In one of my favourite scenes in one of my favourite movies, John Travolta explains to Samuel L Jackson the quintessential aspects of visiting Europe. This involves the French term for a large hamburger he ordered in Paris. Wistfully reflecting on it all he smiles and says, ‘It’s the little differences.’

I thought of this scene as I reflected on this week’s special guests, The Delines. Tiny margins, sometimes negligible, but enough to tilt short, vulnerable lives off balance. It’s those little differences that bring Willy Vlautin’s songs to life.  Nothing is left to chance…though there’s plenty of room for your imagination too. Desolation, disappointment and broken dreams all counter-balance the optimism of the country-soul of the music of Willy’s band The Delines. With the voice of Amy Boone telling the stories of Holly, Charly, Sonny and one of Willy’s best ever couples, Eddie and Polly (love the names) we are brought gently into stories which skirt with personal disaster but contain moments of joyous relief. In Holly The Hustle, as Willy points out in this week’s extended interview, her life may seem like a series of wrong turnings but she still grifts the guy for $60K!

After their gig at Oran Mor a week past Sunday, The Delines came in to Studio One at AC Central and we recorded some live songs and talked to Willy and Amy about their new life as a band. Amy explained the three year wait for this new record, why she’s being pulled north to live in Portland and we get a chance to talk to Willy about the many characters he’s created in his songs and novels. If you are still not sure whether you like the band I refer you to the esteemed Rachel Unthank (of the eponymously named folk group) in yesterday’s Observer who describes their music as ‘heartbreaking and sad but really warm and beautiful.’

In what will be a crowded two hours we will also pay tribute to the late Harold Bradley. We met Harold (younger brother of producer Owen) two years ago in Nashville. Then he was ninety one and still full of great reminiscences of his days making records in the famous Quonset Hut where he played guitar on records by Elvis Presley, Patsy Cline, Roy Orbison and so many more. He died peacefully last week and we will celebrate his unique contribution to country music on Tuesday.

Your host standing next to the great guitarist Harold Bradley (January 2, 1926 – January 31, 2019) Owen’s daughter and son, Patsy and Jerry to his left.

Finally, we will celebrate. On Thursday night some of our favourite guests were honoured at the UK Americana Awards in London. Mary Gauthier, Courtney Marie Andrews, CJ Hillman, Ben Glover and Scotland’s very own, Dean Owens all received awards. Three of these artists were produced by Neilson Hubbard who has been a guest and is soon to be interviewed on the show. It was a wonderful endorsement of these great performers and of our continued support of their music. We will celebrate by playing you the winning songs of the night.

It’s all on BBC Radio Scotland from five past nine this Tuesday evening. Join me if you can.

Twitter asked its customers for some input yesterday: One thing you’d tweet your teenage self. I liked Mhairi Black, the UK’s youngest MP’s answer. ‘Don’t tweet that.’ I once recorded a series of radio conversations where the guests were asked to address their younger selves. It came from a letter Stephen Fry had written and published along similar lines.

It’s an interesting thought and led to me to take up the challenge in a song I wrote to the young man I was thirty years ago. ‘Here I Am In London Town,’ was an interesting exercise for me. Writing it in a studio in Shepherd’s Bush I found myself thinking about the person that had first adventured into London all those years before. The conclusion? ‘There’s so much to forget, but it’s forgetting that makes it easy. That’s how we survive.’ And, for me, that was the truth. We seem to remember the important stuff and it’s only possible to keep going if we let some memories slip away. We can’t carry it all.

I thought of this when preparing to talk to this week’s very special guest, Ashley Monroe, AKA Hippie (Hillbilly) Annie from The Pistol Annies. In the liner notes to her beautiful current solo album, Sparrow, she talks about the therapy she experienced before writing it and remembers the young person she was who first came to Nashville as a teenager. Reflecting that every minute of her time growing up has been important (“even the times I was a sloppy underage drunk in Printers Alley, trying to sing “Broken Wing’ like Martina in the karaoke bars to get discovered“)

Ashley’s honesty is engaging and moving. It comes out in a brilliantly ambitious record which tells her own recent story of being a first time mother. You will hear all of this in a conversation I recorded with her for this week’s Another Country. She cut three session tracks for us too after her sell-out show at St Luke’s as part of Celtic Connections last Sunday. Reading Ashley’s notes it reminded me of seeing two young girls outside The Ryman on my first visit to Music City when I’d gone to see Patty Griffin‘s concert there. Returning to my car I couldn’t help notice two teenagers dressed up like Patty tottering back to Broadway in red velvet heels, high on the music of the night. It was a joy to behold. I always wished Patty could have seen them, and often wonder where they are now and indeed what they’d make of their young selves.

