Music Sunday: Tempest Edition

I decided to do something a little different this Sunday for Music Sunday.

Since I started writing these Music Sunday features, for the most part, I've been sharing music from artists who have made a big splash in the media, artists that everyone knows. The band whose music I'm sharing this week, on the other hand, are very popular, but in an indie sort of way.

I had heard of Tempest for years. But I never knew their music, which is mostly in the Celtic Rock genre, until they played at BayCon, a literary science fiction convention held in the San Francisco Bay area every year. I was just a bit skeptical going into the concert, but I was a fan by about the second song they performed. I've seen them perform live several times since then, and I like them more and more every time I hear them play.

So, today, I'm just going to shut up and share some of their music.

This is an instrumental piece, performed at an arts and music festival in Humboldt County, CA, in 2010. I was not at this performance, but thanks to a kind soul who posted this on YouTube, I can pass this on to you:



This is the official video for Tempest's cover of The Grass Roots "Live for Today". It kind of tickled me that they covered this song, since The Grass Roots were my favorite band way back in the dark ages when I was in junior high school (late 1960s/early 1970s):



"Black Jack Davy" is an adaptation of a Celtic folk ballad from the early 1700s. One of the things I really like about Tempest is how they can take traditional works and themes from centuries ago and make them sound so contemporary:



Here is a two-part mini-documentary focusing on the making of one Tempest album, in 2006:





More information about Tempest can be found here and here.