I'm on shaky ground here, and must tread carefully.
A much-mocked prog-rocker invents himself some Celtic roots and records an "Eirish" album with an ensemble of 30 musicians from his local pub in California. Sounds like it should be terrible, doesn't it? And by and large, it is. Not offensively so, but Anderson's voice doesn't suit this kind of song, and The Chieftains it ain't. The recording sounds like a bootleg of a pub session, though it was also partly recorded in a professional studio.
Anderson writes in the sleeve notes, "One evening in San Luis Obispo, I was out with my love, Jane, and as we strolled past The Frog 'n [sic] Peach Pub, I heard the most wonderful, happy bunch of musicians playing songs that I'd never really heard before. I decided then and there to find out who they were, and ask if we could make music together… Though I was born in the north of England, my mother's folks were from Eireland, and my father's Scottish, so I always thought of myself as Celtic…"
In my defence, I didn't know all these details when I bought the album. I was just surfing Anderson's web site one day in 1998, and saw there were a bunch of solo albums I'd never heard of. They were clearly small-scale productions — I had to get this on import, which wasn't easy then — and I've often thought that Jon's best work came when he wasn't trying to please anyone and just did what he felt like. (I still do respect him for being prepared, and apparently quite content, to turn himself into a cottage industry without too many airs and graces, alongside his Yes career.)
However, I cannot recommend this to anyone other than Jon Anderson completists (and they don't need recommendations, right?).
Sidenote: San Luis Obispo is the home of Robert Kaye, who runs MusicBrainz. When I met him last year, he was surprised not only that I'd heard of SLO, but that I'd been through there (I didn't stop!), and that I'd been through there on a train. That was on my West Coast trip in 2001.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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