So it’s with a glad heart too I can tell you there is new music to play you from Patty and we may well use the excuse to celebrate something from the album I first heard on that warm summer evening back in 2007. It will be a great pleasure to play the title track of Sean McConell’s new record too. One of my first writing dates was with Sean in the Warner Chappell building on that trip and it was on his recommendation I went to see Patty that night. I have a lot to thank him for and I think you will love the title track of his new album, ‘Secondhand Smoke.’

Elsewhere we will celebrate some new music from Yola, Sister Sparrow, Hayes Carl and Clint Bradley. We will get to the letter C on our A- Z of country music and we will attempt to bring you all of this in two hours of radio. Join me live if you can this Tuesday evening on BBC Radio Scotland.

It was a freezing cold November in New York in 1992. From memory we were over to publicise a new record due to be coming out the following year. My task was to have a one to one meeting with the head of our label and convince him to spend a fortune promoting it…I was less than confident.

The label boss in question was Don Ienner of Columbia Records. A big man with a big personality who ran the operation on a mixture of brute force and fear. I sat outside the office waiting to go in with a knot in my stomach.

Soon the door opened and I was beckoned in to the big man’s hallowed space. There were many things I’d expected (rumours abounded about his ejecting hapless promo guys out for failing to meet targets) but I had no preparation for the conversation that ensued. My 7 year experience of the music business so far had taught me that the higher one moved up the chain of command the less likely it was that anyone ever talked about music any more. So it was with some surprise when Don invited me to sit down and listen. ‘It’s the new Dylan album,‘ he told me over the track. As it finished a smile came over his face. ‘A couple of years back I had a conversation with Bob and ..I never do this,’ he emphasised ‘ but I decided to suggest a project to him. I wondered if he’d be interested in making a record without any band..just him..his voice and a guitar. Of course he wasn’t interested at all at the time and I felt really stupid. He immediately barked back at me, “Yeah and who’s gonna write the songs, Bruce?”

‘ At that point Ienner pulled out the brand new copy of ‘Good As I Been To You’ on CD. ‘And what do you know, he went and did it.‘ He laughed at his own plan coming into fruition. ‘It sounds great too..like one of the old bluesmen, his voice is raw and cracked, and it’s brilliant. As well as all that Ricky, there’s another thing I’m slightly proud of.’ He pulled the CD out of the player and pointed to the artwork. It was the Columbia label just as it had looked on all those classic vinyl albums of the late sixties and early seventies. ‘I suggested we reintroduce our logo on the CD and we’ve done it.’ Rightly, he looked proud as punch.

Music, it seems, always wins the day. We were set up for some high powered meeting which simply turned into two blokes who shared a love of records rejoicing in the fact our hero had made a blistering return to form and it even looked good. My respect and admiration for Don Ienner was complete. I couldn’t imagine many label bosses who would have the same time to share the passion for their own products. As for the Bruce gag…well twenty seven years on, it’s still worth telling.

Listening to songs acoustically, the way they were written is one of the great traditions of roots music. It spawned MTV unplugged and brings people to queue every night outside the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville. On this week’s Another Country we will celebrate that tradition in style. We welcome Kathy Mattea, Willie Watson, May Erlewine and Israel Nash into Studio One where, in the round, they will bring you songs and stories from their extensive catalogues.

Just as I was smitten by the Dylan album all those years ago, I’ll be there, sitting in the circle and enjoying every minute of it. Join us if you can this Tuesday from five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland.

By chance I had some time to spare in Dundee last weekend. It was an odd conglomeration of circumstances which involved waiting for my son to arrive by train and realising I had two hours alone to follow my nose around some old haunts. I was surprised to realise I hadn’t walked certain streets properly since leaving the city 37 years ago.

