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This article examines the dynamics between old and new ways in Irish music, using terms from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of the fields of cultural production, such as position taking, gatekeeping and consecration. The traditional unaccompanied song in Gaelic nowadays known as sean-nós, or the old style, is not the most commercially viable type of music in an age with little patience for longish laments without vibrant beats or obscene lyrics. What then might be the sean-nua, or new style that is more befitting for today’s audience? Paradoxically the answer might lie in looking backward while at the same time looking forward to create a hybrid, glocal sean-nós-nua. Some of Ireland’s biggest names in contemporary popular music have been enamoured of the idea of crossing old with new, creating a hybrid form that would at once contain the wisdom of the old style and yet yield some authority in the marketplace. One such artist is Van Morrison, another is Sinead O’Connor who attempted a come-back with an album titled Sean Nós Nua, on which she, self-confessedly, ‘sexed-up’ traditional Irish songs, some sung in Gaelic, much as Van Morrison had done two decades earlier with his collaboration with the Chieftains, Irish Heartbeat. In this article I propose to look specifically at examples from these two albums where the vocal stylings of these singers resemble the sean-nós in its canonical meaning, yet are examples of boundaries of Irish time and place being transcended in the songs’ hybrid musical style, lending new meaning to both sean-nós and nua. In the process of fusing old and new, wisdom and authority, I propose that Irish popular music must become glocal to succeed in the marketplace, given today’s global yet specialized economy of distribution, and in the critical field of reception, given the currently prevalent preference for hybridity and authenticity.