ecret Garden's musical ideas are built on organic melodies telling their own stories, simplicity and straight from the heart performances. With our new album, once in a red moon, we wanted to retain these basic elements, but also explore new areas in our musical universe, and challenge our own creative thoughts. During this process we also discovered that this development was a circle - like an orbit in our creative universe taking us around to the intimacy and emotions of where Secret Garden once originated.

After developing the new compositions and demoing the first drafts over a period of twelve months, the actual recording began in March of 2001 in Windmill Lane studios in Dublin. With just the two of us, accompanied by our sound engineer Andrew Boland, we started with only violin and piano trying to capture the intimate nerve of our new music. We wanted to let the natural performance be the dominant force. Even trying to find the first magical moments, and the original and unpolished rawness of the "first takes", rather than the technical process of the studio production. By doing so, the essence of the music was shaped around the two of us simply playing together and expressing our most personal musical feelings.

The production continued with the symphony orchestra and Fionnuala recording together live in the studio, capturing the true musical moments that can only occur in a live performance setting. Five of the new songs was scored and conducted by Steven Mercurio, whom we had previously worked with during the Nobel Peace Prize Concert. (Steven Mercurio is a renowned opera conductor, and the musical director of Andrea Bochelli. He has also conducted the Three Tenors, and has recently arranged and conducted the latest recording by Chick Corea).

The trademark of Secret Garden's music is the instrumental melodies. We regard the violin as "the voice of our melodies" and the instrumental phrases as "the words of our songs" But sometimes, through the creative process, some of these melodies naturally lend themselves to words to further express our ideas. We invited the Irish novelist and songwriter Brendan Graham to write the lyrics to two of our songs - "You raise me up" and "Gates of dawn". His bestseller novel "The whitest flower" was very inspirational to us, and we wanted him to capture into words what we felt was something spiritually important to us in these melodies.

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