I found myself on The Perth Road. I’d walked this particular street in many different stages of life. In my early years with my grandparents. We’d walk along the parallel Hawkhill where they lived near The Sinderins to stand gazing for hours at trains being shunted in and out of the depot beside Magdalene Green. Stopping by walls where iron railings had been cut down, my grandmother would tell me about their requisition during the first World War. ‘Why wouldn’t they have simply used the railings to make spears?’ I’d ask her.

In later years I’d come from the east side of the city to spend valuable hours searching for bargains in Groucho’s on The Perth Road. The possibility that we could own records at a fraction of their usual price because they were preowned changed everything I listened to and in turn, my life. Eventually I lived not far from the house my grandparents had occupied and I’d walk each morning to my work along The Perth Road – a stretch of Dundee described by a friend with his tongue firmly in his cheek as ‘the Latin Quarter.’ But there was a certain logic. The University and Art school provided the city with a bohemian edge not visible in the less fashionable districts. In the late sixties it was in this part of town where the hair grew longer and the jeans more flared. Like the party Randy Newman‘s Mama told him not to attend it was here strange smelling cigarettes ‘scared me half to death.’ Here I first bumped into Dundee’s greatest ever songwriter, Michael Marra and just around the corner came face to face with Billy McKenzie in his pre Associate youth.

The two spare hours passed easily but it churned up within me such a strong sense of nostalgia I wanted to stop innocent passers by and explain what had been lost. Like Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey I felt as if I needed to explain to anyone who would listen that these streets weren’t always like this…it used to be so different. Then I realised what generations before had experienced and keep experiencing. Change is hard and you can’t go home again. It’s at this point we resort to memory and warm nostalgia. We seem to be able to block out the negative and a warm glow of the past takes over. I’m grateful for that as the real truth of what life once felt like might well be much less attractive.

So it is with records too. Going back to music we enjoyed in our youth allows us to experience something more than a memory. The music takes you to the place where you heard it first and how you felt. The joy, the disappointment, alienation, love, loneliness…all of that is brought back within a few bars. On Tuesday night we’ll hopefully create some of these moments for you as we bring you some musical nostalgia and also something to chime in the future. Listen out for George Strait, Solomon Burke and John Prine and have your ears opened to the new sounds of Jessica Pratt, Kaia Kater and Olivia Lane. We’re live on BBC Radio Scotland from five past nine. Join me if you can.

When I first started the Radio Blog I was talking through the pleasure/pain/duty of my decision to a friend. I must have said something about enjoying the possibilities and he concurred. ‘Yes, a lovely white blank piece of paper waiting, ready for you.’ It’s true…and sometimes, maybe more than often, I feel I may be spoiling the pure simplicity of that empty space.

On this Tuesday, more than normal that comes into some focus. Given my odd work/life pattern I’ve often managed to find myself on a very blank page come the early working days of January. As members of my family and my neighbours slowly reacquaint themselves with the 9 – 5 I still get a small frisson of joy looking out the window, wishing them well but glad not to join them. In years gone by this is often mixed with the opposite and equal emotion of stomach-churning dread that nothing certain will make itself known. Poetry is good but prose is better at spelling out the facts about how sooner or later you and your family need someone to put some food on the table.

That blank page of A4 can be unhelpful too. Filling it up feels good until you realise you’ve filled it up with nothing of value. Nevertheless we begin, one word a a time and slowly notes and words appear and the silence and the empty space is filled. So creativity begins and carries on.

The joy of the New Year too is a feeling that you have done your best with the last one. We gave it a good shot; we tried for 12 months to make it an epic and well, if we failed, we can say say we tried. We made the best of what we were given…..ok it wasn’t a classic but we survived and this one…oh just wait till you see this one. It’s in that spirit I approach the first of this year’s Another Country programmes. We played as much as the music we loved as we possibly could and like almost every other year I can remember it seems we found some beautiful things which will remain friends for life. So we begin 2019 in that hope and expectation that we will surprise and delight ourselves and yourself with names that will fit comfortably into your own personal world of music.

