The Wide World Over: A 40 Year Celebration

1	March of the King of Laois
2	The Foggy Dew (with Sinéad O'Connor and Ry Cooder)
3	I Know My Love (with The Corrs)
4	Cotton-Eyed Joe (with Ricky Skaggs)
5	The Magdalene Laundries (with Joni Mitchell)
6	Live From Matt Molloy's Pub
7	Shenandoah (with Van Morrison)
8	The Munster Cloak
9	Morning Has Broken (with Art Garfunkel and Diana Krall)
10	Morning Dew
11	Mo Ghile Mear (with Sting)
12	Carolan's Concerto (with the Belfast Harp Orchestra)
13	Txalaparta
14	Full of Joy
15	Here’s a Health to the Company
16	Chasing the Fox (with the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra)
17	Long Journey Home (with Elvis Costello)
18	The Rocky Road to Dublin (with The Rolling Stones)
19	Redemption Song (with Ziggy Marley)

Barnes & Noble

When the Chieftains invented "crossover," they didn't just cross the Atlantic. In 40 years, they've circumnavigated the musical globe, from Galicia to Hollywood to Mexico to China, not to mention the perhaps even greater distance from their inception as a rowdy young pub band to today's venerable status as a world-class ensemble of stylists. On this retrospective collection, The Wide World Over, we're reminded that the six-time Grammy winners have also invited the likes of Joni Mitchell, Sinéad O'Connor, Elvis Costello, Van Morrison, Ricky Scaggs, Sting, Linda Ronstadt, and the Rolling Stones along with them for the journey. (Not to mention Stanley Kubrick.) They've played with Los Lobos, Chinese ensembles, and symphony orchestras, and backed up singers from Diana Krall and Art Garfunkel to Ziggy Marley ("Redemption Song," Ziggy's version of his father's anthem, is one of the set's three previously unreleased gems). Luckily they haven't forgotten in the meantime how to play the tight, majestic, and/or hilarious jigs and reels they came up on. What ties it all together is leader Paddy Moloney's hunger to expand the scope of his little band of aging merry men to face the joyous challenge of music of all stripes, and to bring to each the perfectionist polish he demands. With this time capsule of an album, the Chieftains ably demonstrate how far they've come, and how kind it was of them to take us along. Emily King

All Music Guide

In the Chieftains' four decades of recording, they've changed labels a handful of times, and each label has seen fit to record at least one or two collections of the band's output under their tenure. At this point they have so many best-ofs and greatest-hits compilations, it's tough for the listener to know the best of what they're actually hearing. New millennium -- new collection: the band's longtime label, RCA Victor, has done the Celtic community a favor by releasing a collection that deals more with the band's journey through their different phases as opposed to trying to reassemble a hits package. The end result is almost like listening to a radio station that only plays Chieftains songs. There are some live tracks, their countrified romp through "Cotton-Eyed Joe"; Van Morrison's adult-contemporary "Shenandoah"; an unusual introduction of the bandmembers in Chinese; appearances from Sting, Diana Krall, and Art Garfunkel; and a couple of new recordings. The breezy cover of "Morning Has Broken" fares better than the hybridized "Redemption Song" (in fact, it's a challenge to think of any instances of a successful Celtic/reggae alloy). The album will be enjoyed by Chieftains fans as a fun collection of songs they have never heard back-to-back before, and those looking for a greatest-hits collection will have plenty of other places to look. Zac Johnson