for a band that has always been interested in making quality recordings. Inspire by Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page who produced all the Led Zep albums, Craig Herlihy has always worked with the engineers at other studios when he recorded Yoke Shire material. "We started years ago doing demos with our smaller equipment," Craig Herlihy said. "We've been building it up over the years and then just kind of made the leap here after "Masque of Shadows" when we felt the time was right and it has provided us the opportunity to experiment a little more and take a little more time with our different tonal colors in things that we're searching for in our sound."

Brian Herlihy pointed out that "There's been a few technical advances that have kind of enabled us to do that." he said. "Some of the equipment has come a long way over the years. Craig had always done demos. He had four track and eight track demos before we would go into a professional studio. Now we've been able to cut out that part of the process. So that when Craig is doing a demo it's not a demo any more, it's the actual recording because we have the equipment that can capture it in that kind of fidelity. It's been a big boon as far as how fast we can get to work on an album."

With their new Hallowed Ground studio, Yoke Shire, a.k.a. the Herlihy boys, can avoid the long wait for studio time. Once they compose something, they can go into their studio and start recording it. "I spend so much of my time writing," Craig said, "the studio really provides the opportunity to just get the ideas, and I'm right on to recording it, as opposed to the waiting phase that takes place when you're going into a separate studio, and the additional complications that come in when trying to book studio time. It makes it a lot easier when you have your own access to the equipment."

"We're night owls as well," Brian said. "So, you'll see Craig out there at midnight getting underway with some lead track or keyboard track and going until two or three in the morning. That doesn't always fit into the schedule of other studios."

Yoke Shire has no immediate plans to bring other bands into their studio. "At this time," Craig said, "It's pretty much a Yoke Shire thing. It's just that we've waited so long to have this opportunity. We have a lot of backlog material that we'd like to get on to tape and out to the fans. Believe it or not, we've got several albums sort of on the shelf waiting for the next round of recording. The first phase was getting out "A Seer in the Midst" and sort of collecting up the works we have going on there. Out live we do a lot of material. We've been doing in some cases three hour shows, and we find ourselves expanding the live show all the time. So, it's a great chance for us to get some of this live stuff on to final studio versions."

This new "A Seer In The Midst" compilation was put together to give new fans a sense of the band's history. The Herlihy boys embarked on the Yoke Shire venture in 1993. They released an EP in 1995 that some fans only found about after "Masque of Shadows" was released. "After we released "Masque of Shadows", we got a lot of world wide reaction, and people started going into older interviews that we had done back in 1995," Craig said. "There was an EP we had released at that time. We had come out with a four song EP and it was out of print for a few years, and everybody was asking about that EP: "What's the deal? When can we get a hold of that." We decided to combine that with some live material that we had from the "Masque of Shadows" CD release concert that sounded really good. We were also anxious to get out some of the new material from Hallowed Ground too. So, we decided we'd kind of put it all together, give people a feel for a little bit of the history of the band, and how long we've been around."

The first two songs on "A Seer In The Midst" are somewhat of a departure or evolution from what Yoke Shire played on "Masque of Shadows", "Mesmerize" is a mellow groove excursion into space age sounds while "Ghan Buri Ghan" is more rocking. "It's an expansion on the textures and the sounds," Craig said. "We're not looking to repeat ourselves, per se from the "Masque of Shadows" stuff, but we do have a lot of material that leans in that direction too. We just kind of decided to grab those pieces. A lot of our material - multiple songs will have kind of a thematic sense to them and we'll pull them into a whole album. Those pieces were kind of nice because they were individual numbers where they kind of stood on their own as their own work, so we thought we'd put those in with the compilation. The next album we're working on is a series of songs that really sound nice together."

Craig Herlihy's flute playing on the first of the new tracks, "Mesmerize," is far less aggressive than his previous flute work for Yoke Shire. Hauntingly beautiful, this flute melody doesn't have the heavy, hard driving Jethro Tull influence found on the "Masque of Shadows" CD. "The flute is such a versatile instrument that you can use it in these different atmospheres, and it almost sounds like a different instrument when you use it in different ways," Craig said. "That’s where that particular song was going, it's not that we're leaning away from the heavier flute, per se. On the new album that we're working on now, we've got a lot more of that heavy flute sound."

"In fact," Brian added, "I think when Craig was starting to lay down that flute track it was more of the aggressive flute, but he just sort of sensed this song needed a little something different, and it ended up settling back into that flute that you're hearing on there now."

Yoke Shire debuted their new and old songs for local fans at a CD release party last December at Lowell's Play Loft. A showcase for the New England Art Rock Society, the concert gave the boys a chance to play for local fans after hitting the festival circuit for several months in the previous two years. Reconnecting with the local fans base was important too because they have become world wide in their marketing efforts.

All the art work on the CD jacket for "A Seer In The Midst" features really cool Gothic looking images and objects from an earlier period in English history. A past century mandolin abuts a shelf lined with ancient goblets, candlestick holders, scrolls, old-fashioned manuscripts in a room lit by candle light.

"It's actually a combination of things that we're interested in," Craig Herlihy said. "The sound of the music has drawn us in different directions in terms of spirituality and different aspects of the deeper essence of life. Those images and types of things we have on there represent some of those things." Brian Herlihy said that in the days of vinyl records the larger packages had artwork that matched the spirit of the music. The Herlihy's brother, Joe Herlihy, handled all of their photography.

As for the music, a piano on track four, "The Brook, The Mirror, and The Maiden" was played to great effect by Craig Herlihy at Yoke Shire's CD release concert for "Masque of Shadows" at Durgin Hall in Lowell in 1999. "The theatre that we were playing in had a very nice seven foot Mason and Hamlin grand piano," Craig Herlihy said. "We obviously took advantage of that."

"That's another area where a lot of people might just get an electronic keyboard sampled - Kurzweil or something - that often sounds pretty good - not bad - but not quite like a real seven foot grand piano," Brian Herlihy added.

"I play a lot of piano at home," Craig said, "it allowed me to bring in some of the elements of the types of work I do as a solo pianist as well."

One of the older pieces Yoke Shire put on the compilation, "Dogfight," is interesting for its amalgamation of electric guitar sounds. Craig Herlihy was attempting to recreate the sounds of a small fighter plane in World War I from the point of view of the pilot inside the cockpit. "That was many years of listening to Hendrix and cool sounds from the 60s and early 70s that inspired some wild guitar playing during our live shows," Craig said. "That developed up over playing different solos. I found myself getting some pretty crazy sounds out of the guitar and I decided to put it together into a piece that emulated a World War I air battle."

"It's a neat approach to writing music too because you're not even really writing a song, you're creating a soundscape that a person can actually put themselves into," Brian said.

Yoke Shire has found a neat approach to doing a lot of things. Composing, arranging, and producing. Marketing, performing, and broadcasting, Yoke Shire are in a class all by themselves.