This week we have some new names as well as well as old names with new music. We think you’ll enjoy the bluegrass of Billy Strings and the country voice of Carson McHone and someone we were recommended by Sam Outlaw called Caleb Caudle. You’ll also be as pleased as we are to welcome back Willy Vlautin’s Delines, Yola Carter with her opener from the new album and something wonderful from Hayes Carll.

We will welcome back too our Nashville correspondent, Bill DeMain who’s going to reflect on Jerry Chestnut who died just before Christmas. Bill will also give us some great musical tips for 2019.

Finally, and we’re quite excited about this one, a new tradition for 2019. The A- Z of country music will begin this week and take us through to…well…whenever. It’s two hours of country music…our way…from five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland this Tuesday evening and repeated on Friday evening at five past eight.

I’m writing this on my second last journey of the Deacon Blue tour. It’s been a long haul and I’ve met some amazing people and had the joy of singing songs in some amazing spaces. 

At my age touring is a physical stretch as well as being mentally exhausting. It’s also enormously rewarding, as I’m sure you can imagine. Being face to face with people who have connected with the songs you have created is a gift and a blessing. As my road buddy Ross Wilson (aka Blue Rose Code) will always preface and hashtag , I am grateful.

I usually get to sleep some time between one and two and one night after a day of noise and movement I found the best therapy was a long bath and a country playlist. My day unwound to the songs of other people and it truly felt like a healing experience listening to Miranda Lambert, Sam Outlaw and Brandy Clark. It reminded me of the power of songs to connect just when you need them most.

It’s probably the fact we are celebrating 30 years as a band but we get so many requests for special hook-ups for people who are experiencing adverse health issues. Immediately I think back to a young mother of two who came to her 30th show two days before she was to go in for major surgery. It was humbling to realise that music was still so important, maybe even vital for someone who was facing life-threatening issues. We get mails, tweets and Facebook messages from people who have been unable to make the gig because a family member is unwell or circumstances have changed and they’ve had to pass tickets on to a friend. What amazes me most is how important people feel the experience of sitting or standing in a room listening to music is to them. Missing out is something that needs to be explained and requires appropriate consolation.

I am amazed and humbled by all of this but understand it only in how much songs mean to me over the course of my life. I hope that over the course of the last twelve months we’ve played you some songs and artists you’ll find you need in your life. Looking back over that time it’s been a classic year. We’ve had wonderful music from old friends, Kacey Musgraves, First Aid Kit, Lori Mckenna and John Hiatt. We’ve also had some beautiful surprises from new artists including Cordovas, Ruston Kelly, Rayland Baxter and Mattiel. For me, some of the songs of this year will be life-time favourites.

This Tuesday and on Christmas Day we will celebrate 2018 in style by playing you some of the songs of the year mixed in with some Christmas Country Modern Classics.

Thanks for listening over the course of the year. We’ve had so much enjoyment bringing you Another Country in 2018. On behalf of Richard Murdoch, Roslyn McCuish and all the great team who help make the show I wish you all a very Joyful Christmas and continued happy listening in 2019.

It’s an interesting experience meeting up with artists. Very often we record an interview a few weeks before we get a chance to broadcast it. The old AC vault even now has interviews in the can we’ve not yet put out on the airwaves. So it was with interest I listened back recently to two (fairly long) conversations I had with Jason Isbell from last year and 2014.

Perhaps it’s what happened in between the two interviews that interests us the most. In that short time Jason went from a much admired Americana artist to someone who could credibly be perceived as the ‘keeper of the flame.’ If, like me, you are a little uncomfortable with the catch-all terminology of Americana as a sub category of modern rock, allow me to unpack it here a little. In Jason’s case it’s wholly applicable for a number of reasons. For one thing he’s distilled the roots/alt country music of his own Alabama background into something which identifies wholly with the ordinary working person; songs about real life which, it seems, no longer interest the mainstream country singers emerging from Music Row. In contrast to their self-adulatory obsessions, Jason ‘s eye is caught by a different landscape. He wants to tell you stories about ‘the lights down in the lobby’ that ‘don’t shine and just flicker while the elevator whines.’ (Flagship) In his song Elephant it’s the final lines that pack the punch: ‘There’s one thing that’s real clear to me: No one dies with dignity.  We just try to ignore the elephant somehow, somehow.‘

