After three decades on the road, Celtic and world music duo Four Shillings Short will play their last-ever Palo Alto concert on Saturday, July 18, kicking off a multi-year U.S. farewell tour from the city where the band got its start.

Aodh Og O'Tuama and Christy Martin, the married couple behind Four Shillings Short, plan to wrap up touring by late 2028 and retire permanently to Ireland. The July 18 show at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, 505 East Charleston Road, begins at 7 p.m. Admission is a $20 suggested donation; children get in free with a paying adult.

"Being on the road for 30 years, we just figured it was time to do one final, full U.S. tour, and then set down our roots, finally, in Ireland," Martin told Palo Alto Online.

The band's Palo Alto roots run deep. O'Tuama, a Cork, Ireland native who grew up in a family of poets and musicians, arrived in 1983 on a Stanford University fellowship in medieval and Renaissance music performance. He started Four Shillings Short in the mid-1980s and spent years working as a sound designer for TheatreWorks Silicon Valley and for the city of Palo Alto.

Martin and O'Tuama met in 1995 at a Four Shillings Short show at St. Michael's Alley in Palo Alto. Within two weeks they were playing music together. Within a month, they were making plans to hit the road as a duo. Martin quit her job in human resources, and by 1998 the couple gave up their Palo Alto apartment to tour full time.

Between them, the pair plays more than 30 instruments spanning Celtic, Indian classical, medieval and South American traditions. Martin studied sitar for 10 years with a student of master sitarist Ravi Shankar. She sings in four languages; O'Tuama sings in three.

The duo has released 13 albums and performs roughly 100 concerts a year across the country. Their educational program, "Around the World in 30 Instruments," has appeared at libraries, schools and community centers nationwide.

For the July 18 concert, Martin said the set will be a retrospective drawing songs from all 13 albums, with stories from the road woven in. She called it their farewell to the city that supported them from the beginning.

Even after settling in Ireland, the couple has at least two more records in the works. Martin is also considering a musical memoir drawn from years of journals and photos. The duo will continue leading music, folklore and archaeology tours in Ireland between legs of the farewell tour.

Palo Alto, Martin said, will always be their U.S. home, even though they can no longer afford to live here.

The farewell tour continues through late 2028; future dates will be posted at 4shillingsshort.com.

If you go: Four Shillings Short farewell tour launch, Saturday, July 18, 7 p.m., Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, 505 East Charleston Road. $20 suggested donation; kids free with a paying adult.