About 5 weeks ago I (along with my best pals) went into a recording studio in Lanarkshire to start making a new album. This Friday I hope to walk out with that album almost completed. It’s been a great ride but it’s meant that this blog has had a short holiday and I’ve not been on active AC duty for a while. First off I need to say huge thanks to Roddy Hart for hosting a couple of great shows. Roddy played some new things which we’re delighted he brought along and I hope to be playing some of these again for you soon.
My drive to the studio every morning lasts for about six songs. Enough to know if you love an album and also long enough to move through two or three you feel are maybe ‘not for us.’ Sometimes of course you get half way through one and can’t wait till the return journey so you can listen to the whole thing. I’m pleased to say there’s a couple of these long players on Friday’s AC. Firstly – and this filled me with visible excitement – the new album by Rodney Crowell. It’s impossible to overestimate Rodney. He’s a magnificent song writer and a nightly carrier of the country torch. We probably all got to know him first with these great contributions to Emmylou Harris’s early albums. ‘Elite Hotel’ featured ‘Till I Gain Control Again’ a song so perfect that I feel the need to play it at very regular intervals in my life. Rodney’s new album is called Tarpaper Sky and I haven’t really stopped playing it since it came through my door. We’ll share a track with you and, no doubt, play much more from it in the weeks to come.
A few years ago when I was sitting in for Iain Anderson I came across the music of Eliza Gilkyson. She’s an Austin based artist who has consistently produced some great songs and has been nominated more than once for a Grammy. Her newest offering, The Nocturne Diaries is very fine indeed and if memory serves me correctly she is coming this way soon to perform live.
What else? Well we continue to celebrate Eddy Arnold….once you start loving Eddy you can’t stop and I’ll be playing you some great new artists including Boy and Bear, Mo Kenney and Noah Gunderson – yes we like him very much. We will celebrate the new First Aid Kit single and open up the beautiful colouring box of this man……..
David Scott …yes the wonderful Davie, producer, best pal, professor and Radio Scotland star has a new record out under his usual moniker, The Pearlfishers. We think you might love it a lot.
There’s more but telling you now would spoil all the fun that is the experience of Another Country live on Friday evening on BBC Radio Scotland from five past eight.
Roddy certainly fronted some great shows in your absence, Ricky, and if a few weeks’ absence from the show and the blog is what you need to be off making a new album then it’s a small price to pay!
Rodney Crowell is one of those artists I appreciate more and more every time I hear something new (to me) from his catalogue, and Eliza Gilkyson sounds like just my cup of tea.
In other news – and do excuse me if you’re already well aware of these, as I suspect you might be – I’m really excited to see that John Fullbright has an imminent new album, “Songs”, and that he’s visiting both Glasgow and London in early June. I do hope he’ll be popping into AC Towers. And one news story today caught my eye too, as the boundary between fact and fiction blurs wonderfully with the announcement of an upcoming US mini-tour by some of the artists appearing in “Nashville”! I know you referenced Richard as still being a fan, and I count it as a guilty pleasure given its soap melodrama element. I bet they’ll make for some entertaining shows – it sounds like they will mostly feature Deacon, Scarlett, Avery, Gunnar and Will.