You can hear both these songs on Jason’s current record, ‘Live From the Ryman’ where in this hallowed space you can hear the reverence and clear respect the Nashville audience have for this man and his excellent band. Seeing his progress to the point where he now lives his life at his own pace, as a husband and a young father and knowing what he has had to leave behind only increases my admiration for what Jason Isbell has achieved. But for one second let me return to that Americana riff. A few years ago when BB King died I remember seeing a tweet by Jason about how much they had learned from the man and how much of his music they had taken in and recycled in their own music. That, my radio friends, explains this clumsy Americana tag better than anything else. An artist whose ears and eyes are open to the roots of the music and is willing to absorb and pass on in new and fresh ways leaving room for his own influences to shine through…Americana..Jason style.

He’s won Grammys and Americana Awards and he’s had No 1 albums and a record run of shows at The Ryman. That’s not why we’re spending two hours in his company this week, however. We will celebrate Jason Isbell because he’s at the peak of his powers and he’s telling simple, but heart breaking stories of human struggle, disappointment, love and joy. Join us this Tuesday evening (and a repeat on Friday) for a very special celebration.

For my own part, I’m out on tour for a few weeks with my old road pals, Deacon Blue, so this will be the last blog until Christmas time. I’m leaving you with some very special Nashville conversations which you can enjoy for the next few weeks.

Sometimes it’s hard to work out why things have come to be. In music there are partnerships which seems to work because they both seem to come alive in a way that never quite happens when they are on their own. Think The Everleys, The Louvins and maybe even (controversially) Gram and Emmylou. We could add a few modern versions too with First Aid Kit and Gillian Welch and David Rawlings feeling like acts which rely on their respective partners to make the best of what they do individually.

I was thinking about this in the context of this week’s special guest Dawn Landes. There’s really no way you would have figured Dawn for a country singer in the traditional sense. Like so many artists we feature on the show her music has been influenced by and often nods to the roots of American music…and therefore becomes country in our book..but it would be a stretch to rack any of her albums in the country section of your favourite record shop. There’s been a misleading cover a couple of records ago when she looked ready to lassoo something or other on ‘Sweet Heart Rodeo,‘ but the music didn’t really follow what the sleeve suggested. All of the above is true…until now.

Last year Dawn took time out from a tour in New Zealand to make along distance call to the city where she now lives, Nashville, to speak to Fred Foster. For reasons she’ll explain on this week’s show, she wanted to see if he would be interested in coming out of semi retirement to produce her next record. I’m delighted to say he agreed and you can of course hear the glorious results on her new album, ‘Meet Me At The River’ which we’ve been enjoying these last few months.

The partnership between Dawn and Fred seems more unlikely the more you explore it. he was the man who ran and produced records for Monument in the 60’s…he  even wrote some of them. He’s credited with developing the careers of Roy Orbison and Dolly Parton and has produced albums by Willie Nelson, Billy Joe Shaver and Kris Kristofferson. On Dawn’s record he introduced her to Charlie McCoy and Bobby Bare.….oh yes, there are stories. As well as a great acoustic session from Dawn (where she covers John Prine) we’ll celebrate the music of Fred Foster in the second hour of the show.

Elsewhere…more from that Pistol Annies album, new discoveries Nora Collins and Desiree Canon and the new direction from Ferris and Sylvester. It’s all in a packed show which starts on BBC Radio Scotland from five past nine. Join me if you can.

One of the reasons (of too many to mention) I love the radio is the sheer surprises it brings. Not only does it spring songs on you when you are least expecting it but often it manages to do that at just the right moment. I’ve told Roddy Hart this before but there are nights when I’ve taken a little detour round our little local park on a Tuesday night just to hear the end of something he’s been playing as I wind my way home. I now have to thank him for how I discovered Gabriel Kahane.

The late Mr Wogan was the king of the poignant audio drop. On the way back from a school run he could turn your life round with a choice spin just at the point when you needed it most. I still remember the times when he’d ease in Frank Sinatra singing Rod McKuen:

There was a girl in Portland
Before the winter chill
We used to go a-courtin’
Along October hill
And she could laugh away the dark clouds
Cry away the snow
It seems like only yesterday
As down the road I go

Love’s Been Good To Me has all the vital elements of a Wogan moment. A sense of nostalgia, lost love, regret but a reminder that there’s more in this world for which we can be more grateful than resentful. I had an old musician friend who couldn’t hear a great song played on his car radio without parking up the vehicle and listening until it was over, such was his deep love of any given track. I’m not sure I haven’t done the same thing.

