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It was a strange encounter for Dropkick Murphys guitarist/accordion player/backup vocalist Tim Brennan -- a band of impoverished kids from Boston, playing a raw and rollicking mixture of punk and traditional Irish music to a bunch of fans in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Over the years, the band had paid a lot of lip service to an all-for-one, one-for-all mentality among musicians and fans -- a solidarity of empowerment through self-sufficiency and success through hard work and watching out for one another. It's the way Brennan and his bandmates came up in Beantown, raised on the morals handed down from their Irish ancestors and the punishing work ethic of their immigrant parents and grandparents.

But to witness the testimony of an Asian kid on the other side of the world articulate such sentiment -- arrived at entirely on his own, unprompted, through the sheer experience of a Dropkick Murphys show -- it was an eye-opening experience, Brennan told The Daily Times this week.

"We were playing in Japan, doing this tour, and when you go to a place like that, you realize what a different place it is culturally, especially compared to where we come from," Brennan said. "We were playing a show and then were at this club afterward, and this kid came up and said, 'The pride that you guys have in Boston encourages me to have pride in Japan.'

"For us to hear that ... I mean, we're just a bunch of idiots from New England. How is it our songs made this person think like this? It was amazing. When this thing started, we never though we'd hear that from anybody, much less someone on the other side of the world."

From humble roots, the band has become something of a collective of hometown heroes for Boston, and it all started out in the basement of a friend's barbershop. The friends put together a band to play rock infused with the sounds of the old country -- tinwhistle, bhodran, bagpipes and more, played within a framework of fast-and-furious punk. It worked -- enthusiastically so, and a couple of years later, the band released its first full-length album, "Do or Die." That was in 1998, and by 2001, when the group's third album came out, the band had earned the respect of its peers -- Pogues front man Shane MacGowan made a guest appearance on that record, which was also Brennan's first with the Dropkick Murphys.

As the guys gained greater respect with punks and Celtic-rock lovers around the country, they also became more and more identified with Boston itself. On the 2003 album "Blackout," the guys sang about a favorite bar in Quincy, Mass., in the song "The Dirty Glass." Around the same time as the Dropkick Murphys joined the Vans Warped Tour that year, the band reworked the Boston Red Sox anthem "Tessie," and their rendition became the official song of the team's 2004 World Series run. It was also used in the romantic comedy "Fever Pitch," starring Jimmy Fallon as a Red Sox-obsessed fan, and on the EA Sports MVP Baseball soundtrack. The video for the song was shot at Fenway Park, and to this day, a Red Sox game is one of the comforts home that Brennan and his bandmates miss most when they're on the road.

"You wake up sometimes when you're on the road, and you think, 'I'd love to be at home right now,'" Brennan said. "You sort of yearn for a place without that language barrier -- a place where you can get warm food and not have to spend a long time explaining yourselves because you don't speak the language or whatever. Being normal guys who come from Massachusetts, we never thought we'd be traveling all over the world, and we still get excited about seeing other cultures, but it can make you miss home.

"Toward the end of the tour, you're always longing for your couch, or being able to go watch a Red Sox game. Everyone has wives or girlfriends, and a lot of the guys have kids, so we love to get home and see our families, too. We just try to spend the maximum amount we can before our significant others get sick of us and tell us it's time to get back out on the road."

It doesn't take much for the boys to get bored and become ready for the road. After all, they're perpetual highway troubadours -- touring incessantly and tirelessly, stopping only to record an album here or there -- like 2005's "The Warrior's Code," which featured a forgotten Woody Guthrie poem set to music called "I'm Shipping Up to Boston." The track was featured in the 2006 Academy Award-winning film "The Departed," and director Martin Scorsese even mentioned the band in an interview he gave after winning the Oscar.

It became the band's biggest hit to date, inspiring two videos, use in an episode of "The Simpsons" and adopted by various Boston sports teams as an unofficial victory anthem. Another song on the album, "Last Letter Home," contains excerpts from personal letters written by an American soldier serving in Iraq who was a Dropkick Murphys fan. After his death during deployment, the band honored his written request to play its song "Fields of Athenry" as his casket entered the church.

It wasn't a matter of choosing to get political, Brennan said -- it's just the kind of dedication the band feels for its fans, and vice-versa.

"We try to stay away from the political aspect of things," he said. "We aren't a very political band, and we try to stick to the old writing songs about the hell that was growing up. By no means do we think that's a bad thing -- a lot of our favorite bands are out there, especially nowadays, doing very political stuff to get things moving in the way of change, but we've yet to sort of breach that realm."

Regardless of whether Brennan and his bandmates cast a songwriting eye on national social and political causes, they've already done more for Boston in the way of pride and community than many Beantown civic organizations. They don't claim such as a point of pride, and they don't seek recognition for how much they're loved by hometown crowds.

They just write about what they know, and do what they do best -- work hard, play hard, love hard and rock hard.

"We're all guys who grew up in working-class families, so we know how much family and friends and things like that mean," he said. "Certainly we wouldn't be here without any of that support. I mean, if you can't rely on your friends and family, who can you rely on? It's difficult to do something like this on your own.

"It's strange, because we just kind of do it -- write the songs and play the songs. Everything has meaning, but it tends to get lost along the way when you're playing the same songs night after night, and sometimes it takes somebody coming up to you and saying how us being proud of where we come from makes him proud of where he comes from, to make us realize that it's bigger than a few dudes sitting around writing songs."