Girl power! isn't exactly a new thing. Sisters were doing it for themselves long before the Spice Girls were just a dollar sign in a record company executive's eye.
But you might not expect to find it infusing an album by the Chieftains, the bunch of Irish reelers and jiggers long acclaimed for their interpretations of classic Celtic tunes . . . acclaimed for so long, in fact, that it was way back in 1964, on the release of their first album, that the plaudits began to arrive at the Chieftains' door.
It's girl power of a sort, at least, on their new record. The vision, as usual, of founder member Paddy Moloney, it features what the PR people concerned fairly describe as a 'stellar line-up' of female artists.
This includes Joni Mitchell, Sinead O'Connor, Joan Osborne, Mary Chapin-Carpenter and Bonnie Raitt, each accompanying the Chieftains on their individual tracks. But don't expect any power-politics or feminist breast-beating: it's the power of love they're singing about.
The celebrated guests on Tears Of Stone give form to Moloney's dream - three years in the realisation - of exploring the pleasure, pain, joy and remorse of the most sublime emotion.
That it took so long to bring to the turntable was a result of his insistence on using the biggest and best artists from assorted genres, which obliged him to become a schedule-juggler extraordinaire and itinerant producer for the period of its gestation, recording his collaborators' contributions in Los Angeles, London, Dublin, New York and Washington.