It’s the moment, the time, the place and then the music…film and TV editors know all about it. From Harry Nillson in Midnight Cowboy to The Chi-Lites, in one of the most devastating scenes from The Sopranos, the song starting and ending in the right place locks the visuals for ever.

On this week’s AC we’ll celebrate the talent of a young woman who, for me, knows everything about timing and the joy of delivering a song when it’s most needed. At The Hydro earlier in the year Kacey Musgraves brought herself up to the mini stage at the back of the hall in a celebratory song for people of all sexual orientations, Rainbow…a truly perfect moment from Golden Hour. Six months on we’ll revisit that time we spent with Kacey before Golden Hour came out and before we saw that particular show. You can listen again to the conversation with Kacey who perhaps knew better than anyone just how perfectly her new album was about to be received. This late in the year  I’m delighted to tell you the only album that rivals it for my affections is the one released a few months ago by her husband, Ruston Kelly. You can hear Kacey talk about him too!

Earlier on we’ll catch up with our Nashville correspondent and find out why his day job – being a great songwriter – is meaning there will be more of Bill DeMain than usual on this week’s show. In case you wondered, Bill is firstly a musician and songwriter with Swan Dive as well as being respected author of many books on rock and pop and a regular contributor to Mojo, Entertainment Weekly and Performing Songwriter. For us, of course, he is the best man to lead us and any of our AC friends on the greatest tour of Music City, ‘Walkin’ Nashville.’ Bill joins me in the first hour of the programme with lots of local news where he’ll also pay tribute to Tony Joe White who died quite suddenly over the weekend.

Listen out too for music from Larkin Poe, Neilson Hubbard, Austin Lucas and Mary Bragg singing a new song she wrote with the correspondent himself!

We’re on air from five past nine on BBC Radio Scotland this Tuesday evening.

I

How the romantics loved the Autumn. More than anything else it has a melancholy brought about by the inevitable sense of an ending. Wallowing in all of that poses little difficulty to those us who retreat to songs as a natural expression, but I became aware in my more recent years of how difficult a time it could be for people whose fragile hold on the world meant they could never take life for granted. My own father used to express a deep joy at the advent of spring which I have only understood now as I pass well above the age I thought of him as ‘old.’

However, I hold an enduring love of this time of year and Scotland has been beautiful over the last week or so, made better by the absence of winds allowing those slow turning leaves time to linger a little longer.

For me Autumn too is associated with Another Country and paying music on the radio. Instead of going out, we stay in and invite folk to come join us in the studio. Around this point in the year we start to wonder how we’re going to pay enough respect to the records we’ve encountered since the start of the year.

So many good albums have come out and are still popping up almost every day. This week we’ll get round to playing as many tracks as we can as well as introducing you to the joy of Edinburgh duo The Jellyman’s Daughter. We’ve played their music over the last few years but this year TJD took a huge step forward by bringing out a bold, ambitious new album which we’ve featured on previous shows.

Dead Reckoning keeps the folk/bluegrass sensibility of the band but, in adding evocative string arrangements, the album has deeper resonance than we’ve come to expect from Emily Kelly and Graham Coe. On this week’s AC they will be with us in Pacific Quay’s Studio One to play tracks live from that album and answer your host’s questions.

Elsewhere, to celebrate their arrival on theses shores, we’re going to remind you of some great session moments from earlier in the year when First Aid Kit came in to our studio before their opening concerts of this year’s (first) UK tour. It’s been another record breaking year for the Soderberg sisters as their tour goes from US to Europe and back again. They play Australia early next year before some home-coming Scandinavian shows in February. If you have a ticket to see them in Scotland this coming week, count yourself very lucky.

We will also remind you of the news we broke earlier about the line up for next year’s Country To Country at Glasgow’s Hydro. We’re going to try to do all of this in two hours starting at five past nine this Tuesday on BBC Radio Scotland. Join me if you can.