Spokane Irish music group Floating Crowbar readies for the St. Patrick’s Day season with its new album, The Smoker’s Cut

Seth Sommerfeld
Feb 25, 2026 Updated 18 hrs ago

Andersen, Hunter, and Rubin float on…

Bridget Green photo

When it comes to playing musical styles from across the globe, there’s a difference between being physically capable of executing all the notes and actually being immersed enough in the culture to have those traditional tunes fully flowing though you.

Spokane traditional Irish music group Floating Crowbar knows this to be true. Since 2009, the primarily instrumental band — consisting of Morgan Andersen (fiddle, octave mandolin), James Hunter (penny whistle, flute, uilleann pipes, bodhran), Rick Rubin (cittern, guitar, bodhran) and Don Thomsen (banjo, mandolin, flute) — has been spreading Celtic music in pubs and other musical nooks across the Lilac City. But to keep its Irish roots ever strong, the band has developed somewhat of a routine.

“We play music here to get money to go to Ireland to get recharged. We’ve sort of developed a habit of taking a trip to Ireland, working up material, we put out a CD of material, and then the year after that we go back to Ireland,” Andersen says. “It feels very cyclical and holistic, because we’re not over there on tour. We’re not earning money when we’re there… we’re hearing new things, we’re connecting with new people.”

The CD part of that cycle approaches quickly, as Floating Crowbar readies to release its new album, The Smoker’s Cut, with a free gig at Central Library on March 7. But the soul of the new album can be traced to the guys’ frequent trips across the pond to their musical style’s homeland. When the group realized that instead of going to stateside Irish music camps, they could just go take in the real deal for not much more money, it became a regular occurrence with trips as a foursome in 2012, 2014 and 2016, and then as a threesome sans Thomson (who is leaving Floating Crowbar after playing The Smoker’s Cut release show) in 2018 and 2024, plus another excursion planned for this coming summer.

The linchpin of these trips are the traditional Irish music sessions — which are not so much concerts but open, communal musical gatherings that routinely take place in at least a pub or two in pretty much every Irish town.

“There’s something about the music, pub culture in Ireland that we’re just completely addicted to. There’s no equivalent in the States,” says Andersen. “Most towns will have one or two or maybe three pubs where trad music happens. It’s not like in a bar in America. You go to a bar and the big TVs are on, and you’re with whoever you’re with — you’re this little island — and every table is this separate thing. Nobody’s interacting with each other. And in that type of Irish pub scene, it literally is a public house. It’s a public living room, and groups of people come there, and everyone’s interacting with each other.”

“And it’s not like we’re a band performing for an audience — we’re sitting in the corner playing tunes with a few of the locals,” he continues. “And I can’t tell you how common it is for at some point in the evening, some older woman at the bar stands up and sings a song, then some guy recites an amazingly detailed, long comic poem that goes on for 10 minutes that he memorized 50 years ago. And everybody’s in stitches and laughing. We come back and go to a bar here and you actually feel culturally impoverished.”

In addition to dropping into real Irish sessions to reinvigorate their collective spirit, the friends that make up Floating Crowbar essentially make their trips into creative retreats where they can be musically inclined all the time.

“When we’re all in town, we get together every Thursday night at James’ house to practice for a couple hours, and we have been since 2010. But the progress is kind of slow [on new material], and a lot of that time is just like maintaining the repertoire that we have,” Andersen says. “When we’re in Ireland, we’re there for three or four weeks and we’re together 24 hours a day. So we get up in the morning, make a pot of tea, and there’s a new song that James wants to bring to the band, and we start working it up. Play for a bit in the morning, play for a bit in the afternoon, then go out and play in a session at night. It’s just tunes, all the time.”

Coming together near the end of the ’00s, part of what makes Floating Crowbar stick out sonically from other Irish acts is the divergent paths that brought its members to the Celtic sound. Andersen is the Irish music lifer, having played the fiddle with Irish groups since his teenage years, but Hunter was playing bass in a Japanese band (the wonderfully named Lumpy Futon) and studying traditional shakuhachi (a Japanese end-blown flute) with a real sensei before being drawn to the tin whistle after hearing Vinnie Kilduff. Thompson had more of a country and bluegrass background, and Rubin had hung around the folk scene in London in the late ’60s and then got into early music and lute building. That hodgepodge of backgrounds gives Floating Crowbar a unique sound, and the guys don’t shy away from being a bit atypical.

“That’s what keeps the tradition alive, you know,” Hunter says, “playing exactly what it’s supposed to be is what stops the tradition from going. It stagnates.”

The ever-evolving quality of Floating Crowbar’s sound can be heard throughout The Smoker’s Cut. With Thomsen departing the band, its remaining players had to reimagine their approach in a more trio-friendly manner to cover up the gaps. Rubin’s heavier guitar playing had long set the rhythm for the group, but without Thomsen’s mandolin fills, Rubin switched to playing more of the lute-like cittern with Andersen and Hunter picking up more of the rhythmic slack by adding more staccato notes and edgy bow triplets. As a result, the new tunes have a different gravity with the cittern providing space for more free melodic interpretation.

Highlights on The Smoker’s Cut include the album-opening interpretation of the slip jig standard “The Drops of Brandy,” the tight album-closing title track (which features an original tune by Hunter) and “Garrett Barry’s,” a combination of three tunes that Andersen says he has had in his head for 20 years. Hunter — who records Floating Crowbar albums in his basement known as Dungeon Studios — is particularly gleeful about the way the up close mic’ing of bodhran (a traditional handheld Irish frame drum) sounds transitioning between the numbers on “Garrett Barry’s”

“It’s like club music with Irish on top,” he says with a laugh.

While Floating Crowbar is in most demand in March due to St. Patrick’s Day, the unique spot that Irish music holds in our collective musical psyche allows them to gig all year. Unlike many other international folk music traditions, there are aspects of Irish music that just resonate differently, both in the U.S. and around the world.

“It’s a huge inspiration for a lot of Americans, whether they are actually Irish or not. There’s this sort of connection to the old land. There’s something about the Irish that’s both familiar and feels like home, but also they’re rebels. You know, “F–k the British. Which, frankly, Americans can identify with,” Hunter says.

But as the London-born Hunter knows — having traveled to teach at far-flung institutions abroad — Irish music knows no borders.

“I mean, I went to teach in Abu Dhabi. I took a flute with me and first thing, I was definitely looking out for musicians. And the first day I was there, there was an Irish guy doing an orientation on the technology at the school. And I went up to him and said, ‘Hey, do you know anyone who plays Irish music?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah… you’re looking at him!’” Hunter recalls with a laugh. “It’s just every single time [I travel]. I was just in Colombia for six months, and found a great Irish band with a woman who had spent six years in Dublin. She did a master’s in traditional music. We hook up for a session, and it’s just like wearing a glove. Everywhere you can always find an Irish session, pretty much. Expats like it… even British expats.” ν

Floating Crowbar: The Smoker’s Cut Album Release Show with Low Class Bluegrass, Betsy Rogue • Sat, March 7 at 7 pm • Free • All ages • Spokane Central Library • 906 W. Main Ave. • floatingcrowbar.com